Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Changing the energy consumption of the robos from "distance moved" to "time in air".

What ?

ATM it seems to me, that the actual main energy consumption for the robos is distance moved. The more i get into the endless research of robo speed the more they wait on roboports for recharging. So the effort you get from the research is that the robos move faster to a roboport for charging, nothing more.

Why ?

A better way would be that the robots charge after a fix time in air, so better researched robos can travel longer distances without charging and the robos would get a better bonus from that endless research (also a Recharge station like in bobs would be a nice feature in vanilla, 4 on standard roboports are way too less without making excessive roboport spamming charging areas)
Other suggestion would be an endless research for robo battery size or sth like that

The energy use is based on the distance they travel iirc so say a robot has 100 tile range after 80 tiles they'll go into "I need a charge" mode and head to the nearest roboport, if your robots travel ao 100 tiles a second rather that 1 tile a second they still need to charge every 80 tiles and so would need charging more often

I actually kind of agree that distance covered shouldn't drain the battery but rather time and acceleration should.

F=MA Mass is a constant but to get to a higher speed you need more force, more force = more battery use

but once at peak speed whatever that speed is you're using maximum energy output you can provide because if you used more you'd get to go faster right?

So each 'stop' a robot makes should have some cost and then each tick a robot is in the air there's some cost.

An argument might be that the distance = battery use is equivalent to this method it takes the same amount of energy to move the same mass 1m if you do it at the speed of light or the speed of a snail but I think that the research should be a counter argument the research provides more efficient use of the same parts and the overall range should increase with research

I don't know a good solution to this but time and stops could be nearly the same computational cost as just distance.

This ties in well with one of the ideas keeping me up last night, introduce a bot charging point and construction/logistics area expansion access point.
Put another way, a roboport without the hangar capacity for the bots.

I would think a structure derived from the either the steel power pole + batteries + something like red chips (Advanced Circuits) would be a single charge point that functions as the power line it was previously.

Or

A structure derived from the power substation + accumulators + something like red chips (Advanced Circuits) or blue chips (Processing Units) again still functions as the substation on the power grid but acts as a charging port for bots without the hangar capacity.

To prevent people from just building these charging points, a single roboport and endless bots you may have to track which port the bots fly from and disable any that have no home, they'll just float around.



Final thought that occurred to me while typing this out is an end-game structure that allows bots to passively and remotely charge as they fly-by, a prime component of this structure would be the beacon, otherwise similar to the substation sized or requires charging point. May also introduce an upgrade to or upgraded form of the roboport with the remote charging capabilities.

Quantum_mechanic wrote:This ties in well with one of the ideas keeping me up last night, introduce a bot charging point and construction/logistics area expansion access point.

This is in Bob's Logistics Mod

Personally I'm against the idea cause it trivialises certain harder puzzles especially if such structures are smaller than the existing roboports. But if such items are bulkier but also have more charging capabilities then maybe they'd have a strategic element to them do you place 4 6x6 dedicated chargers or 9 4x4 roboports in the same space. Most people would say they'd never use the bulkier version because it gets more in the way than the smaller option even if it's more powerful (as some people do with substations vs medium power poles)

Quantum_mechanic wrote:Final thought that occurred to me while typing this out is an end-game structure that allows bots to passively and remotely charge as they fly-by, a prime component of this structure would be the beacon, otherwise similar to the substation sized or requires charging point. May also introduce an upgrade to or upgraded form of the roboport with the remote charging capabilities.

There's a mod for that too in alpha, I think it's by Dustine, called Charge Transmission it is super laggy because of the way it works but I can think of ways to integrate it into base game where it's far more efficient but there's a limit on Mod capabilities

Another way to address the OP's request would be a new research for increased battery capacity + charge rate. That would mean the bots could travel further on a single charge. I think that there is already a mod that does the increased capacity.

I've done some Excel work with the existing stats of the Robos:

There you see that you will get a hard cap of energy consumption of 60% (3KW/5KJ/m) for the infinite speed research. So the infinite research for robo speed is getting worse the more you will research them.

With the speedbonus of 200% you can get a energy saving for 25%, while you get only 5% more from 200% to 300% speed and from 300% to 400% you get ~2.14%.

Other infinite researches are linear like mining drill or weapon damage, there is no hard cap.

Revelant related topics :
viewtopic.php?f=71&t=51813
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=51439

Also :
[Koub] Topic moved to Balancing

Quantum_mechanic wrote:This ties in well with one of the ideas keeping me up last night, introduce a bot charging point and construction/logistics area expansion access point.
Put another way, a roboport without the hangar capacity for the bots.

I would think a structure derived from the either the steel power pole + batteries + something like red chips (Advanced Circuits) would be a single charge point that functions as the power line it was previously.

Or

A structure derived from the power substation + accumulators + something like red chips (Advanced Circuits) or blue chips (Processing Units) again still functions as the substation on the power grid but acts as a charging port for bots without the hangar capacity.

To prevent people from just building these charging points, a single roboport and endless bots you may have to track which port the bots fly from and disable any that have no home, they'll just float around.



Final thought that occurred to me while typing this out is an end-game structure that allows bots to passively and remotely charge as they fly-by, a prime component of this structure would be the beacon, otherwise similar to the substation sized or requires charging point. May also introduce an upgrade to or upgraded form of the roboport with the remote charging capabilities.

My logistics mod has these roboport structures.

There's a logistic zone expander (okay, the range isn't as big as a roboport) and a charging pad (for 4 or 9 robots).

Zavian wrote:Another way to address the OP's request would be a new research for increased battery capacity + charge rate. That would mean the bots could travel further on a single charge. I think that there is already a mod that does the increased capacity.

The more i thought about it, the more I agree with Zavian.

Minimalistic should be added an Infinite research für Battery Capacity of Robos, bonus would be an increased chargerate on the roboports and/or chargeports with more charging slots than a roboport oder faster charging, but only for charging robos.

When you play with excessive amounts of robos, you nearly have to build roboport on roboport in (<0.16.6) vanilla to give your robos enough charging slots, else you will inevitably get grapes of robos on the roboports.

I will test more when my new map is more advanced...