I am not suggesting here to go back to the L1 order and add the new skills at the end!The current order is:
Walker, Climber, Swimmer, Floater, Glider, Disarmer, Bomber, Stoner, Blocker, Platformer, Builder, Stacker, Basher, Fencer, Miner, Digger, Cloner
My suggestion would be:
Climber, Floater, Glider, Swimmer, Disarmer, Blocker, Bomber, Stoner, Platformer, Builder, Stacker, Basher, Miner, Digger, Fencer, Walker, Cloner
Here are the reasons:
1) The walker skill is not a permanent skill, so should not be grouped with them. Actually if there is any other similar skill, then it would be the cloner, because they are non-permanent skills not modifying any terrain (with the blocker being the only other one).
2) Climbers, floaters and gliders share one similarity, namely they deal with high walls (just going on opposite directions). On the other hand swimmers and disarmers are similar, because both deal with previously deadly objects. So I would like to move the swimmer after floaters and gliders.
3) I would like to have blockers and bombers next to each other, because quite often they are used on one and the same lemming. On the other hand grouping bombers and stoners as the lemming-killing skills makes sense, too. So I suggest to move the blocker in front of the bomber.
This has the additional advantage that the blocker (which is usually applied first) now comes before the bomber (something I never understood about the L1 oder).
4) In my opinion there is no intuitive order of the four terrain removal skills (apart from the bomber). So I would suggest moving the fencer after the digger, to keep the "basher-miner-digger" oder that we are all used to.
A much more radical suggestion would be:
Climber, Floater, Glider, Swimmer, Disarmer, Platformer, Builder, Stacker, Stoner, Basher, Miner, Digger, Fencer, Bomber, Blocker, Walker, Cloner
Again the list of reasons (in addition to the ones above):
1) This groups the skills as "permanent", "terrain adding", "terrain removing", "lemming-only"
2) However it splits up the two lemming-killing skills, which might be a downside.
PS: This suggestion was triggered by the
suggestion to reorder the skills in the editor, because I don't want to reorder them twice.