Tanks & Cars remote control

[zanven]

TL;DR

Tanks and Car's can be controlled like spidertrons remotely and auto fire

What ?

Tank's and Car's can be controlled with the same device spidertrons are controlled with, they also will auto fire the cannon and machine guns.
Mod's have been unable to create it due to the limitation of the entity and no desire to remake it as a "spidertron heavily modified".

This could be achieved by overhauling tanks and cars to have similar API interfaces with the spidertron allowing mods to enable the feature if not suitable for main game so players can opt in the for the functionality easily.

These changes may mean that limiting vehicle slots like chests would be useful to allow inserters to fill vehicles up.

Why ?

When playing on a deathworld or anything with the rampant mod, before getting to spidertron's you find the car immediately useless and the tank only useful if gotten very fast and early to do a land grab and then turtle and turret creep until spidertrons. If you do not greatly reduce evolution rate by the time the vehicles are unlocked they are already useless. This means only turret creeping is viable way to expand which is limiting. The proposal to allow tanks / cars to be remote controlled with automatically firing weapons allows the player to decide if they prefer to turret creep or need to manually setup / maintain a group of vehicles to fight the biters. They will also double as a defensive force should the outer permiter of a base be overwhelmed they give the player an option to defend with a mobile force pre spidertron. The spidertron which fires missles only is also very limiting when needing to use different ammo types to hit weaknesses on modified biters so this allows players to mix "guns, shells, missles" which can lead to RTS level play where you have tanks shielding spidertrons firing over the top of them.

Outside of pure combat this would also allow a pre train resupply vehicle to outposts to be easily manually directed to move between two points with inserts.
It will also allow early game transportation across long distances to be "click" and afk to avoid needing to drive everywhere.

References

RoboTank:
This mod makes a new entity that will maintain its offset from the players vehicle so a group can go into combat and demonstrates the kind of value the tank can have when they can be used in groups rather than solo to demonstrate its usefulness and potential fun to the game as an alternative to turret creeping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64LyVkl6Ac

The below two video's highlight the current kind of meta in factorio pre spidertron which only allows 1 single way to expand viably when surrounded by lots of enemies which is to tower creep your way to the next resource.

Vanilla deathworld turret creeping:
https://youtu.be/WDGV0nsQP8s?si=0YL9Lk9yU9-KWqi4&t=775

Rampant turret creeping:
https://youtu.be/FLbJMBM7QnM?si=XoeFSkH9Sh0OfgKX&t=1598

[Pi-C]

TL;DR

Tanks and Car's can be controlled like spidertrons remotely and auto fire

Check out Autodrive! You can equip vehicles with "sensors" for specific purposes. Vehicles that have loaded guns and are equipped with an enemy sensor will shoot at enemies within range of their selected weapon. Vehicles that have guns and an ammo sensor will be reloaded from the trunk (if it contains ammo), vehicles that require fuels for driving or equipment and have a fuel sensor will be reloaded from the trunk (if it contains suitable fuel items). There also is a repair sensor (will auto-repair the vehicle with repair kits from the trunk), a logistic sensor for requesting/providing items, and more.

Of course, you can select a vehicle (or a group of vehicles) with the mod's remote and send it somewhere! One special feature I've spent a lot of time on is bouncing: When a vehicle crashes into a rock (or some other entity) without destroying it, it will bounce off; when the other entity also is a vehicle, both will bounce.

[sarge945]

If vehicles are useless in Rampant, that seems more like a balance issue that should be addressed via the mod, rather than simply making them auto-drive capable.

I feel like Rampant would do well to allow multiple tiers of each vehicle type, which get better over time, and allowing the earlier ones to be gotten much quicker. Tank already takes a good couple of hours for someone who doesn't know what they doing, a tank you can get with just red and green science would help a lot.

I feel like the "base model" tank should only use the regular shells (rather than explosive ones) since they suck, but are serviceable for sniping biter nests.

[zanven]

If vehicles are useless in Rampant, that seems more like a balance issue that should be addressed via the mod, rather than simply making them auto-drive capable.

I feel like Rampant would do well to allow multiple tiers of each vehicle type, which get better over time, and allowing the earlier ones to be gotten much quicker. Tank already takes a good couple of hours for someone who doesn't know what they doing, a tank you can get with just red and green science would help a lot.

I feel like the "base model" tank should only use the regular shells (rather than explosive ones) since they suck, but are serviceable for sniping biter nests.

the issue is that a single vehicle has a single gun and can not survive the quantity of units on it simultaneously. The only time it remotely becomes viable is once you have equipment grids and lots of lasers on yourself and the tank. Many tank mods don't help this situation you simply need more guns firing at the biters to not be swarmed.

[sarge945]

In that case rampant should improve the personal defense drones so you can have a swarm of high-damage drones around your tank.

What if rampant significantly buffed them, but reduced their duration by a lot, so you can have a death swarm in the early game for clearing out nests, but it'll cost you a high upkeep for the privilege.

[zanven]

In that case rampant should improve the personal defense drones so you can have a swarm of high-damage drones around your tank.

What if rampant significantly buffed them, but reduced their duration by a lot, so you can have a death swarm in the early game for clearing out nests, but it'll cost you a high upkeep for the privilege.

Yeah i have been experimenting with things. Having a variety of options is always nice because sometimes a different method is better.
When i have run around with a crazy amount of defenders, you find yourself trying to run in a direction then slingshot them into the enemy so you aren't going "head first" the defenders on a tank are versy op IF you have equipment grids with shields on the tank. I do find it a bit too OP as the cost is so minor.

When i have done that in the past you end up sinking an hour into slowly expanding ( i like to play with maximum expansion speed on enemies ) so you need to take the land as you conquer it. which just means your not spending time expanding and teching up so its a fine balance.

I tried Autodrive / AAI for a few hours in a vanilla save and didn't like that update ticks limited the vehicles from auto firing the guns to be anywhere near sufficent at killing anything with autodrive so i switched to AAI vehicles and took the dive to do the extra complexity and i think it will offer me the right balance.

Where i can use a tank / defender bots with some ai vehicles to help push a location, then i can split up the vehicles into groups to hold the conquered land while i build the new wall behind them They vehicles are a massive resource sink if you are inefficent and they get killed which is great for risk / reward.