Construction Robots Getting Destroyed in Friendly Fire

[Meehael]

Hey guys,

my construction robots are taking a lot of damage, even get killed by friendly fire from flamethrower turrets when defending on Nauvis, especially since the turrets are upgraded to +160% damage.

I'm using a simple defensive setup of a wall and flamethrower turret and roboport behind it. As soon as enemies attack, robots rush in and get scorched.

Do the surviving robots repair or heal themselves? Maybe over time in the roboport?

Thanks

[BlueTemplar]

They get (at least) repaired by other conbots. Which can cause mass conbot dieoffs in some situations...

Consider :
- using less flameturrets
- placing roboports as far from walls as possible
- not researching Refined flammables techs
- accepting inevitable conbot losses and just replacing them

[sushi_eater]

On a desert world with death world settings, I had something like 50 bots per minute getting destroyed by the flamethrowers, once behemoths showed up.

There are mods that make construction bots fire proof. Alternatively, you can switch to gun turrets. They got really heavily nerfed with 2.0, but with uranium ammo, they are still fine.

There is very, very little value in having a mix of flamethrowers and gun turrets. If you have enough turrets so that your defenses don't get damaged, you don't need the flamethrowers at all. All they do is cut down on ammo usage.

I don't mind replacing bots, but the constant alerts do get old and you may miss when there is an actual problem with your defenses.

[BlakeMW]

For this reason I don't research flammables upgrade, not beyond the first anyway.

Barely upgraded Flamethrowers + walls are effective until the late Behemoth Biter era, at that point you need to mix in laser/tesla/gun turrets to take down the Behemoths before they annihilate the walls. Up until then, barely upgraded Flamethrowers are perfectly adequate for destroying everything a maximized biters deathworld can throw at you.

You should know that Flamethrower turrets get the damage upgrades twice (because in the raws they use "virtual" flamethrower ammo, so get the bonus from it too!), this means when you have +160% flammables damage, you actually have +576% damage, this is why the bots die basically instantly.

Also, the Tank has flat fire resistance, making it highly resistant against flamethrowers, up until some threshold where the fire damage per tick is higher than the Tank's flat resistance, then the tank dies much more quickly to "friendly fire".

Unfortunately what has been researched cannot be unresearched. You might consider using a wall of laser turrets to just melt the biters with impunity.

[IsaacOscar]

Hmm, if you're feeling like spending ages on this,
you could use the circuit network:

• have a tank of oil for the flamethrowers, connect it to a power switch and make it turn off when the tank isn't full.
• have the power switch connect between your main electric network, and a single power pole
• have said power pole be the only one in range of a roboport that gives coverage to the area with the flamethrower.

Then your roboport will deactivate when the flamethrower is working, and so no robots will be sent out! (robots that are already nearby though might still die...)

You might need to do some more trickery with a pump to ensue the oil tank doesn't fill up faster than the flamethrowers drain it.

[Tertius]

What is it that needs repair, and is engulfed in flames from the flamethrower turrets?
Also, flamethrower turrets alone are not sufficient, since they have a minimum distance, so they need support from other turrets such as laser or gun turrets to finish off the nearest enemies.

My defensive wall setup looks like this:
- continuous wall with thin dragon teeth reaching out, so biters are slowed down while they approach
- 1 tile space behind wall
- row of laser turrets, spaced with alternating 2 and 4 tile gap. Optionally fill the gaps with turrets on frequently/heavily attacked wall segments.
- row of flamethrower turrets directly behind the laser turrets, spaced with the maximum distance of the underground pipe
- row of roboports directly behind the flamethrower turrets, spaced with their 50 tile maximum range

There is usually just the laser turrets that get damage, it's from the spitters. The wall itself rarely gets damage due to the dragon teeth slowdown, flamethrower pushback and finishing by the laser turrets.
Loss of construction bots from damage is minimal. Once in a while one or two are lost, but no continuous loss.

[BlueTemplar]

On a desert world with death world settings, I had something like 50 bots per minute getting destroyed by the flamethrowers, once behemoths showed up.

There are mods that make construction bots fire proof. Alternatively, you can switch to gun turrets. They got really heavily nerfed with 2.0, but with uranium ammo, they are still fine.

There is very, very little value in having a mix of flamethrowers and gun turrets. If you have enough turrets so that your defenses don't get damaged, you don't need the flamethrowers at all. All they do is cut down on ammo usage.

I don't mind replacing bots, but the constant alerts do get old and you may miss when there is an actual problem with your defenses.

Also, flamethrower turrets alone are not sufficient, since they have a minimum distance, so they need support from other turrets such as laser or gun turrets to finish off the nearest enemies.

Flamethrower turrets with no upgrades and placed as sparsely as possible are much more than sufficient even on DeathWorld, even on 99%+ evolution. (Maybe throw a single laser turret as a backup (out of range of walls) where flame turrets get killed frequently. Or just use thicker walls.)

