Factorio Forums

TL;DR
The new tesla-towers/tesla-gun could be used to recharge robots instead of damage them.


So this was an idea after reading Friday Facts #422.

One shot of a tesla-tower could maybe charge 10% of the first robot it hits, then 9% to the next robot in the chain down to only 1%, this matches that a tesla-tower can damage 10 mobs.

So placing a tesla-tower in the path of a notorious long stretch the bots often use, could charge them repeatedly.

Also for the tesla-gun, if you see a robot struggle with low power, shoot it a couple of times and it flies away quickly again. So a tesla-gun could maybe charge half the amount of a tower.

I would leave all the minor details to the developers, but I feel this would only add to the game by creating an expensive way to wirelessly charge robots.

Are you trying to make bots even more overpowered?

I don't think this is making bots more powerful, it's just removing an annoyance... Because at the stage where you have bots moving over long distances, you already have at least one full stack of roboports in your inventory. So all I really have to do is plant some poles and plop down ten roboports.... But that also gives the robots a place to stop, making it a hassle to pick the ports up later because suddenly now I have 1400+ bots in my inventory.

Which is why I would argue tesla-towers is a decent middleground... They are (probably) expensive to make (compared to roboports), and cost a lot of power to use, so I might not want to plop down too many either.

But they don't have an inventory and no radar-range. So it's a balance.

Also the robots moving long distances are probably not doing it for a long time... It's mostly when you are laying down concrete og requesting a chest full of items. Making the constructionbots even more likely to stop at the first roboport and add itself to it's inventory.

No.