[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[kyranzor]

Great mod, should make the most (and only, really) tedious part of the game automatable, like the rest of it.

However, we're currently playing with Bob's enemies, and are having troubles with explosive spitters and worms absolutely destroying the robot armies.
Other types of enemies (anything but explosive) don't pose nearly as much a threat.
We haven't built any Terminators yet, though.

Is this mod supposed to be 'balanced' with Bob's Enemies, and Terminators will solve this issue,
or are the enemies in that mod just too strong for the robots?

There is no real 'balancing' in the mod. The default balance is pretty reasonable for vanilla enemies and costs and scale with technology vs "expected" biter evolution. The problem is, every person's situation is different and eventually either the biter % evolution and difficulty gets too hard for the robots, or the robots totally destroy everything and have no problem. IT is a little bit of a self-limiting system, because if your robots are going out and destroying everything then biter evo % goes up very quickly and soon the biters will start winning battles.

Bob's enemies DEFINITELY make it harder, especially as you say the special enemies attacks which the robots are weak against (less resistance to damage types).

Try using more Rocket Droids to land one-hit-kills as much as you can. Otherwise, if you want to you can go into the mod folder "config" and edit the config.lua file, and make the "HEALTH SCALAR" and "DAMAGE SCALAR" to bigger numbers than 1.0. For example, 1.5 in health and damage will make them 50% more health and 50% more damage (base damage, no upgrades).

[Parmsib]

Great mod, should make the most (and only, really) tedious part of the game automatable, like the rest of it.

However, we're currently playing with Bob's enemies, and are having troubles with explosive spitters and worms absolutely destroying the robot armies.
Other types of enemies (anything but explosive) don't pose nearly as much a threat.
We haven't built any Terminators yet, though.

Is this mod supposed to be 'balanced' with Bob's Enemies, and Terminators will solve this issue,
or are the enemies in that mod just too strong for the robots?

There is no real 'balancing' in the mod. The default balance is pretty reasonable for vanilla enemies and costs and scale with technology vs "expected" biter evolution. The problem is, every person's situation is different and eventually either the biter % evolution and difficulty gets too hard for the robots, or the robots totally destroy everything and have no problem. IT is a little bit of a self-limiting system, because if your robots are going out and destroying everything then biter evo % goes up very quickly and soon the biters will start winning battles.

Bob's enemies DEFINITELY make it harder, especially as you say the special enemies attacks which the robots are weak against (less resistance to damage types).

Try using more Rocket Droids to land one-hit-kills as much as you can. Otherwise, if you want to you can go into the mod folder "config" and edit the config.lua file, and make the "HEALTH SCALAR" and "DAMAGE SCALAR" to bigger numbers than 1.0. For example, 1.5 in health and damage will make them 50% more health and 50% more damage (base damage, no upgrades).

Okay, will try that. Thanks!

[Zemekis]

I have a question regarding droid count: Is it possible to also count local squad sizes instead of the global droid count?

Reason: I want to advance on 4 fronts (north, south, east west) individually. I have hence 4 Droid Assemblers in each direction. I want to replace destroyed droids for a specific assembler so when survivors return, the squad is ready to go hunting again. A global count could produce new droids in any of the 4 assemblers randomly.

[thaflya]

Does this mod work in 0.17? If not, is there any chance it will be updated?

This is one of the most important mods for me, would be sad if it is dead.

[brokenshakles]

This seems interesting, would be a nice compliment to AAI if compatible. I too vote for a 0.17 update.

[kyranzor]

I will be updating the mod to work with 0.17 as soon as I can, I'm on holiday and don't have very good internet connection in rural Australia right now but I should be able to make some progress (starting with actually getting 0.17 installed) on Sunday.

[kyranzor]

Alright everyone,

I have just put a version 0.4.0 up on the mod portal for those of you who want the mod to work without any significant changes for 0.17.

This will tide you over until I have some more time to make the improvements I want to for 0.17 now that I have lots of nice juicy new unit AI options and some minor gameplay mechanic changes to how Robot Army works.

The only changes for this version from 0.3.8 are:
- the robot counter and settings modules are now unlocked with military 1 tech, rather than Electronics.

The rest of the code changes were small and were just changed names or removing un-used flags for 0.17.

[brokenshakles]

Neat! I look forward to using this, but I would recommend you consider integration/compatibility with Advanced Autonomous Industries (If that guy ever comes back and updates his stuff) since it offers a way to control the robot-armies RTS style (Auto-hunt-kill is not really my style, I want to command). Not to mention some additional craftables that can be used to make building minions more challenging/interesting.

[kyranzor]

Neat! I look forward to using this, but I would recommend you consider integration/compatibility with Advanced Autonomous Industries (If that guy ever comes back and updates his stuff) since it offers a way to control the robot-armies RTS style (Auto-hunt-kill is not really my style, I want to command). Not to mention some additional craftables that can be used to make building minions more challenging/interesting.

I will not do AAI integration, it's too much work.

If you don't like automatic hunting and killing then set hunt radius to 1 with the settings module.

You can select and command your squads with the droid selection tool. You can even command them from the map view (once zoomed in enough to see the world view)

[brokenshakles]

Ah, well the selection tool was the bit I really cared about anyway (alongside alternate cost for producing them, but that is a truly minor point) so it should be just as good.

