[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[kiba]

Anybody has issues with belts snagging robots?

[impetus maximus]

Anybody has issues with belts snagging robots?

it was a known issue last time i used this mod. it's been a while. fix was to deploy bots outside the base walls.

[plandgren]

So i'm not sure what i'm doing wrong here. I making terminator robots. I placed a rally point form them to form up on. When they get there they just sit there. They do not go out hunting like I have read they are suppose to do automatically when a big enough squad forms. I have 50 of these robots just sitting there doing nothing.

can some one please tell me what I did or doing wrong please?

[kyranzor]

Rally beacon is not what you think it is. Just delete it and don't use them.

[JakeSublime]

Hey check it out, I have a rather large amount of bots in my game and I want to know how to remove them all simultaneously with some sort of console command. Their path finding is giving me a lag spike each second, so I want to remove them all and put a spawn cap before having my barracks produce more again.

Also, I've noticed that sometimes bots will get stuck, while the rest of their squad will leave them behind and travel slowly, or sometimes even completely stop moving. Other times half of a squad will get stuck in the barracks while the other half leaves to go raiding, even though I followed your advice with the large hole in wall solution. I can post a picture if you'd like.

I've also noticed that the bots will not follow the 5-bot-to-squad rule, and I end up with large squads of 10, 20, 30, even 50 bots all moving together, which is okay, but only the first 10 will attack and the rest stay behind in some sort of line, waiting to attack.

Lastly, just wanted to say I love the mod and the idea that drives it. I appreciate the hard work, and I hope my criticism is constructive lol.

EDIT: Thanks to Google, I found kunkka's post with the command to remove all the battle bots. Soooo... No help needed anymore I suppose, but the bots being left behind, and the bots attacking in lines are still problems.

[JakeSublime]

Here's a few pics anyways lol

Half of squad stuck in barracks:


Oversized squad, also attacking in a line:

[kyranzor]

Hey JakeSublime, your pictures are broken links. Use something like imgur or imageshack or something to host them if they don't work here.

There are many changes that fix squad behaviour and general balancing like spawn times which will probably solve all of your problems, available in the git-hub repository in the "unstable" branch.

I'm glad you found the command to kill all of the units, if you hadn't I was just about to tell you now

As for the 5-bots-to-a-squad rule, that's not really a rule, it's more of a guideline for a squad to work out if it should go hunting or not. The squad sizes can be any number of bots. Their group pathfinding and combat AI is not particularly good, and sometimes bots can get left behind, or they don't attack very effectively (like in the line that you mentioned).

If you are deploying bots very quickly from the droid assemblers in one spot then it can cause problems, they get stuck on eachother. Try playing around with the flying robot units, you might have less issues with them. They still get stuck on transport belts and cannot find paths through/over walls/water but otherwise they perform better overall than other droid units. For the end-game you'll still need terminators though. But terminators + swarms of destroyer bots are pretty dangerous.

[kyranzor]

Can I get people to start trying out the 0.2.4 version from the github "development" branch? You'll need to rename the mod folder to 0.2.4 and totally replace all the files inside it with those from the github branch. You can download a zip with the contents of the branch by clicking this link: https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfact ... opment.zip

Major changes are listed in the changelist.txt:

Changes from 0.2.3 to 0.2.4 release:
- recipe adjustment for clockwork rifle bot if Bob's electronics is enabled (thanks Nexela!)
- changed codebase to add new squads to a tick-update list, and each tick in a 60 tick cycle, only update squads assigned to that tick.
- refactored/added functions to handle squad AI with just the squad as the input to the function
- huge changes to squad AI to make it more robust to failures and pathing issues (huge thanks to Peter Gaultney)
- performance improvements (huge thanks to Peter Gaultney)
- More advanced AI options for targeting behaviour: squad-centered, assembler-centered, radius-clear) (huge thanks to Peter Gaultney)
- fixed build time for deploying all droid units, some where 0.5 seconds. Most are now 5-10 seconds deployment time.

[niccage]

I just updated to 2.4 and this was the error i got before my game crashed to main menu:

Error while running event on_tick (ID 0)
LuaEntity API call when LuaEntity was invalid.
stack traceback:
__robotarmy__/robolib/onload.lua:110: in function 'migrateDroidAssemblersTo_0_2_4'
__robotarmy__/robolib/onload.lua:43: in function 'migrateForce'
__robotarmy__/robolib/onload.lua:16: in function <__robotarmy__/robolib/onload.lua:6>

[kyranzor]

Thanks I'll fix that and update the branch

[kyranzor]

I fixed the error on line 110, try again please.

[ruskyandrei]

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for the awesome mod!

I've been playing with this lately and it's really cool and fits in the game perfectly, especially for someone like me who loves to play with huge swarming biters that eventually engulf the whole map so having some help with keeping them in check is definitely a nice touch!

