[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[kyranzor]

Haha wow.. well I don't know. Maybe that save is just being weird. You said you have a different game going with them as well and have not had the issue?

[impetus maximus]

i did, but this last time was on my campaign save which i thought was ok.

[kyranzor]

Well.. that is very disturbing.

I just updated the mod to 0.14.x and added flying robot units, maybe try updating and see what happens?


Robot Army V0.2.3 Released:
This update brings support for 0.14, change to rally beacon behaviour, and adds flying robots (defender, distractor, and destroyer types, just like the base game) which are basically the Combat Units from Klonan's mod.

Changes:
Rally beacon now sends out a rally pulse every few seconds and as long as one is active, squads (ones not guarding or patrolling) will move to the rally point. You can use these to move large armies around for a bit more control. Squads that are partially filled will have problems as they will move towards it too, but when it's removed they won't be big enough to start hunting. This behaviour can be good to find and collect small squads though.

Combat Units mod integration:
The flying robot style units have been added, which are cheap, small, and in huge swarms can do a lot of damage and move very quickly. All three types of flying robots are unlocked with the "Combat Robotics" tech. You build and deploy them exactly the same way as you make droids currently.

[hyspeed]

Hi kyranzor,

I am using RA in the September Community map, which is Toxic Jungle - a heavy forest.

Watching them path find to get to a biter base by cutting down trees is fascinating and hilarious. (I am only use BattleBots at this time.)

I recall earlier discussions (perhaps on the mod portal) about ways to limit the bots by having them return when low on ammo (you said it is really hard to do because they don't have individual ammo count on the model). In a situation like this, they would run out of ammo very quickly and be nearly useless with the constant 'return to base to reload'. so thank you for not doing that.

However, if you can track the health of each robot, you could have them return to base when their health drops to a certain level. This would require removing their auto-heal. Perhaps you could even have them deteriorate (e.g. take damage) over time, which would limit their ability to just run all over the map in mobs, clearing everything. They could come back, get repaired, then go out again.

I apologize if this has been discussed in this thread, but I don't want to read 25 pages before making a comment.

thanks,
jon

[kyranzor]

I recall earlier discussions (perhaps on the mod portal) about ways to limit the bots by having them return when low on ammo (you said it is really hard to do because they don't have individual ammo count on the model). In a situation like this, they would run out of ammo very quickly and be nearly useless with the constant 'return to base to reload'. so thank you for not doing that.

However, if you can track the health of each robot, you could have them return to base when their health drops to a certain level. This would require removing their auto-heal. Perhaps you could even have them deteriorate (e.g. take damage) over time, which would limit their ability to just run all over the map in mobs, clearing everything. They could come back, get repaired, then go out again.

Having an individual unit try to retreat would break the spirit of the squad-based behaviours. Also in upcoming versions of the mod, there will be a "repair droid" like a combat medic, and all droids will have self-heal turned off from then on.

The repair droid can be placed by themselves (not near a squad) and they will repair all nearby structures forever too. While in squad, they will slowly heal one member of their squad at a time, every tick.

[hyspeed]

Excellent!

[impetus maximus]

a repair droid sounds awesome.

would it be possible to have the bots melee trees and dump wood into the Army loot chest?
maybe make it optional if folks don't want to deal with the wood.

about the "friendly fire" situation. i've been testing (0.2.2) a new save for 2:20:00 with Moweather disabled and they haven't shot at me so far.
going to start another with just Moweather and Robot Army enabled and see if it happens again.

[kyranzor]

Sounds good, thanks for doing more testing for me


Has anyone had a chance to try out the new combat robot units in squads yet? Might want to set squad sizes larger to get more use out of them in each attack. 50-100 is good.

[hitzu]

After several games I started to hate the pathfinding. Every time I think I deployed bots far enough from may main base, they mock on me and choose to walk right through the belt-heavy core of my base and of course they stuck there forever. It became tedious to surround every major pack of belts with walls turning the base into a maze ugh. If there only was an elegant way to prohibit some areas for robots.

[kyranzor]

After several games I started to hate the pathfinding. Every time I think I deployed bots far enough from may main base, they mock on me and choose to walk right through the belt-heavy core of my base and of course they stuck there forever. It became tedious to surround every major pack of belts with walls turning the base into a maze ugh. If there only was an elegant way to prohibit some areas for robots.

Walls. they do not path through walls. Gates let you/trains out, but not the robots in.

Also, you can now (in 0.2.3) get flying robots in addition to the droids, which might solve your issue. Please try with these new ones.

[b38917ce-3ad3-4fae-b]

I've played around a bit with the new flying units.
Overall, pathing is generally much improved.

Due to the large numbers required for them to be effective, this highlights another issue: how they position themselves to engage enemies. With squads of 100, I've noticed that about half of them sit back instead of spreading out to engage. That's not really the issue though, but the fact that after some dancing around in place they despawn.

