Combat Roboports

[Radioactive Pretzels]

Remote defense bases are fun to design, but inevitable damage to walls and turrets means they need repairs, not just restocking. Construction bots with repair packs are the solution, but the (expensive) bots are eaily destroyed!
There are some clever guys thinking of ways of using accumulator drain or ammo use as a circuit condition to disable roboports during the heat of battle, but the construction bots are still vulnerable.

One idea would be to have a special defensive roboport. It'd work the same way as a normal roboport, but bots leaving from it would have a temporary energy shield like the players powersuit shields. Or perhaps if roboports had equipiment grids of their own like vehicles in 0.14, shields could be added to a regular roboport to buff its issued bots. In fact extending this to allow portable fusion reactors and batteries inside of a roboport would allow remote outposts to have more robust charging for bots as well, especially when they're not part of the main power grid. It'd be too expensive and unncessary to add to all or even many roboports, so you'd only add these features to those key support regions where combat is likely.

[aubergine18]

What about a defence capsule roboport feature? I could add defender bots to it and when there's an enemy nearby they go out to engage it then survivors come back to the roboport for restocking an repairs.

[Ironmonk]

I always thought that the Defender, Distractor and Destroyer robots should work this way instead of self-destruction after a time.

It would be much more interesting to house in a roboport all kinds of robots for different purposes, not just construction and logistic bots.

[OdinYggd]

Its almost trivial with the roboport circuit connection to just restock the bots on a regular basis, with the same supply train bringing spare parts and repair packs also bringing bots to replace those that got blown up.

On the other hand, I really would like a device that could launch the destroyer bots when biters get within range and have them defend a cloud around the launcher till they expire. Have it deploy a user or circuit configured number of bots when activated, and maintain that number active as long as enemies are within its flight coverage.

[bobingabout]

That's something I keep meaning to do in my mods, but haven't yet... Robot turrets. A gun turret that shoots combat robots!

But, an actual roboport that you can place combat robots into, that detect enemies within a radius and deploy the robots for combat, before the robots return is... Something I have personally requested more than once.

[Deadly-Bagel]

It does raise a lot of questions. Simplest way would be to arm it with defence capsules, but given the expense of destroyer capsules you don't want it deploying 10 capsules for 3 biters. How then to limit this?

I think the drone system could benefit from a change in "lifespan". Currently they last a set amount of time, don't know how long that is but it's a reasonable amount of time. During this time however you feel compelled to get your resources' worth out of them which means you're rushing yourself. Instead, what if they had an "energy", like bots, that is primarily drained by firing? You wouldn't feel so compelled to rush into the next base before picking up your artefacts and it makes bots easier to balance. A slow idle drain can be used to prevent a permanent bot defence if the devs want to go that way, but personally I find it annoying that they fly around you when you no longer want them so either they dock on the player when out of combat or we would need a way to remove them manually.

Getting back to a defence roboport, this means that drones can be deployed in bulk without waste and return to the roboport.

An alternative solution is to only deploy a number of drones based on the number of biters in the area. This does mean you might get situations where there are a wave of biters slowly filtering in that destroy your bots, so you end up with a trickle deployment floating to its doom.