[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[kyranzor]

Okay, yes, I like. Very nifty.

I had another idea too. The droid barracks can be upgraded. The different levels of the barracks allow different distances that the droids will go.

But really, whatever you do is awesome. I am happy right now

Being able to configure the Assembler with a 'hunt distance' would definitely be a nice feature with a constant value for the chunk distance (so it could be anywhere between 1-1000 chunks of the assembler)

It'd be a nice way to set perimeters actually besides the patrol posts. Just have assemblers dotted around filled with droids, whenever a nest pops up in range it'll send the droids out to attack.

The new global override special droid command module (only 1 per force) will allow you to set hunt radius and squad size and retreat size in-game.

[Murdersquish]

Howdy. I really like the mod. I'm looking forward to trying it with Natural Evolution as I've never played with that mod, but since Terminators are OP as eff...

I wanted to offer my anecdotal feedback after playing with Robot Army for about 20 hours--from start to game finish. In no particular order:

• After quickly realizing that a squad size of 5 was too small, I increased it to 20. It's the only setting I changed.
• I only ever built the (pardon for the loss of names) "machine gun" robots and the Terminators.
• Initially I tried using the droid deployment factory, but it doesn't work well if it is too close to your your factory. The robots will quite frequently try to cut through your factory and ultimately get stuck on belts, factory implements, etc. This is one of my bigger complaints, and I eventually abandoned the deployment factory and would run/drive/train a ways out and drop down a squad (of 20).
• It's counter-intuitive to drop down a squad of 21 and get a squad of 20 and a squad of 1, which sits idle indefinitely.
• Guard stations, unlike deployment stations, seemed to mostly work. I had one instance where I noticed a squad of 7 (of 10) and wondered what happened to the other three. It turns out they were milling about a destroyed nest and never returned back with the other seven. I can only surmise they were part of the guard group, but...
• I feel--but cannot confirm--robots get lost/stuck/de-squaded. I didn't use the droid combinator except that I had one sitting around so I could monitor how many droids were out there. I had upwards of 100, but for the life of me I have no idea where they were except for the 30 in three guard stations and 20 Terminators terminating. The minimap has trails of blue dots, but often those appeared to be radar ghosts.
• The combinator of not the total robot count, but counts of each robot type, would be more useful IMO. Not one combinator for each type, but one combinator only (similar to how you can setup a continuous combinator to output multiple types).
• Terminators are overpowered--crazy damage and self-healing. Mayhaps this was because my squad size was 20 instead of 5. My laser tech research was a non-factor; I had flamethrower and gun turrets and never bothered upgrading laser tech.
• I would like combat warnings when squads are engaged--much more so for guard towers than hunter-seekers.
• I would like a keyboard shortcut to open a UI that lists the squads, their makeup, and a "camera" toggle button to zoom to them (similar to how several of the trains mods work).
• Artwork and icons need love .Way down on the list of things for me, but there you have it. I was pleasantly surprised at the Terminator artwork.

As with all internet posts, take this feedback with a grain of salt. I appreciate your effort with the mod--it's definitely in the spirit of Factorio!

[Dark_star]

great mod, but after the last update 13.13, started receiving err message;
"Error while running the event handler:
__robotarmy__/control.lua:514:position not specified"
this during placement of 1of 20 guard stations, each with 20+ terminators
a reload of last backup did not stop error, but did cause a short delay.
Able to save and restarted game which did help.
have not changed squad number.
running on Win7sp1
again thanks for the great mod

[kyranzor]

great mod, but after the last update 13.13, started receiving err message;
"Error while running the event handler:
__robotarmy__/control.lua:514:position not specified"
this during placement of 1of 20 guard stations, each with 20+ terminators
a reload of last backup did not stop error, but did cause a short delay.
Able to save and restarted game which did help.
have not changed squad number.
running on Win7sp1
again thanks for the great mod

Hey, it seems the getGuardSpawnLocation() function returned a failed position to spawn the next terminator, so it barfed on the create_entity function on the line you showed. The issue is 20+ terminators is too many, there's no room to spawn another one, and it seems my code cannot handle that properly. The only thing I can suggest is turning down how many guards you have. All droids in the next patch have been scaled down in size 20% so we can fit more and they can path-find a little better, but this might still happen. I will put more radius on the code that finds a suitable spawn position so that this is less likely to happen again. Sorry about that!

[kyranzor]

Howdy. I really like the mod. I'm looking forward to trying it with Natural Evolution as I've never played with that mod, but since Terminators are OP as eff...

