This is an awesome game so far. It's very fun to play and reminds me of Autonauts without feeling like the sole purpose is automation. I love a game where you can do it all yourself if you prefer, but automation helps a ton. Another nice thing is that the further you go from the base, the more risky life gets for you.
I love the idea of having humans do work in the base. Currently I build a huge group of humans and then mow down the wasteland, but in the base they just stand around or get in the way, so having them work is a great idea.
I would have robots be faster and have a boost to efficiency. For example, if 1 harvest is 1-2 corn for a human, it would be 1-4 for a robot, incentivising you to move up the tech tree to robotomation, which would free up those humans to do another task.
I get more irritated than I should at how hard it is to come up with metals, so building a mine and sending humans in could be cool, and possibly have side-effects such as more thirst, or even having beasts come from the mine and attack the base. I don't think robots should mine (perhaps they should), however, having a refinery where the ores are processed into metals could be automated with an efficiency boost by bots.
Since you're legitimately interested in listening to people, I thought I'd share my two cents. Love your work, man!
PS: When I play games, I don't like to waste time. Sometimes my time is very precious. You have addressed that with the faster version of the game, but have you thought about teleportation? One of the first mods I look for is a teleportation mod so I can play faster and do cool things. I don't mean teleportation between cities. I am referring to a maneuverability mod where you can blink across the screen (for example, if you just want to exit the map). I'd love it if that were to appear in the game :-p.