Factorio Forums

An early game item that will repair buildings in a small radius (2-3 tiles maybe?) slowly, using the repair packs in its inventory. It has 2 module slots. It also uses power per n health repaired.

Interesting idea. Would work well for early game defenses until you get repair bots.

My vision shows some kind of beam, that rotates into the direction of nearest repair. The area could be a bit bigger, 5-10 tiles radius or so.
I don't know if it is a good idea that they need power.

How interesting would it be to have belts mixed with many different types of ammunition and repair packs. Each tower takes from the belts what's needed. The "right mixture" of the items on the belts can be calculated by circuits.

ssilk wrote:My vision shows some kind of beam, that rotates into the direction of nearest repair. The area could be a bit bigger, 5-10 tiles radius or so.
I don't know if it is a good idea that they need power.

How interesting would it be to have belts mixed with many different types of ammunition and repair packs. Each tower takes from the belts what's needed. The "right mixture" of the items on the belts can be calculated by circuits.

Or we could have radius-limited crawling robots Path-find, etc. are already in game (for the biters) so I assume the devs can add a semi-autonomous entity to the play'er force. Come to think about it, we might be able to mod something like this into the current game. I'll have to play around with it to see what is actually possible.

Turrets and walls can hold up pretty well until logistic drones come into action.

bobucles wrote:Turrets and walls can hold up pretty well until logistic drones come into action.

Fire up Natural Evolution and DyTech and take a look

orzelek wrote:

bobucles wrote:Turrets and walls can hold up pretty well until logistic drones come into action.

Fire up Natural Evolution and DyTech and take a look

if you want to balance out a mod then add something to the mod.

ratchetfreak wrote:

orzelek wrote:

bobucles wrote:Turrets and walls can hold up pretty well until logistic drones come into action.

Fire up Natural Evolution and DyTech and take a look

if you want to balance out a mod then add something to the mod.

Idea presented here is at least tricky to do in mod properly - at least not to do it in hackish way.
I do hope still that vanilla will get a bit more "interesting" after combat overhaul and repair tower would be useful then

orzelek wrote: Idea presented here is at least tricky to do in mod properly - at least not to do it in hackish way.
I do hope still that vanilla will get a bit more "interesting" after combat overhaul and repair tower would be useful then

then suggest a way to let things get done without the hacks

For example add a filter for find_entities_in_range to include the damage taken to find all damaged buildings

johanwanderer wrote: Or we could have radius-limited crawling robots Path-find, etc. are already in game (for the biters) so I assume the devs can add a semi-autonomous entity to the play'er force. Come to think about it, we might be able to mod something like this into the current game. I'll have to play around with it to see what is actually possible.

There are so many suggestions about path-finding robots, that it is very unlikely, that the devs havn't see them. I think they will not come in any way. The argument for me is the same as here on earth: Why by the hell should a robot be able to walk if flying is so much more practical?

I think having more types of towers would be cool, cause I also think, that with every new type of enemy the usefulness of one type of tower sinks. I see the right way in doing here something like in tower-defend games: Only the right combination of towers enables survive. And with the right combination of towers we need also the right combination of ammunition and supply that in the right way. I think it is an interesting part of the game. In many games I use a combination of lasers and gun turrets, cause gun-turrets prevent due to it's firerate and limited range, that a big horde of biters can distract the lasers from killing the spiters too much. If you use gun turrets, you can reduce the lasers. Less standby energy is used.

And a repair tower would be just one part of that puzzle.

ssilk wrote:The argument for me is the same as here on earth: Why by the hell should a robot be able to walk if flying is so much more practical?

My idea was for something that can be used before flying robots become the norm. Think of the early game, when you spend 30 minutes trying to get the factory started. It would be great to have:

• Something (easy/cheap to build) to fetch ores / coals / etc. to a given chest.
  This becomes obsolete pretty much as soon as you can mass produce belts, but it can still supply further reaches of the factory.
• Something to run around repairing stuff.
  This won't become obsolete until your repair network covers the whole factory.
• Something to supply the early turrets with ammo.
  This might or might not become obsolete, depending on how the base is built.

Basically, an autonomous helper bot to free the player from running all over the map in the early game.

Anyway, when I see "repair towers" I think of a roboport with bots and repair packs in them, except those are blue-science level techs and are expensive.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... r+inserter

The response was none. That was at a time, where the devs read this board.

It is also a simple calculation: Walking entities need to pathfind the way. But the afford rises with the number of entities. That was the reason to reduce the number of enemies and instead adding more powerful.

It is not a good argument to say "We already have enemies, that walk, so we can have also robots, that walk". This is not quite the same, there is a small, but important difference. For the enemies the devs have the control to limit the number of enemies. For walking bots not. You can have unlimited much. There are some crazy players, which have 10,000 bots or more in one network! They will do that also for walking bots.

A CPU can handle 10,000 flying bots, that cannot collide, but not 10,000 walking bots, which then will collide endless.

Now it feels like a challenge Let's table this for now. I'll see if I can mock up a mod that does some of this stuff, and let's see if it's even useful or fun. And I'll put a hard limit of the number of crawlies you can build.

ssilk wrote: A CPU can handle 10,000 flying bots, that cannot collide, but not 10,000 walking bots, which then will collide endless.

Have them walk over each other like ants

Path needs to be searched. Or I can build a new device. All of those "events" needs to be calculated.

Reminds me a bit of this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=8122