I wanted to offer my anecdotal feedback after playing with Robot Army for about 20 hours--from start to game finish. In no particular order:

• After quickly realizing that a squad size of 5 was too small, I increased it to 20. It's the only setting I changed.
• I only ever built the (pardon for the loss of names) "machine gun" robots and the Terminators.
• Initially I tried using the droid deployment factory, but it doesn't work well if it is too close to your your factory. The robots will quite frequently try to cut through your factory and ultimately get stuck on belts, factory implements, etc. This is one of my bigger complaints, and I eventually abandoned the deployment factory and would run/drive/train a ways out and drop down a squad (of 20).
• It's counter-intuitive to drop down a squad of 21 and get a squad of 20 and a squad of 1, which sits idle indefinitely.
• Guard stations, unlike deployment stations, seemed to mostly work. I had one instance where I noticed a squad of 7 (of 10) and wondered what happened to the other three. It turns out they were milling about a destroyed nest and never returned back with the other seven. I can only surmise they were part of the guard group, but...
• I feel--but cannot confirm--robots get lost/stuck/de-squaded. I didn't use the droid combinator except that I had one sitting around so I could monitor how many droids were out there. I had upwards of 100, but for the life of me I have no idea where they were except for the 30 in three guard stations and 20 Terminators terminating. The minimap has trails of blue dots, but often those appeared to be radar ghosts.
• The combinator of not the total robot count, but counts of each robot type, would be more useful IMO. Not one combinator for each type, but one combinator only (similar to how you can setup a continuous combinator to output multiple types).
• Terminators are overpowered--crazy damage and self-healing. Mayhaps this was because my squad size was 20 instead of 5. My laser tech research was a non-factor; I had flamethrower and gun turrets and never bothered upgrading laser tech.
• I would like combat warnings when squads are engaged--much more so for guard towers than hunter-seekers.
• I would like a keyboard shortcut to open a UI that lists the squads, their makeup, and a "camera" toggle button to zoom to them (similar to how several of the trains mods work).
• Artwork and icons need love .Way down on the list of things for me, but there you have it. I was pleasantly surprised at the Terminator artwork.

As with all internet posts, take this feedback with a grain of salt. I appreciate your effort with the mod--it's definitely in the spirit of Factorio!

Hey, try it with Bob's enemies and with Misanthrope. Your terminators will suffer. Also, the damage for terminators is from Combat Robot damage, not laser-turret related damage tech. 20 terminators is expensive and should be dominating, only 100% evolution vanilla biter deathworlds are a match for swarms of terminators. But with this game, it's just a matter of time before the player can essentially do anything, and outproduce/outslaughter all the aliens. The terminators just give you a way to do it automatically

Just a few things on your list:
1. Squad size of 20 is probably a bit high, and I suggest you increase the squad-check-range value up to 25 or something, to guarantee any that you place will all end up in the same squad.
2. yes, the droids get stuck on belts and on your buildings. This is a factorio pathfinding issue and there's not much i can do about it. only place droid assemblers on the outskirts of your factory or out near resource outposts.
3. I have added extra AI for guard post units to return to their station if they wander too far. this is in 0.2.1 which is releasing soon (this week i hope)
4. combinator that counts each droid type is already done, in 0.2.1 too.
5. The red alert mod adds "Unit lost" sounds/alarms which now supports my modded units.. check that out?
6. A UI of some kind of my mod is ultra low priority right now, i have a lot of content and "proof of concept" work yet to be done. UI is last, unfortunately..
7. Yes, icons and artwork are important and i'm doing my best and there will be some upgraded art in 0.2.1

[Dark_star]

great mod, but after the last update 13.13, started receiving err message;
"Error while running the event handler:
__robotarmy__/control.lua:514:position not specified"
this during placement of 1of 20 guard stations, each with 20+ terminators
a reload of last backup did not stop error, but did cause a short delay.
Able to save and restarted game which did help.
have not changed squad number.
running on Win7sp1
again thanks for the great mod

Hey, it seems the getGuardSpawnLocation() function returned a failed position to spawn the next terminator, so it barfed on the create_entity function on the line you showed. The issue is 20+ terminators is too many, there's no room to spawn another one, and it seems my code cannot handle that properly. The only thing I can suggest is turning down how many guards you have. All droids in the next patch have been scaled down in size 20% so we can fit more and they can path-find a little better, but this might still happen. I will put more radius on the code that finds a suitable spawn position so that this is less likely to happen again. Sorry about that!

I did an adjustment to the Out Post (OP) with Guard by making area for spawning slightly bigger by moving walls back a little, which cause the problem to stop happening.
Also suggest making Guard patrol area bigger . They stay too close to Guard station.

