Factorio Forums

Too true.and you don't see, when you loose one...

I had in this moment the idea, that this kind of routing must be researched first.
Something like "intelligent robot routing":
- a robot takes the direct way only, if his accus are full (more than 90%).
- otherwise he takes a route, which leads him over roboports.
- the next tier of this research would be: if the roboports on the route are heavy loaded (the sum of all queues thru the ports is > some number) then try choosing another route.

As result this should happen:
- some bots go directly, because they are loaded
- some go first on a short route over the ports, until they load and then go directly
- some will choose a route around the heavy crowds. They will also go directly, when loaded.

That should spread the bots all around the ports and if this gets long queues at the ports, then the player hasn't understand how to use them. And you can also cheat that system out by making a robotic network bigger, than a bot can fly with one load.

Balthazar wrote:Theres another problem i forgot to mention; when you're trying to connect miners you end up having to cover every possible path the drones can take or you'll lose drones when they fly outside the net. For example a setup like this:

A - - - - B - - - - C
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D
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E - - - - F - - - - G

Will lose drones if they travel from G to C because they cannot recharge in the area thats not covered by roboports. Your suggestion would fix this and make it much easier to have a branching structure to remote mines without covering the entire map in a massive grid

This is something we originally wanted to do - the robots would plan the path within the network only "within the span of the network". Though there was no time in the end. It will come in the future (just put it on our internal todo list).

There's a very simple way to fix robots dying while waiting for a recharge slot, while making them slightly less "realistic": make them not use power while waiting.

That would prefer players, which use too much bots. They can handle unloading trains with much less roboports.

Hm. But might be a good idea: if a bot in a queue can see, that he won't come to charger in time, he lands in the Roboport, uncharged. Uncharged bots take an extra slot. They come out only, if there is no queue anymore. If there are no stacks in the port, they are lost.

Frankly this still wont help from loosing bots that decide to travel from one branch to the other as shown before.

Also i don't think I've seen bots die waiting for queue often enough and I do use a lot of bots with variable amounts of roboports. Usually they experience a large queue surge in the beginning, which evens out over time. In this regard storing bots might be actually worse due to additional time wasted at going in\coming out.

If a player has too many bots, they won't gain throughput from the extra bots, because they'll all be waiting to recharge.

And the branch problem is a different problem entirely.

The idea behind it, is to take out the bots, which are too much. This is, because my measurements show for example, that a single roboport is not able to hold more than around 75 bots in the air. Under ideal circumstances! So I can't recommend to use more than 50-60 bots per port ATM.

But, well, the "go inside and wait"-idea is not the best.

Hmm. As I wrote anywhere else, before we change it, I currently think, that we need more data, to be sure, that this is really a problem and what can be done. Better knowing that means, that I have more statistics, or more time for such experiments.

I think a good solution to the problem of suicidal robots is just to make them run at 1/5th speed instead of dying. Pretend they have a solar panel on top or something, but without battery charge run much slower. ;p

A use for portable solar panels and how great they are, I joke. Still it would make sense, that or a mass robot recharger that does so but at a slower rate but can hold more robots to charge at once, instead of 4

liq3 wrote:I think a good solution to the problem of suicidal robots is just to make them run at 1/5th speed instead of dying. Pretend they have a solar panel on top or something, but without battery charge run much slower. ;p

I was once the same opinion, but they fly around. Not enough energy and they need to land. There is no slow flight, no slow propeller, either they fly or not.
But well. Maybe they have really a small solar panel and can load the accu again... But that takes quite a while, one day or so.