Factorio Forums

Problem: when I have no base network but personal roboport at my location, both building and deconstructing is very fast as both work from / with my inventory using bots from my inventory, as the bots have to travel a very short distance. But when I add the base network, which is supposed to be an upgrade, responsiveness of both build and deconstruct requests plummets because a subset of requests that are within the reach of my personal roboport get randomly assigned to the base network, which tends to be much slower for all sorts of reasons - further distances, bots are busy with something else, or bots have to pick up or drop off the items far away.

Solution:
- minimal: if a new build, deconstruct, or upgrade request is made within reach of the personal roboport, it is served from the personal roboport, not the base network.
- alternative: some sort of assessment is made which assignment will result in the requests within the reach of the personal roboport to be served the fastest (possibly a combination of personal and base bots) and that assignment is made.

I found this problem to be quite annoying for years now, but seeing viewtopic.php?t=135174 that may or may not be asking the same thing (I can't quite understand that post all that well) prompted this request.

I guess the best solution could be just giving the player a toggle in "E" UI that controls who serves new requests that originate on tiles where both networks are available - from the personal roboport and "external", and let the player judge which network is supposed to be faster at their current point in progression.

Also as a note, this all feels somewhat connected to another missing feature and some pre-existing suggestions on this forum - have some kind of "draft" ghost placement that doesn't trigger bot assignments at all (base or personal) to be able to finalize the ghost, and then 'commit' or activate it. With a personal roboport only this is achievable by just toggling it off, with a base network it becomes impossible, which once again turns building base network into a downgrade experience-wise. It compounds with the OP issue resulting in the behavior that is wrong more than half the time - when you want the ghost to be built ASAP, it takes unnecessarily long (building from personal roboport would be faster), when you want to design the ghost on the ground and don't want it to be built, it gets built. The problem with the ghost being built prematurely is mostly deconstruction speed - a ghost can be moved or partially deleted instantly, actual buildings take time to remove. The other issue is that random parts of belts and pipes get filled with content and then that stuff takes even longer time to remove (longer than buildings) and it has to go somewhere.

If you have 10 personal bots (example), and you issue an order that is 10 (or less) tasks, your personal bots should already be doing all the tasks -- closest bots do the deed. If you instead issue an order that is 100 tasks, then those extra 90 tasks will get assigned to the next (closest) bots, which are coming from the base. But I see your point that your 10 personal bots free up very rapidly and can potentially finish all 100 tasks, before the first of the 90 bots even show up from the base to start theirs.

From an implementation standpoint: Bots (perhaps just the personal ones) would need to be able to preempt that task queue and pick up the next closest task (even if already assigned to another bot from the base) as soon as they've completed their previous task.

Sounds like a good idea to me, but no idea on how much dev work that involves and the performance impacts of that sort of change.

Alternate solution: player needs to carry more bots and more personal roboports

That sounds about right, yes.

So, if a bot from a personal roboport becomes available and it can do the job (the ghost is in range and the building is available in the inventory for construction jobs), none of the ghosts in range have no bot assigned, but some of them do have base bots assigned, new behavior triggers - for all such base bots find the one that is physically the farthest away from the ghost and check if the player is closer to the ghost than that bot. If it is, cancel that bot's job and assign the personal bot to it instead.

The alternative is just a manual checkbox in the "E" menu that allows the player manually enable/disable assignment of base bots to jobs in range of the personal roboport when those jobs can be served from the inventory.

That reminds me that the game already has a proximity based system for bots - when a bot's battery dies, it chooses the closest roboport among those that are closer to the bot's goal than the bot to recharge to ensure progress.

And of course job cancellation is no stranger to pre-existing game logic, e.g. if a player manually places the building over the ghost that cancel's the job of a bot assigned to it.

I think this would be a great addition to the game, make personal and base construction bots interact much nicer, make it all snappier, and ensure that building a base network is indeed an upgrade and not a sidegrade.