[kyranzor]

Well we don't want then going too far away, and if they do they need to come bacK, but we also want them to cover a larger area - thats where the patrol post comes in usefulness.

[Dark_star]

Well we don't want then going too far away, and if they do they need to come bacK, but we also want them to cover a larger area - thats where the patrol post comes in usefulness.

I been watching them more and they can get far from home when activated, which fine by me, so the patrol area is about right.

[Exavier724]

Really like the mod. Though after trying this with Natural Enemies, Natural Tree Expansion (to regrow forests i accidentally burn down), and your Robot Army 0.2.0 I can think of a few things

1) Spawn Area Overlaps.
- I noticed you are planning a 20% size reduction on the bots which should help with the issues I have had going through forests. But I don't think its going to help very much with a large barracks area. I've noticed most of the blob occurs when the target for attack is to the left/right of the barracks line where the bots drive through the other spawn zones when the next batch appears.

Is it possible to give them an "on spawn" order to move forward out of the spawn zone before they pause to search for squads? This is more noticeable when you have speed module filled assemblers where the time needed to group & start moving out takes longer than the next 2-3 deployment cycles.

2) Request a Flamethrower Equipped Bot
- Your terminators are nice but against Natural Enemies they get swarmed badly. Specifically because the mod adds Worm unit cannons that spit a group of biters at you. I actually installed this mod originally to see if i could do something about my late game bottlneck and it works well as long as I can run with the bots using a flamethrower to clear forests & massive swarms. But then i run into item #1 above and have to go back to base to fix the spawn area, after which the assault pretty much stalls lol

Hu thought I had more to bring up but i think #2 would actually solve alot of my other complaints since it would also cover a need for AoE (I understand why the AoE was removed from the rockets, but I am willing to accept the firestorm friendly fire I cause to deal with my other issues lol). Can't wait for the changes to the production line.

[kyranzor]

Exavier, Is this the firebot you were looking for? https://youtu.be/HQS8OsCE7qc

And the changes to droid size and enlarged spawn area should allow for a less frustrating spawn area. Are you by chance having a large amount of Guard stations nearby? I suggest you space them out.

[Qon]

If you are going for more complicated recipies then more of the player equipment pieces are good candidates. They are usually not automated at all anyways so you would still have to set up completely new production lines. Only the terminators are powerful enough to be worth such expensive parts though. It would be weird if entirely new parts that were not usable as equipment were introduced when we already have parts available. Maybe for the mid-tier bots it could be worth it though since not much equipment is cheap enough. As long as you keep the weaker bots simple to make (so you can try it out and get hooked immediatly) and the complexity progression is smooth it's fine.

[Exavier724]

Um wow. Can I have that shipped over to my base now? lol

I haven't had a chance to use guard stations as I don't usually set up isolated fire points. Instead I use heavy firebases surrounded by flamethrowers and the one time i tried guard bots i found out very quickly that they are not immune to that much fire lol. And I haven't played a game on settings that had the resources spread out enough to need large area denial.

I got this mod for more of the brute force hammer I could automate against the somewhat insane late game bases my mod combo generates lol.

What I did do for my assault base though is use the waterfill mod to make a small moat around a firebase (only 1-2 tiles wide) and set up the deploy assemblers on one edge. Keeps the melee biters from eating them (as they run toward the wall the can hit) and lets me spit the army out into a flat open area. I noticed as long as their target base was straight out (not crossing the other spawn points) I never had any clogging issues. But with 6 spawn areas they would get bogged down if they went left or right and tried to cross multiple areas. 4 would make it out, the other 2 had a high chance of causing a traffic jam.

[kyranzor]

It sounds like maybe you just had too much going on in that area.. 6 spawning assemblers is probably getting too dense. Because they spawn so fast, you might be better off just reducing the number of spawners.

If you want to try the 100% fire immune firebots, please get my current Development branch code from github (https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfact ... opment.zip) and replace the files in the robot army folder and change name of folder to be 0.2.1 instead of 0.2.0 (otherwise it won't launch).

Also, if you want to use the bots as an assault force for large bases, and don't mind being with them/nearby at the beginning of the assault, just load up your inventory and deploy your army as you see fit, nearby the biter base you want to steam-roll.

[MatthewGP]

I like the video of the firebots. However, the name... The name makes me think of something else...

Are you going to have the version of the firebot that has the fire extinguisher? The AI will be attracted to forest fire pollution and spray it down with fire suppressant. That would be hilarious. Impossible to make, but hilarious. You should make a mock video of One version coming behind the flame thrower bot and putting out the fire that is on the bug. Then a shot of the bug thanking it and asking why we just don't all get along.

[kyranzor]

The name is a "Firebat" joke. From Starcraft, for those who don't know.

