Are bots really short range thing?

[Avezo]

Since they always recharge after finishing the job, doesn't it make long-range transport the same as multiple short-range deliveries? I mean, it would take the same amount of electricity for a bot to make one 10km trip as making 1000 1m trips.

BUT. Over certain distance, when bots run out of power, the transport becomes basically energy-free, they don't drop below zero. Sure they get much slower, but that's easy to overcome with large amount of bots, which makes using bots over larger distances more energy-efficient than using them at shorter routes.

This seems weird given how devs claimed bots are meant to be short-distance thing, so I wonder did I miss something here?

[Hannu]

You can use bots on infinitely long distances like you have noticed. However, their throughput will be low and flight time very long which makes them very impractical and expensive compared to transport methods intended for longer distances.

[SHiRKiT]

Since they always recharge after finishing the job, doesn't it make long-range transport the same as multiple short-range deliveries? I mean, it would take the same amount of electricity for a bot to make one 10km trip as making 1000 1m trips.

BUT. Over certain distance, when bots run out of power, the transport becomes basically energy-free, they don't drop below zero. Sure they get much slower, but that's easy to overcome with large amount of bots, which makes using bots over larger distances more energy-efficient than using them at shorter routes.

This seems weird given how devs claimed bots are meant to be short-distance thing, so I wonder did I miss something here?

Bots in older versions (0.9 and earlier I think) used to get destroyed when they run out of energy, but since their AI is dumb (for performance reasons), this was removed and they just drop to REALLY LOW speeds, and you've seen. Although you could indeed exploit that, they are incredibly slow compared to anything, even to transport belts. Over 10.000 tiles, one single train can outperform prolly over 100.000 robots in that distance, at a almost no fuel cost, just infrastructure, which should be 0.01% of that compared to build 100k robots. So yeah, in theory they are "free", but in pratice, you'll run out of memory and processing speed for the game to run with MILLIONS of robots doing the job that 20 trains or less could do.

[Mehve]

Some problems with the free energy idea:

1) Bots don't operate outside of their roboport network's range. In order to gets the bots to cross a large enough distance to get them to run out of energy and start flying slowly for free, you'd need a massive number of linked roboports stretching from one end of the journey to the other, to establish a single roboport network. These roboports that would be candidates for the bots to recharge themselves with, so the bots would automatically dock at the nearest candidate en-route, no matter what you might want, and wait in line indefinitely until they have a chance to recharge. Which would prevent the bots from ever flying energy-free. This is why the vast majority of limping bots you see come from your personal roboport, because you cam move and throw them off their recharging calculations.

2) Even if the first point wasn't an issue, there's a huge difference in the bots' "energized" speed and their "limp-home" speed, to the point where you'd need massive amounts of bots to compensate and maintain material throughput. The number of bots necessary to properly exploit this "free energy" represents an amount of resources that could be better applied to just adding some more solar panels, which would offer free energy indefinitely, while letting you keep the faster energized bots.

3) The response time from when the network request was put in, to when the requested item actually arrives would be MASSIVE. You couldn't get anything done in a time-sensitive matter.

[Avezo]

I agree that bots are ineffective when comapred to other ways of transport, but when you compare just short-range bots and long-range bots, it kinda surprising that long range bots seem better.

[ssilk]

Here is a comparison for the different type of transports: https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport/Wha ... ch_case%3F

[aober93]

I agree that bots are ineffective when comapred to other ways of transport, but when you compare just short-range bots and long-range bots, it kinda surprising that long range bots seem better.

WTF are you talking about?

[GoldenPorkchop80]

I agree that bots are ineffective when comapred to other ways of transport, but when you compare just short-range bots and long-range bots, it kinda surprising that long range bots seem better.

WTF are you talking about?

I think what he is trying to say, mein frerf, is that long-range bots are the construction bots, and the short-range bots are logistic bots.

[aober93]

I rather think he's saying short range bots are those that will recharge, and long range bots are those that dont recharge. Weird but true

[GoldenPorkchop80]

I rather think he's saying short range bots are those that will recharge, and long range bots are those that dont recharge. Weird but true

Currently, all logistic robots and construction bots HAVE to recharge. If they don't, they'll move at 1/3rd of their original speed.

Capsule drones, however, don't need to recharge, since they self-destruct after a set amount of time.

However, if there were any new types of drones added to the game, please feel free to correct me. The last time I could actually play the game was July of this year.