Factorio Forums

Hello!

I really like your game, and I have been playing it basically since it's release date. However, there are some things I would think would make the game better, and would be easy to implement in 2.1. I realize there might be tens of thousands of these, so I will be quick: one of the most annoying things that can happen is if you want to build an outpost somewhere before you have spidertrons, and you request a bunch of things from the logistics network, but right before the bots get to you they suddenly need charge and turn to a roboport. So, here is my suggestion: if a robot needs charge but is within some distance of its target (15 tiles? Less than 2/3 the distance to the roboport it would charge at?) then it would postpone charging until its job is done. I think that would make situations like these less frustrating.

Sincerely,
That_Guy_32064

but what happens if they feel the need to charge 16 tiles ( 1 more ) or 2/3 + a little bit ? , isn't this just moving the problem by a 'little" ?

Really, the solution here would be not to head for recharging at a specific percentage at all. Instead, when the robot starts its trip, it should figure out whether it can get to the destination without needing to recharge, and if so, do so, but if it can't make it there, it should instead go for a recharge first. (And in cases where the destination is so far away it can't make it even on a full charge, it should instead aim for a roboport which it can reach and is closer to the target and head there, then recharge and try again.)

The problem with this is that it would potentially be very expensive, computationally, when there are a lot of bots in a network, since now you need to do lots of 'distance to' calculations and decision trees every time a bit starts a trip. One way to limit that would be to use the current system for short trip (i.e. the destination is within, say, 16 tiles (Manhattan distance) or the start location) and only use the new one for longer trips; since long trips mean long trip times, this puts a limit on how often you have to do the expensive calculations.