Change behavior of lost construction robots

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<NO_NAME>
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Change behavior of lost construction robots

Post by <NO_NAME> »

Let's start with a little story: (tl dr - just skip this paragraph)
I just ended battle with a bunch of biters. A few of my buildings was damaged but of course I was too lazy to repair them by myself. I didn't have any stationary roboports jet but I used personal roboports a lot. The roboports were unequipped during the battle so I of course equipped two of them and ... nothing. I check my inventory for construction robots and repair packs but I found that I had everything. Accumulators in my armor still had enough charge left and I definitely stood close enough to damaged buldings. However, robots didn't even try to do anything. They was just sitting in my inventory. Did you guess already, what went wrong? Well, I didn't have any idea what was the problem. After 10 minutes of pondering I was close to report a bug. But hen I noticed something weird. I had only 30 construction robots and there was 50 of them before. Using my amazing power of deduction I quickly put two to two. Obviously, I had unequipped my personal roboports while my robots was still constructing/deconstructing something and now they were rambling somewhere in the woods with depleted batteries. I don't know how that happened because I always check where are my robots before I remove roboport from armor. Anyway, I had to wait 20 minutes until they finally catch up.

We can observe two problems with personal construction robots:
1) They do not return to inventory when roboport is removed from armor.
2) They still reserve slots in personal roboport, even when they are lost.
While both points are kind of reasonable, together they create a mayor issue.

I don't know what is the best way to solve this.
My suggestion is to treat lost robots differently and do not reserve for them slots in personal roboport until they catch up with a player. Also, they can follow player even if he don't have any personal roboports equipped.
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ssilk
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Re: Change behavior of lost construction robots

Post by ssilk »

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=20566 Changes for the Personal Roboport
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zOldBulldog
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Re: Change behavior of lost construction robots

Post by zOldBulldog »

I think the biggest part of this problem is that bots get assigned jobs even when they are too far to do them. Also, they often launch when undesired (i.e.: when you are moving too fast for them to catch up).
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