The size of bots

[alan2here]

I was just catching up with https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-224 and it got me thinking, but the thread for it is huge and locked.

It is sort of asserted that no amount of reducing bots makes them less powerful than belts, but I'm not sure I agree. There are performance considerations but also optimizations/structures to help with this, bots are also popular in there way too, but it needn't be an all or nothing thing.


How about:

Bots being unable to get less than a certain distance from each other. This could be as an on by default option when starting a new game. On a technical level partitioning is an example of something that can make this efficient enough, particularly seeing as there would be able to be less bots at once. It'd look a lot more realistic and force bots to "queue up" a bit, this needn't even be a very large radius. Having less of an enormous increasingly continuous seeming rather than discrete seeming cloud of them might lead to more interesting optimization problems becoming relevant for bot movement as well. Being forced to fly around some of the tallest structures could be a fun quirk too.

A restriction of the number of messages "the air can handle", as in for a square km only a curtain number of messages like "I need a new task" or "I need deconstructing" can be exchanged per second, importantly with some part of the UI that communicates your localisation of the capacity of this. The limit could be quite large but it existing at all would still cap things a bit.

Bots being unable to leave the construction/logistics area of the network too, relevant for example for banana shaped factories. Subtle but curtails them a bit and is also an advantage in disguise re not ridiculously flying into biter bases.

More specialized types of belt (that aren't almost straightforwardly more powerful upgrades), but not stacking up of belts though in a big pile. :¬|

A couple of a slower factory like buildings that make a couple of particular small groups of the items that are good to have as an option, but you hardly ever need much of, use a mishmash of materials, don't go into making anything else and you just scoop out into a permanent stack in a logistics provider chest anyway. Most of the interesting intricacies of trying everything with just belts is still there, but enough of the fat is trimmed off so bits that are just blindingly more practical to do with the logistics network than an either bowl of spaghetti shaped belt network or lots of redundant belt and a base that in its entirety approximates to the shape of a conifer tree or a radio tower don't end up incentivizing an inevitability in using bots.

I wonder if rockets could be made to land and be reusable and requested to return to the planet and land on other launchpads you've built elsewhere, still being extremely expensive to lunch each time though. Along with some other uses (observation satellite module etc...) A niche form of transportation for moving extremely large numbers of things extremely large distances.

I've not explored using trains much, but out of interest. I presume they can be used to move things around even within reasonably small and self-contained bases, including where desired on branching or cyclic tracks that allow cycles of one train delivering different sorts of things to different places, intelligent decisions using intricate contaminator networks, a loop of trains almost bumper to bumper that are synchronized well enough not to crash etc... But as this doesn't seem to be done much, what makes these sort of uses unappealing in bases where the scale of operations is enormous and yet trains are only used to fetch metal ore from far outside the base?


All in all I think bots could be balanced in subtle ways so they are a more flexible but slower option than belts & trains rather than a godlike power.

[fiery_salmon]

Bots being unable to get less than a certain distance from each other.

was proposed (many times), will never be done as it would require pathfinding for bots what would mutilate UPS.

[Jap2.0]

That thread was continued here, at the thread for the second blog post. It's still semi-active, so you can post there if you want. That suggestion has been proposed and shot down a few times, largely because of UPS and partly because that's half of what makes bots unique - OP as well, perhaps.

[HurkWurk]

the only way to really balance bots is to cripple them, which i dont agree with.

the simplest way to do that would be a size limitation, so that logistics bots could only carry intermediaries or define a size on objects and disallow logistics from carrying large objects.

[dood]

the simplest way to do that would be a size limitation, so that logistics bots could only carry intermediaries or define a size on objects and disallow logistics from carrying large objects.

Making items unable to be picked up by bots is a terrible idea since bots are also how you build and deconstruct things.
Besides, while impressive, bots defining strength isn't that they can carry a stack of nuclear reactors so it wouldn't even accomplish much aside from breaking every single mall.

[vinnief]

How about a series of upgrades in the tech tree which allow them to carry increasing numbers of items but also make the recipe more expensive?

[Krazykrl]

Modifying bots won't really solve much. You need to spam roboports to create enough charging capacity. Adding any more conditional checks (like collision or ranging) is just utterly out of the question due to UPS concerns.

The best way to buff belts for endgame would probable be automatic stacking of items in a way similar to inserter stack research.
Via research, all production machines would only output a full stack of items (but you may turn this off individually.) For bots, trains, and inventories; this would be practically invisable... the items only look like, say, 200 greenchips. But once you take a stack inserter, it plunks down 1 item on a belt which is the full 200 chips. If inserted into a chest for bots, the bots only can pickup 1*botcapacity at a time (just like currently.) If a stack inserter picks up a stack of something, it does not pause or attempt to pickup another item, it just swings back; non-stack inserters will not pick up stacks of items. When stacks of items are inserted into a machine, they act just like you manually placed 200 or whatever of an item by hand.

[OBXandos]

About the only way I have seen that nerfs bots in an acceptable way(to me at least) is to give every item a weight and the bots a carrying capacity. Each item would weigh something based on input materials. Each bot has a recommended carrying capacity that it performs best at. All bots can carry all items but any item or group of items over a certain weight would cause the bots to move slower or maybe consume more energy. This doesn't completely neuter their abilities but does make them less useful in certain situations. A good balance would have construction bots being able to carry larger weights than logistic bots.

[DaveMcW]

The simplest way to nerf bots is remove "worker robot cargo size" tech. Alternately you could buff belts by giving them a "belt cargo size" tech.

[Gergely]

banana shaped factories.

Have you ever seen a banana shaped Factory?! Please show me a link...

What's even the point of building one?!

[HurkWurk]

the simplest way to do that would be a size limitation, so that logistics bots could only carry intermediaries or define a size on objects and disallow logistics from carrying large objects.

Making items unable to be picked up by bots is a terrible idea since bots are also how you build and deconstruct things.
Besides, while impressive, bots defining strength isn't that they can carry a stack of nuclear reactors so it wouldn't even accomplish much aside from breaking every single mall.

please be cautious of the difference between logistics robots and construction robots. construction robots would not be altered, so building would not be affected.
also, as i already said, i do not agree with nerfing any bots at all.

[dood]

please be cautious of the difference between logistics robots and construction robots. construction robots would not be altered, so building would not be affected.
also, as i already said, i do not agree with nerfing any bots at all.

Doesn't matter, I still don't want to pick things up from my mall manually and neither do you.