Roboport Radar

[golfmiketango]

I realize there are tons of broader proposals about bots and so-forth acting as radars, and the foregoing is no doubt as a subset of these existing proposals. However the scope of this idea is smaller. I thought it was worth considering in isolation. That stated, if mods feel like this post is redundant or needs to go elsewhere I promise not to make a big stink about it.

Proposal is: Roboports should act as radars with a range equal to the construction area. The reason is simple: otherwise we get feedback from the robotic network (if necessary, reflected on the map, if not, implicitly reflected on the map by their absence) that does not comport with the corresponding fog-of-war coverage area, which makes no sense.

To wit: the map is not really an in-game object but an RL-facing interface. We know this because the map provides data that no single entity in the game could aggregate together, and is available even before we can build an underground belt... Therefore, it does not make sense for the fog-of-war to ever deprive the player of information which is available by other means. For example: a bunch of warning icons saying, "not enough material to build solar panels" tells the player exactly what is where on the map, but yet, the map simultaneously attempts to deprive us of the information it already gave us as punishment for our deficient radar coverage.

A discrepancy between radar coverage-mediated map-generation updates and robotic network-mediated warning updates would make sense if the map were something the in-game character was looking at by, say, using a "map object" he has to put in his power armor. But it isn't; the map is a meatspace construct. If the game engine already told the player what is where on the map, fog of war is not applicable to that location or really oughtn't be, sort-of by the normal definition/concept of fog-of-war. Since this conflict is hard to resolve technocratically, i.e., by means of "fog-of-war-information-leak-tracking" or some fancy device, I propose to just make it impossible. This would also make radars a lot less annoying; it would move them from "all over the damn place" inside our bases to the boundaries between robotic networks and unclaimed territory. By the time any sort of "balancing" difference exists between the requirements of the two, building and powering radars has typically become pretty trivial anyhow, leaving only a rote chore of spewing them all over via blueprint.