The actual problem with your defenses here might be that you're letting your pollution outside of your perimeter wall.
(And that you place flame turrets so close to walls they cannot fire on enemies attacking them if that's what you meant here ? Otherwise biters tend to take quite a lot of lingering damage from fire, so even that single backup laser turret might not be needed.)

But that tactic comes with tradeoffs (also you'll get alert spam even if no bots, only walls are destroyed), so it might not be the right one for you. So I guess the blame is on me for not asking about what tactic OP used.

----

Disabling roboports temporarily sounds like a great tactic too, thanks for the idea !

[sushi_eater]

The actual problem with your defenses here might be that you're letting your pollution outside of your perimeter wall.
(And that you place flame turrets so close to walls they cannot fire on enemies attacking them if that's what you meant here ? Otherwise biters tend to take quite a lot of lingering damage from fire, so even that single backup laser turret might not be needed.)

That was a deliberately eco-unfriendly run on a desert map with no trees and almost all the pollution got converted into biters (when I switched to gun turrets, I used a blue belt worth of uranium ammo). The problem is that behemoths start damaging stuff and take a while to die (and the flamethrowers take a while to properly target them), often times long enough for bots starting repairs and getting. Setting back roboports from the perimeter doesn't help, when you have a decent amount of bot speed research.

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried. Gun turrets have enough DPS to prevent damage in the first place.

BTW, I have experimented with "disabling" roboports by disconnecting power. When you have constant attacks it simply doesn't work. There is a huge internal battery and it takes quite a while for roboports to run out of power. There are other kludges like temporarily removing repair packs. IME, none of that stuff works well enough to prevent alert spam.

Let me be very clear, there was no threat whatsoever from the biters and no turrets or walls got destroyed. Spitters sometimes take out pipes, but there is enough buffering that it doesn't matter. You don't need particularly redundant oil connections, a perimeter ring which can feed from both sides is perfectly sufficient.

If you have enough other defenses so that the walls don't get covered by bot-killing flamethrower fire (within the minimum targeting distance), you don't need the flamethrowers in the first place (beyond cutting down on ammo usage).

[Tertius]

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried.

If this happens for you, your dragon teeth are not properly designed. You need enough space for biters actually getting through, and you must not create too long detours.

This is my approach, and with this the wall pieces are almost never damaged. Rarely a spitter chooses to attack the outer wall for some reason, but the biters stall at getting through the hole in the outer wall and bump on the single pieces within, and they're usually dead before they actually reach the inner wall. The outer wall segments must not be longer than shown in the screenshot, otherwise biters will begin to bite through it. As it is here, they choose to walk to a hole and never attack the outer wall or the single pieces within, since there is always a path with a too short detour to turn into attack mode.

Screenshot 2024-09-02 123744.png (558.08 KiB) Viewed 355 times

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, extreme game settings would call for extreme solutions...
(But if you aren't using flamethrowers, is it even on topic ??)

Oh yeah, flat walls work much better for this.
(EDIT : I haven't experimented much with dragon teeth with the exception of the basic «remove half of the walls in an X pattern» one.)
(And forcing even spitters to attack the walls rather than turrets is kind of the goal in this tactic. Which they only do once they are right next to the wall, since they can't get in range to fire on a turret without breaching the wall, even for the behemoth spitters.)

Yeah, now I think I remember holding up on researching bot speed because of this in my previous game ?
(Which had higher tier bots and flammables available, but conbots were much more fragile than the (disabled) vanilla ones. Though really I mostly used personal roboport repairs, running the length of the wall once in a while, with only a small fraction of it covered by roboports.)
I'll have to keep it in mind for my current game, thanks.

[sushi_eater]

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried.

If this happens for you, your dragon teeth are not properly designed. You need enough space for biters actually getting through, and you must not create too long detours.

This is my approach, and with this the wall pieces are almost never damaged.

I don't see any behemoths in your your screenshot and a TINY amount of corpses. I can tell you right now that the incoming biter threat/stream I faced was 100x larger.

You have a TINY sprinkle of laser turrets. A solid double layer of laser turrets would have zero befit for me - the DPS is absolutely pathetic, even with generous amounts of infinite research.

I have built defenses with literally 10x the amount of laser turrets.

[sushi_eater]

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried.

If this happens for you, your dragon teeth are not properly designed. You need enough space for biters actually getting through, and you must not create too long detours.

This is my approach, and with this the wall pieces are almost never damaged.

I don't see any behemoths in your your screenshot and a TINY amount of corpses. I can tell you right now that the incoming biter threat/stream I faced was 100x larger.

You have a TINY sprinkle of laser turrets. A solid double layer of laser turrets would have zero befit for me - the DPS is absolutely pathetic, even with generous amounts of infinite research.

I have built defenses with literally 40x the amount of laser turrets.

[sushi_eater]

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried.

If this happens for you, your dragon teeth are not properly designed. You need enough space for biters actually getting through, and you must not create too long detours.

This is my approach, and with this the wall pieces are almost never damaged.

I don't see any behemoths in your your screenshot and a TINY amount of corpses. I can tell you right now that the incoming biter threat/stream I faced was 100x larger.

