Construction Robots Getting Destroyed in Friendly Fire

[IsaacOscar]

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

I believe other bots repair them with repair packs

[BlueTemplar]

Once inside the roboport too ?

Thinking of it, I don't remember having damaged personal conbots in personal inventory either, maybe it's like with their (personal) charge getting replenished for free : they immediately get repaired when picked up or arriving in the roboport (even if no packs present) ?

[IsaacOscar]

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.)

Theres an /alerts console command (that doesn't disable achievements) whichtyou might find useful https://wiki.factorio.com/Console

[BlueTemplar]

Oh wow, thank you so much for this, why did nobody seem to have mention it in the many alert threads ?!
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=16566

[BraveCaperCat]

Bots have always succumbed to flamethrowers, friendly fire doesn't matter. The only way to fix it is with mods, if you don't like this feature/bug, please use mods.

[IsaacOscar]

Oh wow, thank you so much for this, why did nobody seem to have mention it in the many alert threads ?!
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=16566

You're welcome, but I expect most players would want more frequent or more visible alerts, and that command doesn't help with that (e.g. Id like to get notified of low power or mining drills getting depleted, but I've managed to use the circuit network for those).

Muting the alerts for things getting damaged/destroyed though seems like an incredibly dangerous idea...

[BlueTemplar]

We're talking about combat here. You've just seen people declaring flame turrets to be «non-viable» because using them causes too many ('fake') alerts.

That combat alerts situations are very hard to link to the circuit network is one of the main issues here :
ideally we would also have some kind of enemy detection system (by radars ?) that could be plugged into the circuit network, like some mods allow us to. Also maybe pollution detection.

Muting the alerts for things getting damaged/destroyed though seems like an incredibly dangerous idea...

You've (hopefully) seen my use case in the thread that I linked to before :
viewtopic.php?p=636188#p636188
I would only get warned when the situation is (probably) demanding my attention (a turret was lost). Heck, you could probably do this for much more fragile setups that regularly lose turrets (but for which that's not a big deal), and only set it up to get warned when a tactically placed warning radar is destroyed (since they're biter magnets too).
(Now that I think of it, you can probably already set it up without commands, by watching the energy level of an accumulator (behind dedicated walls, to be safe) linked to a radar ?)

But yes, even for combat, some players would want to set it up so that even damage to walls still makes a warning :
Need Audible Alerts Mod

Bots have always succumbed to flamethrowers, friendly fire doesn't matter. The only way to fix it is with mods, if you don't like this feature/bug, please use mods.

Depending how you set it up, it can make the difference of conbots dying in droves, or just barely.

Oh, another thing that minimizes robot deaths (once your base is relatively big enough to not care about a few of those) is to automate it to only make conbots when no available ones are left, and only have a minimal buffer on a single flying robot frame machine feeding into that (it's a very slow recipe).
(Or any other system that means there are hardly enough conbots to do the repairs locally, so most of them will have to come from much further away, at which point the flames will be long gone and biters, if you didn't undersize your defenses, long dead.)