Factorio Forums

[summary] A separate logistics network and bots just for repairing and replacing structures.

I just finished a game and I'm full of ideas of course, but my biggest problem was that combat was mostly an annoyance. Unless I'm missing something, I feel the player is more or less required to wall their base with a million turrets and cover all of that with roboports. This way, things get automatically repaired and replaced and you can actually work on your production. However, this reduces the bots mostly to this task and makes the logistics network gigantic (which is not intended if I read this forum).
I'm thinking about an extra network, the repair network, in which can only repair en replace structures. It could use the existing logistics network and extend it with a different roboport (or make it selectable or something). A requester chest next to the port could be used to request some common items like walls and turrets to improve this strategy. one can then decide to deploy bots (construction and logistics) to just this network. This can obviously be generalised to any number of networks I guess, but only this one is probably easier to represent visually with a different colour.

To make this more flexible I'd love to see separate, cheaper, network stations as well, that just extend the network but don't provide charging and storage. That way you can cover parts but give them basically low priority and not have to spam roboports everywhere.

To expand a little on this, I never used provider chests for a similar reason. Basically everything everywhere was in the network, so a provider chest would be emptied to storage chests all over the place.

Basically, the need (as far as I can tell the alternative is extremely tedious) to use the bots for repair and for restocking your avatar makes it hard to use them for anything else.

kingmob wrote:Unless I'm missing something, I feel the player is more or less required to wall their base with a million turrets and cover all of that with roboports. This way, things get automatically repaired and replaced and you can actually work on your production. However, this reduces the bots mostly to this task and makes the logistics network gigantic (which is not intended if I read this forum).

It is better to divide defense bot network to small parts (I use 12 roboports as a maximum). Suitable division prevents also robots to go outside from the area or try to fly over large distances without roboports. Defense networks should also be isolated from main base network. I use train lines to supply defense lines.

Hannu wrote:

kingmob wrote:Unless I'm missing something, I feel the player is more or less required to wall their base with a million turrets and cover all of that with roboports. This way, things get automatically repaired and replaced and you can actually work on your production. However, this reduces the bots mostly to this task and makes the logistics network gigantic (which is not intended if I read this forum).

It is better to divide defense bot network to small parts (I use 12 roboports as a maximum). Suitable division prevents also robots to go outside from the area or try to fly over large distances without roboports. Defense networks should also be isolated from main base network. I use train lines to supply defense lines.

But then the robots have no access to your production area, so they've got nothing to replace/build with?

Yes, but it ensures that the bots respond in a timely manner to attacks. All you have to do is move the necessary materials into the defense network for bots to access. You can use trains as Hannu suggested, or if you prefer a purely robot based solution, you can separate defense network and main base network by a single tile and link them with a requester in the main network which inserts into a provider in the defense network.
Simplest way is one chest per resource. It is also advisable to limit insertion into the provider to prevent storing e.g. a chest full of laser turrets. Using combinators you can request multiple resources in one chest.