[kyranzor]

Mod has been updated to 0.4.1:

changes from 0.4.0 to 0.4.1:
- Adding Unit Control as an optional dependency for the mod - if detected as active, it disables the automatic squad control so the player has full freedom to command the units with the Unit Control mod GUI and tool instead.
- disabled the acid fire per-tick damage from worms and spitters, to help restore balance. it was too OP.
- fixed script error (needs confirmation) when deselecting a squad after some time has passed
- fixed script error trying to spawn/change units to an enemy force (needs confirmation) - they will be killed if they try to join a lua unitgroup whose force isn't the same as theirs. This is a temporary fix.
need better way of handling squads anyway, need to think about this case while doing that code re-work.
- bug fix for when trying to pick up droids with the pickup tool, if your inventory is full they were disappearing (no items returned, but droids removed).

Please get it from the mod portal. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/robotarmy/downloads

[Qon]

I installed Unit Control immediately when I heard it was going to be used, in anticipation of this patch

[Qon]

Unit Control is Active! Please use Unit Control selection and command method. Automated behaviour disabled.

Does that mean that I can't have them automatically hunt down nests any more? Not sure how Unit Control works and there's no documentation on Unit Control on Klonan's page or on the RA wiki page. I like being able to easily manually order them around, but I don't want to lose the ability to have them going on a murder spree without me having to do anything.

[kyranzor]

Yes, you are right, the squad AI and automatic hunting is turned off when Unit Control mod is used. If you are okay with using the Robot Army selection tool for commanding squads and want the automatic hunting then you should disable the Unit Control mod.

At least until I get a better way of integration.

I can try to make a simple tutorial on how the Unit Control mod works to help people, it is a bit hard at first to get it going and you are right, there's hardly any documentation by Klonan on actual usage.

[Klonan]

Not sure how Unit Control works and there's no documentation on Unit Control on Klonan's page

I have added some documentation now:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Unit_Control/faq

[Qon]

Thank you Klonan

[kyranzor]

Not sure how Unit Control works and there's no documentation on Unit Control on Klonan's page

I have added some documentation now:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Unit_Control/faq

haha wow, thanks Klonan!

[RickJS]

The Droid Settings Module doesn't seem to be working. I put it right next to my only Droid Guard Station, and pretty near my only Droid assembler. I set the Guard Squad Size to 20, set the recipe to Rocket Droids, set up a patrol path, and put 11 Rocket Droids I the upper left slot of the Droid Guard Station. The droids are produced, and appear on the landscape. In their characteristically derpy way, they patrol, apparently regarding the patrol path as a weak suggestion.

When I hold the Droid Squad Command Tool and click on a droid, I am told the number of the squad and the number of droids in it, which is always 1, 2, or 3.

I am hosting multiplayer, but no other players were online when this test was done.

What do you suppose I may need to do?

Thanks!

[kyranzor]

The Droid Settings Module doesn't seem to be working. I put it right next to my only Droid Guard Station, and pretty near my only Droid assembler. I set the Guard Squad Size to 20, set the recipe to Rocket Droids, set up a patrol path, and put 11 Rocket Droids I the upper left slot of the Droid Guard Station. The droids are produced, and appear on the landscape. In their characteristically derpy way, they patrol, apparently regarding the patrol path as a weak suggestion.

When I hold the Droid Squad Command Tool and click on a droid, I am told the number of the squad and the number of droids in it, which is always 1, 2, or 3.

I am hosting multiplayer, but no other players were online when this test was done.

What do you suppose I may need to do?

Thanks!

Hello!

The patrol logic is not really finished, which causes some strange behaviours like what you are seeing. As the squad is spawned they don't wait for the maximum squad size before starting the patrol, so what happens is the patrolling squad gets out of range as new ones spawn, and the new guy starts his own squad and then starts patrolling too, so the squads get strung out into smaller groups like you've noticed.

The patrol pathing is rather derpy, yes

Honestly the way Klonan implemented patrolling with his Unit Control mod might be worth investigating if you REALLY want patrols - otherwise you will learn how to work around the clunky patrol mechanism in my mod. The benefit of my mod (if you can call it that) is that the guard station will refresh the dead units and they will automatically keep patrolling, whereas if your patrolling units die with the Unit Control mod, they will not be automatically replenished, unless you use the cheeky technique of selecting the Guard Post and assigning a patrol command to all units which come out of it, but then you can't keep track of how many are spawned easily.

[kyranzor]

With the guard station and with Unit Control mod, use the "select deployers" tool and select the guard station, and using the Patrol waypoint option hold shift and left click the patrol route you want. It will show up as dotted light blue lines between each point. Then any droid which spawns from that building will immediately follow it (again, it won't wait for its squad). It will be far more direct and accurate in patrol paths.

see below for an enhanced image to show it working.

Capture_patrol.jpg (513.66 KiB) Viewed 7474 times

You would use this method instead of the Patrol Posts. The normally idle guards will do this patrol route. The guard station will however continue to spawn more units until the amount of units 'nearby' is approximately the guard station squad size value set in the settings module.

Note the settings module is a global item, its settings affect every droid assembler and guard station.

In the v5.0 I have on github there are some huge changes, one major one is that guard stations are basically unnecessary as the droid assembler can be used more dynamically to act like one. Each droid assembler can now be wire-connected to its own settings module, and the settings only modify the behaviour of the connected droid assembler. Also the droid assembler now monitors its own squad, and there are no 'squads' like in the old versions of the mod.

with the new control method and features, you can plop down a set of assemblers configured with circuit conditions as "defensive" ones, or "offensive ones" and adjust squad sizes and using the counter to control inserters you can control droid deployment ratios.

The new droid assemblers are just smart chests too, no need to set recipes.