Slow construction (bots)

[leoch]

One "issue" with construction bots is that they allow ridiculously fast construction (and destruction), e.g. clearing forest in seconds, building large solar plants very rapidly, and deploying electric poles + laser turrets quickly. At the same time there is still incentive to have many construction bots, e.g. to place a lot of concrete or brick tiles, but much of the time they sit doing nothing.

Suggestion: most structures should not build instantly, but require construction bots to hover overhead for a second, or maybe quite a few. Destruction/mining should take time the same as it does for the player, but probably slower.
[To compensate, possibly let the player use more than 10 personal construction bots.]

It might be interesting to make larger structures take a minute or even 10 minutes to build, but allow multiple bots to collaborate. At the same time, player builds would have to be made slow-ish; early construction bots or maybe some initial bots from the player or from a crash-site could be used to make the start less tedious.

[Ragnaman]

Could work for some sort of RTS spinoff/mod.

Main reason people try to get portable construction robots in their pocket is the ability to clear forests, build and deconstruct FAST.
However, getting access to construction robots early would be great, these bots could be really slow as you mention.

[ssilk]

I think this should be discussed in balancing, cause I don't see the game-value in this suggestion. But perhaps you have an good argument, so I keep it for now.


In my eyes, the construction bots are only fast, if the things you build are near. And this should keep so, cause this is the main advantage of construction bots. No! It's the advantage of all bots over every other movement-method: They work pretty fast in near surrounding, but become incredible slow, when things are a bit away.