[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[Arch666Angel]

We were joking in discord, but could you add a wall-e bot that collects things lying on the ground?

[hitzu]

We were joking in discord, but could you add a wall-e bot that collects things lying on the ground?

+1 to this feature!

[Exavier724]

So finally got around to trying out the new version. Love the changes & the new bot. Your right their navigation got alot better for me and my high capacity barracks.

Really helps even the field with the Natural Evolution Enemies mod... Well up till a Big Worm wiped out 200 terminators (Who in their right mind mods the big worm to SPIT biter swarms at me!!!) Time to build up some heavy support artillery now that i have an army capable of getting me in range of the bases

[fregate84]

Hi,


First thanks you very much for this mod.
I use it on my bit base, so I have a problem. I must put about 10 Droid Assembling Machine to hunt in all way. Ok, it's fine.
But I don't have the avaibility to limite a droid assembling machine to 1 or 2 squad. Can you had this possibility ( in fact like Guard Stations but for hunt) ?

[Graybeard]

Hello!

I really like this mod. But after a while I run into some problem.



I am using resource spawner overhaul, so maybe its because the distance is too great for them to find an enemy base?

[Exavier724]

I use RSO as well and haven't had any issue, though I also sue another mod that affects bases & spawners. Have you tried messing with the Droid Settings Module? Its found in the same menu area as combiners. Wiki says the default hunt range is 5k and you can adjust it with that module (though it recommends not going above 10k). Perhaps your deployment isn't close enough to an enemy base?

[kyranzor]

Graybeard:
If RSO removes aliens in a large area, then it is possible there are no enemies close enough for the droids to find.

If you can remove those Droid Assemblers and all those droids (lol.. poor you) and go very far in one direction until you start to find biter nests - then set up the droid assemblers there. Basically follow these rules:

1. Deploy droids as close as possible to their targets, or at least in the general direction
2. Never deploy droids near belts (spaghetti) or inside the factory main walls
3. Try to control how many and when droids are deployed - batches are better than slow streams.


You could try to increase hunt radius as suggested, but really i think you are just deploying the droids way too close to your base and not close enough to the biters (which aren't even on the mini-map!)

fregate84:

Hi,
First thanks you very much for this mod.
I use it on my bit base, so I have a problem. I must put about 10 Droid Assembling Machine to hunt in all way. Ok, it's fine.
But I don't have the avaibility to limite a droid assembling machine to 1 or 2 squad. Can you had this possibility ( in fact like Guard Stations but for hunt) ?

It seems a lot of people want to have squads spawned and linked to their assembling machine. When I get around to making a building you can choose any recipe/insert any droid into, I will change the way squads are made and make them linked to and controlled by their production building. That is a very big change for the code so I don't know if i'll ever do it.

[Exavier724]

Would it be possible to make either of the following changes to the rally flag?
1) Make it a pulse signal instead of a "when you place it" signal? Trying to redirect a massive army is a pain because the ones that are stuck idle in the center of the blob will often change targets before they are free to move. I found myself dropping one flag every few seconds just to keep the army moving until it finally unbunched enough for all of them to recognize the signal.

If it pulsed every few seconds until you picked the flag back up it could be used to gather distant army clusters together near a new target before initiating the assault. Especially if there are 3 possible targets for your army to split up against once the current nest is dead which is what caused me to spam the flags in the first place lol

2) Since the wiki states that squads don't always respond to the rally flag would it be possible to print a message like you do for squad destroyed that simply says "## squads responding to rally". Even if the first suggestion isn't possible this one would at least give us a little bit of feedback on how many squads actually acknowledged the order.

[kyranzor]

These are reasonable requests, i'll see what i can do for the next version. I think pulsing the rally command every few seconds is the best way to do it. Saves having to keep picking up and placing it down again. Because it's pulsing, i don't really want to print messages for each squad (or even just the number of squads rallied) every time it pulses the rally

[Exavier724]

Oh I understand that. Would get a little annoying if you had pulsing & the message

One other thing is you might want to put an auto destroy on the rally if your going to go with the pulsing option. That way if another one is place it causes the first one to self destruct. Keeps there from being confusion signals and solves the issue of someone accidentally leaving one placed on the far side of the map

[kyranzor]

Do you think people would be okay with their rally points being destroyed? The resources are basically free but maybe that's annoying? I suppose if they know it will happen they will be less angry

[Exavier724]

Really depends.
You already set the precedent with your Army Chest of having one on the field per force. Since your giving the rally beacon a revision & what its doing it wouldn't be hard to justify the same thing for it.

I only mention having it destroy the existing instead of throwing an error so you don't end up with the "rally already in use, but where the heck is it" complaint. That and the issue where the army would change its mind eveytime each rally beacon pulsed its "come here" message.

[crooker]

I've been getting this error a lot lately:

Error while running the event handler: __robotarmy__/robolib/Squad.lua:105: LuaUnitGroup doesn't contain key surface.

Any ideas why that is? I can't really say what I've done to cause this, but in one of my save games, it just seems to constantly crop up.

[kyranzor]

Hi, you are one of many people that are not running a compatible version of Factorio. You must be running the most recent version of Factorio 0.13.x builds, or at least Factorio 0.13.15+

The game updates include fixes for my mod, plus additional scripting support, one of which is a unit_group can now have a "Surface" attribute. In fact, to be precise, the addition was in Factorio 0.13.14. So if you are running 0.13.14+ you will not get the error.

Sorry about that, its just my mod has brought up quite a few game bugs which the devs have very quickly finished, it just means you need to keep your game up-to-date to play my mod..

[kyranzor]

Really depends.
You already set the precedent with your Army Chest of having one on the field per force. Since your giving the rally beacon a revision & what its doing it wouldn't be hard to justify the same thing for it.

I only mention having it destroy the existing instead of throwing an error so you don't end up with the "rally already in use, but where the heck is it" complaint. That and the issue where the army would change its mind eveytime each rally beacon pulsed its "come here" message.

Well i could certainly have a similar error message/behaviour to the loot chest, or i could place the new one, delete the old one (or make it drop onto the ground.. but that will get annoying after a while, too much litter if you use them a lot)

I can have the squads merely go towards the closest rally point, but i think only ever having one rally point active is the best way. you could gather a large army near the enemies you want to kill, and then remove it, to unleash the horde of droids lol

[herites]

Hello,

Can someone explain how does the settings/activity modules and the droid guard station works? I was unable to wire up the station to the module, tried setting the hunt radius to k, squad size one, my bots didn't go anywhere.

[kyranzor]

Activity module makes output signals that count how many droids you have, and how many of each type.

You can have as many activity modules as you want. You can use the signals like any other logic circuit condition signal.

The settings module is a way to override the default settings of robot army. You do not connect it to guard stations. Guard stations will spawn X number of droids until it counts up to the default value of 10 or if you have set a new value using settings module. It affects ALL guard stations. Squads from guard stations do NOT hunt, they will never move away from their station unless you set up patrol poles.

If you want squads to hunt, deploy them by hand or use the Droid Assembling machine which makes squads that DO hunt, as long as there is enough in the squad and there are enemies within X radius

[cj89898]

Error I get: http://img.cjservers.net:3096/webserver ... -06-51.jpg

[kyranzor]

Error I get: http://img.cjservers.net:3096/webserver ... -06-51.jpg

Update factorio to 0.13.x experimental builds.

My mod only works on the new Factorio versions, 0.13.14+

[kiba]

Any plan for droids that run out of bullets?

If not, I might consider forking it.