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I just tried to attack a large bitter base, two dozens nests and that much worms. Before patch, my standard setup of 24 destroyer drones and some poison capsules would be able to destroy that base with ease.
After the patch... well, if it wasn't for bugged shields I would be dead. Destroyer drones do little to none DPS against the new bitters, running away to turrets did help. I only lost a half dozen turrets and destroyed couple nests. Yay me.
Now take two. Three personal roboports and scores of turrets, result? The base gone, no looses (besides some repair packs, but who cares about those?) I did not even bother to use capsules.

Does this mean that combat robots are now more or less useless? They cost much more compared to turrets, cannot be redeployed, die like flies and do little to no damage when it comes to the new top tier enemies.

I've used them a few times and they seem like a huge hassle to make, a big waste of resources. I can run in with a machine gun and a combat shotgun and get the job done. If I need help, I can plop down a machine gun turret. Combat robots are a giant waste of time and resources.

I don't have that problems?

Destroyer drones look super cool.

The turrets are a overpowered, the devs have forgotten to rebalance them correctly.

It takes forever to kill even one behemoth bitter with a combat shotgun and piercing shells. You need some sort of helps to attack the base while you're dealing with the bitters / spitters. Then again, it's not supposed to be easy

Combat robots might also be a lot better than nothing in a coop MP game where severe lag prevents one from participating directly in combat.

Destroyer bots were never supposed to be used with a low follower count. The new patch has exacerbated this problem, so that even higher follower counts are required. But, they still work, and work brilliantly. Note from follower count 10 - 20 the number of fieldable destroyers goes up in 10s up to 134. I have noticed a higher mortality rate though to be sure. A swarm of behemoth biters/spitters will stay in the fight longer and so cause more damage to your combat bots, so not only do you need a higher follower count, but take more bots with you too.

On lower follower counts, you will need to use a combined strategy eg combine with turret creep using personnal roboport...

Having said that, I think they probably should get a balance pass to cope better with the new dynamic, devs???

johanwanderer wrote:It takes forever to kill even one behemoth bitter with a combat shotgun and piercing shells. You need some sort of helps to attack the base while you're dealing with the bitters / spitters. Then again, it's not supposed to be easy

Shotgun science upgrades say otherwise. I absolutely chew through everything with a fully upgraded combat shotgun + piercing.

I don't even need robots.

Everyone's experience is going to dramatically differ because low settings only face you off against a handful of nests at any one time, while max settings will have nightmare blobs of 50+ nests all throwing their doods at ya. What cruises through low settings just isn't going to matter at the nightmare levels.

I will test it with 100+ destroyers, I honestly doubt it will do better than the turret spam.

I played with medium setting. Most bases had 10-30 nests in them, but enough space between them so I do not have to face everything at the same time. Still, if I was to play at the highest concentration I would just spam more turrets, rather than a single pole with 4 turrets, it would be a substation and 10-20 turrets.

With the way the personal roboport is set up, it could be a huge bonus to drones. Let the drones recharge and rearm by attaching to the player, and recall them when they're nearly drained with no action. A reusuable drone will be a lot more useful and give something that can begin to compete with turret bases.

bobucles wrote:With the way the personal roboport is set up, it could be a huge bonus to drones. Let the drones recharge and rearm by attaching to the player, and recall them when they're nearly drained with no action. A reusuable drone will be a lot more useful and give something that can begin to compete with turret bases.

Not sure if it's still the case in .12, but construction bots can/could repair combat drones, so you might be able to help their longevity by carrying some construction drones and repair packs.

SpeedDaemon wrote:

bobucles wrote:With the way the personal roboport is set up, it could be a huge bonus to drones. Let the drones recharge and rearm by attaching to the player, and recall them when they're nearly drained with no action. A reusuable drone will be a lot more useful and give something that can begin to compete with turret bases.

Not sure if it's still the case in .12, but construction bots can/could repair combat drones, so you might be able to help their longevity by carrying some construction drones and repair packs.

Not worth it. Repair drones will die during a fight. Also, the destroyer drones do not have enough HP to survive very long. We would need an additional type of drone, one with much more HP and most likely an ability to attack several targets simultaneously so it does not get stuck attacking a single green alien for long time. Even then repairing should be done outside a fight (right now using repair drones is automatic, can we please get something to turn it off?).

At that point you're basically asking for some kind of internal repair bay. That way the repairs are guaranteed to be done out of harm's way.
On the plus side, an automatic item repairer would fix all those damaged items that fill up inventory space.

bobucles wrote:With the way the personal roboport is set up, it could be a huge bonus to drones. Let the drones recharge and rearm by attaching to the player, and recall them when they're nearly drained with no action. A reusuable drone will be a lot more useful and give something that can begin to compete with turret bases.

I'd like to see permanent Combat Robots, that works the same way Construction Robots and Logistics Robots. Not just for the Personal Roboport, but in general. Ones that fly out to fight when an enemy is near, then comes back home to recharge and repair. Simple ones (red+green potions) should use guns and bullets, while more advanced ones (including blue or even also purple potions) should use energy and do electric or laser damage or similar.

