Bot Balance Idea - Beacon Interference

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SentientBot

Bot Balance Idea - Beacon Interference

Post by SentientBot »

TL;DR
Help balance belts in the late game by providing a conflict between two key late game techs, beacons and logistic bots

What ?
The general idea would be to cause a failure or penalty for a bot entering the area impacted by beacons. This could be done in a number of different ways depending on the type of solutions you want to encourage. It can be trivially worked around in the modding community by adding a module that could be placed in a beacon to prevent the negative interaction.

Some ideas:
* A logistic bot can not enter any tile that is currently in a Beacon's influence
----- Forces a factory builder to decide between the power of bots or beacons for different parts of their factories, makes Roboport placements more interesting
* A bot crashes (and is destroyed) when it enters the range of a beacon's influence
----- Penalizes a lack of planning and generates potential bot drains forcing the reconstruction of bots while debugging
* A bot fully drains of power when it enters the range of a beacon's influence
----- May not change things enough as bot scaling would still compensate for it.
Why ?
Based on the Friday Blog, it looked like brainstorming ideas and ways to keep belts viable and for there to be more choices and fewer individual solutions in end game would benefit end game decision making. As both beacons and logistic bots are core late game components, conflict between those two seem to generate a lot of interesting decision points and would make interesting "transition areas" for moving from bots back to belts and back again.

[Koub] Merged into the main discussion so that all ideas are at the same place instead of spread out amoingts tens of topics.
[Koub] [Edit] On author's request, moved back to Ideas and suggestions.
Last edited by Koub on Sat Jan 06, 2018 5:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

CJ5Boss
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Re: Bot Balance Idea - Beacon Interference

Post by CJ5Boss »

It's a good start, but I don't think I would like seeing that in the game, and here is why:
Bots take the shortest distance between two points when going to a chest. If there were to be a beacon in the way, the bots would immediately be destroyed, causing you to have to be on the side with the bots across the beacon to prevent this. I think it would make gameplay a bit annoying.

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