There's a mod for fire extinguisher gun for player, and my all-round handy-man repair/construction droid will not only repair nearby damaged buildings/droids(specifically when in a squad with them) but will also put out nearby fires automatically. So yes this is a thing.

[Qon]

Code: Select all

Error while running event on_tick (ID 0)
LuaEntity belongs to surface nauvis (index 0) but a LuaEntity belonging to surface Inside factory 9320 (index 5) was expected.
stack traceback:
	__robotarmy__/robolib/Squad.lua:95: in function 'checkMembersAreInGroup'
	__robotarmy__/robolib/Squad.lua:230: in function 'sendSquadsToBattle'
	__robotarmy__/control.lua:449: in function 'onTickHandler'
	__robotarmy__/control.lua:587: in function <__robotarmy__/control.lua:586>

Got this immediatly after save load after updating to latest factorio version. Robot army 0.2.0.

[kyranzor]

If you use dev branch (0.2.1) does it have same error?

edit:
there are a few possible missing return-handling errors that could pop up but that particular one that is now generated should be fixed by the dev branch code. i'll be releasing 0.2.1 in about 6 hours officially for everyone so any last changes or bugs you guys can find for me with 0.13.14 would be super handy... i'm at work for another 2.5-3 hours so I can't do much till then.

[kyranzor]

0.2.1 is out! Copy-paste of the release info from first post:

Another amazing update to Robot Army! A slew of bugfixing, performance improvements, and new and exciting features come with this update. Interaction between Robot Army and the "surface" related mods like Factorissimo and others has a major fix in this update. New features include patrol poles, an in-game settings module to change things like squad size, the super hot "Firebot" is a new addition to the droid army, as a tanky flame-thrower robot.

The changelog.txt in the zip is actually a bit wrong in some cases, like SMG (battle) droid damage was actually increase and fire rate decreased a little, to make it scale better against big-biters. Various balance changes to the droids include adjustments to their resistances, increased fire resistance specifically to help avoid Firebot team-killing.

The FPS drop when spamming lots of droids by hand has been fixed, it's now ultra-smooth deployment for everyone!

To see updated information about the droid activity module see here: droid activity module
To see info about the new patrol system see here:patrol poles
To see info about the new settings module, see here: settings module
To see info about the new firebot, see the available droids page here: available droids


Here is the correct changelog (mistakes fixed post-upload..)
Changes from 0.2.0 to 0.2.1 release:
- scaled down droids size and collision boxes etc.
- added ai behaviour to bring back guard squads who wander too far from home (their station)
- increased counter signal count to 5, added count signals for each droid type.
- increased damage of SMG battle droids and decreased rate of fire slightly
- fixed rally point error when no squads in list
- added damage scalar to attack types for using the config properly (inspired by PetePete1984 on github)
- fixed global table for guardstations not being checked before trying to index when creating a new force (issue #42 on github by veden)
- added firebot entity and item, icon, and graphics
- optimised (removed redundant util calls) droid spawning procedure. doesn't cause lag spike when click-drag-spamming droids.
- fixed surface issues for finding targets, grabbing artifacts, and other surface-related activities
- updated Factorio Stdlib to v6.0 (https://github.com/Afforess/Factorio-St ... /tag/0.6.0)
- new default config for squad size being 10, and squad join range being 20 tiles.
- increased all droids fire resistances to deal with their hot friends
- added patrol pole, guard squads will patrol continuous stretches connected by GREEN wire.
- moved rally beacon, droid assembler, droid guard station, unlocked by military 1 (along with patrol pole)
- increased radius check for non-colliding locations for calls to getDroidSpawnLocation() and getGuardSpawnLocation()
- ensure unit_groups/squads cannot add new droids if they are not on the same surface
- added "surface" value for squad tables by default on creation
- added invalid/nil surface handling for squad table iterations
- added new settings module combinator, use this to set virtual signals as overrides for the default config.lua settings for squad hunt size, retreat size, hunt radius, guard squad size
- added new icons for the new virtual signals
- added firebot virtual signal for counting them in addition to all other droid types now being counted by the activity module with their own virtual signals.
- added German locale thanks to Mystery on the forums, plus some english to fill the gaps of new content locale
- added icon for patrol pole, settings module.
- updated icons for all droids to use their sprites, and undeployed item has grey background with black border.
- fixed possible crashes caused by being in a factorissimo building and then leaving.

[Rens2Sea]

0.2.1. instantly crashed my save game:

[Optera]

This is great, hop in a Satellite Uplink station and just watch them work, almost feels like CnC.
It would be nice if DroidActivityModules where to also return the constants.