Don't replace healthy destroyer bots

[Gandalf]

Combat robots have a spawn cap which is determined by the players progress in the “Robot Follower Count N” research line. The wiki has the exact numbers.

What I didn't realize until I just played a new game and finally got to destroyer capsules is, that if you spawn more bots than your current maximum follower count, some of your existing bots will simply disappear. I was not aware of this, since it is almost impossible to spot once you've reached a higher number of bots (maybe around RFC6 or RFC7, at which point you have around 15 bots). My strategy has always been to just spam down as many as possible, assuming it would stop once the cap is reached. I am sure that many other players share this assumption.

So here's my suggestion for solving it: Don't let the player spawn more bots once he has reached the maximum for his current follower count.

There are two special cases to consider:
1. Since there are two types of bots that count for the follower count (defenders and destroyers) it may be useful if higher value bots (destroyers) can always replace lower value bots (defenders).
2. It can be useful to replace low health bots right away instead of waiting for them to die at an inconvenient time. For that reason I suggest to allow replacing bots with less then half health immediately.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

Hmmmm, I personally rather not have a hard limit. I like to spam extra every now and then knowing that 10 bots are about to die. I rather have a army going into a fight rather than having half of them die at the start.

[Gandalf]

Read all of my post…

[sillyfly]

@Gandalf - I think he means die of old-age (time-limit), not from being attacked, and I think I tend to agree.

And, not sure if you know, but when you reach the limit, the number of bots turns green, so you know when to stop.

[Gandalf]

Ah, now I get it. Sorry for my remark.

I didn't know about the number turning green, so thanks for the tip (in fact I've never even noticed that number). I guess that helps, although I think I'd still prefer to have it actually block further spawns if they are clearly not necessary.