TL;DR
It would be good QoL if spidertrons could autonomously build stuff that are not in range of any roboports, or in range of a roboport that doesn't have the needed materials.What?
I suggest to implement the capability for spidertrons to automatically be able to request construction materials for building requests that are not being fulfilled, and then move to fulfill them. If I ghost place a factory outside of my logistic network and my base has the required materials I want spidertrons to be able to pick up the necessary materials, then pathfind to the ghosts and then build them with minimal manual intervention.There are some different ways to interface/balance this and some caveats.
One could just be a toggable setting in the spidertron menu "build unfulfilled construction requests",
One way could be to have a spidertron remote button that lets the player select an area and then the chosen spidertrons will build the ghosts in that area. This would be semi-automatic.
One way could be a "logistic-construction-computer" equipment that when inserted into spidertrons (or tanks?) lets it automatically request up to maybe ~10 stacks of items and autopath to unfulfilled construction jobs in a radius that is much larger than the usual roboport range.
The most pressing problems is "what happens with items requested but the ghost is built by someone else?" (just trash?) and "what happens if the logistic network doesn't have the materials or the spidertron doesn't have logistic bots?" (maybe the spidertron should automatically request construction bots? Or maybe spidertrons without construction bots will not use this logic and have a warning sign "automatic construction can not be done without construction bots")
Why?
Spidertrons are already absolutely amazing at letting you build large builds super quickly. But they still require some manual setup like requesting the material and telling them to walk around the area to build the whole thing. To fulfill the power fantasy of instantly building anything you want, this should be possible to automate.I think this should be in the base game because we can already do everything this does, this is just QoL that makes it easier. The most "vanilla" implementation would in my opinion be the spidertron-remote action that automatically builds in an area. Because this would be completely optional, is not confusing for new players, and is not that OP since it still requires the player to manually select an area. It think it strikes a good balance between automating a lot while still letting the player be fully in control as to when this feature gets used.
I also don't think this feature would detract from the ability to manually choose what building material spidertrons request. Because if you stock up on the required materials in preparation things will be built much quicker since the spidertrons don't need to pick up the materials.