Peter34 wrote:

bobucles wrote:With the way the personal roboport is set up, it could be a huge bonus to drones. Let the drones recharge and rearm by attaching to the player, and recall them when they're nearly drained with no action. A reusuable drone will be a lot more useful and give something that can begin to compete with turret bases.

I'd like to see permanent Combat Robots, that works the same way Construction Robots and Logistics Robots. Not just for the Personal Roboport, but in general. Ones that fly out to fight when an enemy is near, then comes back home to recharge and repair. Simple ones (red+green potions) should use guns and bullets, while more advanced ones (including blue or even also purple potions) should use energy and do electric or laser damage or similar.

Great idea. It would be even more awesome if those robots could be used from normal roboports, allowing us to build some walls and rely on mobile robots for defenses.

Combat drones were always subpar when compared to other means of biter eradication, which in turn were in no way overpowered rather simply good enough to get job done.
The problem is that the very idea of fighting an endless stream of tough enemies with a limited bunch of expensive moderate damaging fragile units incapable of any defensive maneuvers and which have no chance of outnumbering the foes is just stupid. And on top of that they aren't reusable.

A couple dozens of poison capsules will deal much more damage and will cost orders of magnitude less resources and in cooperation several players will be able to fire that much capsules relatively easily.

Adil wrote:Combat drones were always subpar when compared to other means of biter eradication

You've obviously never walked through a cluster of biter bases with 20+ destroyer bots.

I found combat drones to be the fastest way by far to clear out large biter bases in some situations. Such as: late game, not at all starved for resources, all research done, biter settings maxed. Then 30+ destroyed drones (6 capsules) would do a good job of killing the hordes of biters while I focused my shotgun on the spawners while also spamming distractor capsules. Also poison capsules for worm clusters.

This allowed me to clear out a big area in short time, while the turret creep and shotgun raids took far longer. However, in more sane situations (biters not maxed)... this power is not really needed. And it *is* expensive.

I haven't seen how they fare in the latest version.

From earlier in the thread:

roman566 wrote:I will test it with 100+ destroyers, I honestly doubt it will do better than the turret spam.

I played with medium setting. Most bases had 10-30 nests in them, but enough space between them so I do not have to face everything at the same time. Still, if I was to play at the highest concentration I would just spam more turrets, rather than a single pole with 4 turrets, it would be a substation and 10-20 turrets.

Please let us know how this goes, if you do the tests. Maybe destroyer bots don't bypass armor correctly.

For turret creep with bots, sometimes the bots will place turrets before power poles leading to defenseless turrets getting attacked. One solution I like is to make blueprints with lots of turrets that also pre-place the power poles for the next wave of turrets.

Of course the main reason I needed this is is that I was too lazy to set up local logistics bases, instead I made my construction bots carry them over a distance of 7+ roboports in a row.

Linosaurus wrote:Of course the main reason I needed this is is that I was too lazy to set up local logistics bases, instead I made my construction bots carry them over a distance of 7+ roboports in a row.

You no longer have to set up logistical bases. With new personal roboport you ARE the logistical base. That is why I think drones are no longer useful. Everything that made turret spam slow and annoying is now gone.

I use my combat shotgun + piercing shells to get the job done. Circling around the nests and killing off as many as possible before retreating to some big electric poles surrounded by Laser Turrets to get rid of all the biter/spitters I attracted. Set up the turrets once and clean off a whole area that way.

Rinse&Repeat. Most resource and time efficient method I have found.

At least I stopped using Combat Drones because of the ridiculous amount of resources it takes and the amount of crafting time/steps involved. All that for temporary bots you can't keep and which get annihilated too fast if you don't keep on spamming them. Only in a large number they are decent enough to keep their ground. So overall their capabilities are too limited and they are too friggin expensive for all that it's worth.

Peter34 wrote:I'd like to see permanent Combat Robots, that works the same way Construction Robots and Logistics Robots. Not just for the Personal Roboport, but in general. Ones that fly out to fight when an enemy is near, then comes back home to recharge and repair. Simple ones (red+green potions) should use guns and bullets, while more advanced ones (including blue or even also purple potions) should use energy and do electric or laser damage or similar.

I'm in for that. Make Combat Drones permanent units like Logistic/Construction Robots, which retreat to the Personal Roboport (if they were launched that way) or to regular Roboports.

The later would offer a different approach on how to build your defense as well because you just could place Roboports at the edge of your base and together with enemy sensors they could swarm out and kill whatever entered the sensor area and then retreat to the roboports again to get repaired by construction robots. Would have the advantage that you could automate the whole process of replacing/repairing the combat drones (at least if we finally get access to the roboport information like how many robots/drones there are currently).

At least I always thought that those things should work more like the barricade defending the machine city in Matrix Revolutions that sends out a bazillion of drones to kill just one single approaching entity.