You have a TINY sprinkle of laser turrets. A solid double layer of laser turrets would have zero benefit for me - the DPS is absolutely pathetic, even with generous amounts of infinite research.

I have built defenses with literally 40x the amount of laser turrets.

[sushi_eater]

IME, dragon teeth aren't helpful in preventing bot deaths. Quite the opposite actually. The biters happily attack and damage wall pieces, when they run into them - causing repairs and bots getting fried.

If this happens for you, your dragon teeth are not properly designed. You need enough space for biters actually getting through, and you must not create too long detours.

This is my approach, and with this the wall pieces are almost never damaged.

I don't see any behemoths in your your screenshot and a TINY amount of corpses. I can tell you right now that the incoming biter threat/stream I faced was 100x larger.

You have a TINY sprinkle of laser turrets. A solid double layer of laser turrets would have zero benefit for me - the DPS is absolutely pathetic, even with generous amounts of infinite research.

I have built defenses with literally 10x the amount of laser turrets. They absolutely can hold the line - dragon teeth or not. They absolutely can't do it without a a constant stream of damage. Large amounts of biters will attack absolutely everything. No offense, but from your screenshot it appears that you are playing on easy settings.

Default settings with default moisture and trees is extremely easy. At the same time, getting to zero "false" positive entity destroyed alerts is extremely challenging.

[BlueTemplar]

Quoteception incoming, take cover !!

P.S.: Looks like something from default settings to me, and OP didn't say anything about extreme biter settings...

[sushi_eater]

Quoteception incoming, take cover !!

P.S.: Looks like something from default settings to me, and OP didn't say anything about extreme biter settings...

The thing is, even with default settings, avoiding a constant stream of alerts is extremely challenging and pretty much outright impossible with flamethrowers.
Showing defenses without behemoth biters is completely pointless.
"Gimmick" defenses like landmines are insanely overpowered against lower level biters, while completely failing against spitter biters that can't be one-shot. The "benefit" of stunning biters makes landmines pretty much useless against behemoth biters. The briefly stunned biters will attack/shoot down the bots trying to replace mines.

With flamethrowers, you are either willing to deal with the constant alerts or choose something else. With something lucky (good amount of trees) default settings, the only viable alternative is gun turrets. With 2.0 uranium ammo is pretty much required.

[BlueTemplar]

OP also didn't say anything about alerts, and you're the first to mention landmines in the discussion
(which I guess might also pair well with flamethrowers as long as they're placed outside any flamethrower range ? or maybe even just close enough to stun behemoths while they're still standing in the flame range ?)

(OP might also never get far enough in the game that they have to deal with behemoths, though behemoth-proof defenses are of course better.)

Being «willing to deal with the constant alerts» is a viable option too, especially long before behemoths show up, especially as long as you haven't visited Gleba yet.
Robots dying by flying over worms is in my experience a worse issue here (but also with several solutions).

And alerts should be fixed by allowing players to configure them, rather than being bothered by tiny losses. (Note that the situation used to be even worse : an alert when a wall is damaged.)

What changed in 2.0 ? Gleba ?

[Tertius]

I don't see any behemoths in your your screenshot and a TINY amount of corpses. I can tell you right now that the incoming biter threat/stream I faced was 100x larger.

You have a TINY sprinkle of laser turrets. A solid double layer of laser turrets would have zero befit for me - the DPS is absolutely pathetic, even with generous amounts of infinite research.

I have built defenses with literally 10x the amount of laser turrets.

Did you include flamethrower turrets? These are what do the real damage. The lasers are just for finishing off the biters that get too near too fast. Lasers alone are not sufficient.
I used this wall with my 1.1 late game base, where behemoths were quite common (evolution near 1). It's capable to defend against any enemy waves arising from the increased artillery range after each infinite research. There is a bit of damage in this case, but it's never overrun. The occasional patrol pulled by pollution doesn't do damage to the wall. Once in a while a laser turret or a wall piece or a construction bot is destroyed, but nothing that isn't replaced asap. At choke points closing the gaps in the laser turret line helps, but having these along the whole wall would be a waste.

The screenshot is from early game, so no bigger enemies. Unfortunately, I'm unable to provide a video from that 1.1 base any more. My current Space Age base isn't at this stage yet.

[Meehael]

Hey guys,

I'm playing on Default and am at 0.93 evolution on Nauvis at the moment.

Defenses hold on, that's not a general problem. Turrets make short work of behemoths. Maybe once in 10 waves a wall gets destroyed, but robots replace it quickly (I'm using double walls).

Also, my perimeter is outside pollution cloud.

The problem is, while robots are repairing the walls, they sometimes get killed by flamethrowers and I was wondering if they survived the fire, do they heal at the robotport?

I've noticed sometimes robots repair other robots, but only if they manage to do so before the damaged robot rushes back into a roboport (it doesn't wait to get repaired).

Thx

[BlueTemplar]

I don't see any damaged bots in my roboports, I'll try to pay attention as to how exactly they all got repaired.