One thing I'd like to suggest (and I will probably try and mess around with and see if I can do myself too since I suspect it shouldn't be too difficult), is adding the existing tank and car to the list of "bots". I love the tank and the car but, especially when playing with large numbers of biters enabled (and other mods that make biters even scarier) running around in the tank by yourself is pretty suicidal. Now, if you could automate squads of tanks / machine gun cars.... that would be fun

I'm going to look into changing the model for some of the existing bots to the tank/car models to begin with, but I'm not familiar with Factorio modding so if you have any hints they'd be most welcome!

Thanks again for the awesome mod!

[hitzu]

Robots love to attack Robot Mining Site.

[kyranzor]

Robots love to attack Robot Mining Site.

Haha I wonder why? Does judos make his entity a different force? Is the force not allied with the player force?

Does the squad of robots attack the building or the flying robots?

[hitzu]

Robots love to attack Robot Mining Site.

Haha I wonder why? Does judos make his entity a different force? Is the force not allied with the player force?

Does the squad of robots attack the building or the flying robots?

The squad attacks the roboport sub-building and when I came to the mining site there wasn't any robot either flying or inside the port. But I haven't gotten any warning message of destroyed robots.

I have another problem. My base is quite large and I made several special train stations with deployers far away from the perimeter in order to force robots not to walk through my base. But the problem is now that when the squad gathers and reaches its full size, robots don't move, squad dissasembles and a new larger squad appears. Also this casuses lags, it seems that robots try to find the path, fail and gather again, then fail to find the path again and so on. What can I do to force them to run for biters instead of making huge squads on the spawn endlessly?

[impetus maximus]

Robots love to attack Robot Mining Site.

i've had the robots attack me in the past. haven't used the mod i a while.

[Nexela]

Robots love to attack Robot Mining Site.

Haha I wonder why? Does judos make his entity a different force? Is the force not allied with the player force?

Does the squad of robots attack the building or the flying robots?

I believe in order to keep the robo networks separate the mining site belongs to the enemy force. The possible solution would be for Judos to update it to create a new "allied" force it to use.

[kyranzor]

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for the awesome mod!

I've been playing with this lately and it's really cool and fits in the game perfectly, especially for someone like me who loves to play with huge swarming biters that eventually engulf the whole map so having some help with keeping them in check is definitely a nice touch!

One thing I'd like to suggest (and I will probably try and mess around with and see if I can do myself too since I suspect it shouldn't be too difficult), is adding the existing tank and car to the list of "bots". I love the tank and the car but, especially when playing with large numbers of biters enabled (and other mods that make biters even scarier) running around in the tank by yourself is pretty suicidal. Now, if you could automate squads of tanks / machine gun cars.... that would be fun

I'm going to look into changing the model for some of the existing bots to the tank/car models to begin with, but I'm not familiar with Factorio modding so if you have any hints they'd be most welcome!

Thanks again for the awesome mod!

Tanks and Cars have special sprites and animations and states that won't work easily with the way a "unit" entity wants/uses sprites. The turret won't function as an independent graphic either. The other option is programmatically driving a vehicle slowly from point A to point B, and have the vehicle use integrated weapon-systems like a personal defence grid-item.


I want to have special vehicles that do this, and act as APCs (because they can have an inventory, can have equipment grids, and can drive over trees I think this is going to be awesome). The APC unit will be special, and expensive, and you can set them up with various equipments to change their roles/behaviours and put droids into its inventory which it automatically deploys and recovers after a battle before moving on to the next area.

[kyranzor]

I have another problem. My base is quite large and I made several special train stations with deployers far away from the perimeter in order to force robots not to walk through my base. But the problem is now that when the squad gathers and reaches its full size, robots don't move, squad dissasembles and a new larger squad appears. Also this casuses lags, it seems that robots try to find the path, fail and gather again, then fail to find the path again and so on. What can I do to force them to run for biters instead of making huge squads on the spawn endlessly?

I think I will make the droid assembler count nearby droids within the spawn radius and give it some limit (maybe, 1.5x the squad size setting?) where it will automatically stop spawning until the area clears. Does that sound useful? Literally exactly the same code, with a minor change in the number allowed, that the droid guard station uses to limit spawning around it.


edit: Okay, download this: https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfact ... stable.zip

overwrite the files in your robot army mod folder (make sure folder is called robotarmy_0.2.4) with these, and please test this new feature:

"automatic spawn-limiting around droid assemblers" which is set to limit to 1.5 times the "squad hunt size".

[hitzu]

EDIT: Well. As I suspected it's the Robot Mining Site mod's fault.

___________________________________________________________

So it's really weird. I updated the mod and they keep gathering. I set the squad maximum size to 25, but the southern squad is already 51 and growing.

image

And this happens only with 2 of 4 deployers. Here is the squad from the west deployer (near the lake) and they travel to the south where the southern squad is supposed to travel to.

image

I checked some data from the debug menu and it seems that the southern squad try to find path somewhere to the north-west, but failes, dissassembles itself, assembles new as the new squad and checks for the same path again and so on. Once I opened the save with updated mod I got this console message

image

Things are even worse on the northen deployer. Robots literally clogged the mine area (I didn't build a wall there yet undortunately).

image