Reducing squads sizes (to the point where they can still deal with bases) doesn't fix the problem. It makes it less likely that a good number of them despawn, but it can still happen if they approach the nest at a bad angle and there's water (or anything else they won't path through) to one side of their approach vector, even if there's plenty of room on the other side.

Again, I'm not sure how much you can do to avoid any of this, but the price point for the units is quite steep because you end up losing them for reasons that don't involve combat.

I haven't reached behemoths yet in this playthrough, but from what I've read on your wiki and from watching the top tier units engage big biters, I'm not sure that this mod really provides an answer to them.

I respect that you're trying to balance the mod so that there's still challenge left in fighting the biters, but due to the systems the game currently provides, I feel like it ends up being more of a micro nightmare than a logistical challenge.

[kyranzor]

Due to the large numbers required for them to be effective, this highlights another issue: how they position themselves to engage enemies. With squads of 100, I've noticed that about half of them sit back instead of spreading out to engage. That's not really the issue though, but the fact that after some dancing around in place they despawn.

Reducing squads sizes (to the point where they can still deal with bases) doesn't fix the problem. It makes it less likely that a good number of them despawn, but it can still happen if they approach the nest at a bad angle and there's water (or anything else they won't path through) to one side of their approach vector, even if there's plenty of room on the other side.

Again, I'm not sure how much you can do to avoid any of this, but the price point for the units is quite steep because you end up losing them for reasons that don't involve combat.

I haven't reached behemoths yet in this playthrough, but from what I've read on your wiki and from watching the top tier units engage big biters, I'm not sure that this mod really provides an answer to them..

Thanks for the feedback!

That's a shame they are despawning - I haven't noticed that yet, but they can indeed despawn if they can't get where they are going after a few seconds (it's quite aggressive, the despawning algorithm they use). I think that even though the units have collision boxes, they still try to path as if they have one sometimes, which doesn't fully fix the issues of water, other bots, and trees.

The behemoths are dealth with by terminator droids, not flying ones (yet. until I do some more balancing). I can make the destroyer robots much more capable in order to make them capable of handling behemoths. I think the combat robot damage upgrades will help a lot however.

One thing you might try is using the "damage scalar" config option in my mod's config folder, config.lua file. Make this 1.5 or 2.0 to increase the base damage of all droids and flying units. Then research increases it further.

I might request that the collision box be taken into account for the pathfinder (will make it more efficient too, it can skip all of the normal collision/obstacle tests). Maybe Oxyd will do it?

If i was to reduce the cost a bit, what would you suggest for new/reduced recipe costs?

[hitzu]

Walls. they do not path through walls. Gates let you/trains out, but not the robots in.

Also, you can now (in 0.2.3) get flying robots in addition to the droids, which might solve your issue. Please try with these new ones.

That's the point. Walls also block you. And strangely flying bots also are affected by belts.

[Nexela]

Chiming in my 2 cents on unit cost using bobs mods

clockwork bot uses basic-electronic-board (copper and tin and wood and carbon and more omg yeah.....) this is a pita to fully automate early, I suggest a slight change to use basic-circuit-board (copper and wood)

Tested this on a new and existing save.

data-updates.lua

Code: Select all

if _G.bobmods and data.raw.item["basic-circuit-board"] then
--bobmods is present so lets just make use of his lib function
_G.bobmods.lib.recipe.replace_ingredient("droid-rifle","electronic-circuit" , "basic-circuit-board")
end

[kyranzor]

fantastic, thanks Nexela. This is a great addition, love it. I will add this to my 0.2.4 in-progress work.

That's the point. Walls also block you. And strangely flying bots also are affected by belts.

Yes i think as part of my bug report for pathfinding/movement request for entities with collision box of {0,0,0} I think the way a "flying" unit is affected by transport belts is silly. In fact the entire concept of the belts totally ruining the biter/droid/flying bot pathfinding is silly..

[hitzu]

In fact the entire concept of the belts totally ruining the biter/droid/flying bot pathfinding is silly..

Indeed. I suspect that you cannot dig into the pathfinding code in order to make them avoid crossing belts... and rails. Oh my! Hundreds of them died under the unforgiving train wheels But I consider the latter as a part of the game and a necessary evil.

[kyranzor]

The factorio devs have fixed heaps of strange behaviour and bugs on behalf of modders so I hope they will lend an ear to our issues

[Gazer75]

Having issues with the settings module and retreat size. The squads never return to get reinforced, but continue to fight and eventually die.
I am playing with RSO and maxed aliens, both base size and frequency.

[kyranzor]

Having issues with the settings module and retreat size. The squads never return to get reinforced, but continue to fight and eventually die.
I am playing with RSO and maxed aliens, both base size and frequency.

Thanks, I think I have heard of this issue before, it might not be working properly. if you can play around with it a bit, and also try changing it to what value you wanted in the config.lua file (so it's as hard default) and see if that works. I might have made an error in the code to assign the new value to it

[Gazer75]

Tried to change settings around a bit, but it appears to have no effect