Factorio Forums

I've been doing a lot of fighting while wearing a personal roboport. It's usually very helpful, but in some cases there's an especially high casualty rate among the construction robots. As it turns out, whenever a construction robot gets damaged by a biter, the personal roboport sends out a second robot to repair the first one. Since the first one is often pinned by biters, the second robot soon gets damaged as well, and another gets sent out, meaning that you can easily lose half of your construction robots in one attack.

The most obvious way to fix this is to just restrict construction robots from repairing each other. It's fine to have them deploying in combat to fix other things like turrets and tanks, and those casualties are acceptable, but I can't see any benefit to having a robot repair another robot. If my tank is being attacked and the robot repairing it is dying, just wait for it to die and send out a second one. Don't send out like four robots repairing each other in a big chain, only for all of them to die.

This is in my eyes a nice distraction and I use it as a fight-element. If you protect your bots they are also not lost in most cases.
Not repairing themselves can have the same, or much uglier effects as you describe.
In my eyes fixing this will remove an interesting game-element.

Adding timeout for construction bots to emerge after vehicle has moved would resolve this and other issues (dunno yet if it happened in 13.x)

This is an extremely trivial mod to make as you can simply add the "not-repairable" flag to construction bots.

I actually tried it, and it makes construction bots a lot less durable, they only have 100hp, but being repaired by another bot heals 200hp, it basically acts like a powerful shield mitigates quite a lot of damage per second. So without the ability to heal each other they really drop like flies even in circumstances where they aren't taking much heat.

So I'm a bit torn. On the one hand their repairing each other can be really annoying, especially with fire, on the other hand their "never leave a bot behind" mentality really improves their survival chances in most circumstances.

In a vaguely parallel manner, an alternative (partial) solution would be to just entirely disable the personal roboport(s). I have had plenty of cases where I would just like to say "under no circumstances should you guys go outside right now" -- often involving biters that can one-shot them. If I am outside of logistics range I can just temporarily move the robots into logistics trash, but it feels like a really clunky solution.

Removing the roboport is, of course, prohibitively expensive in terms of suit power when it takes minutes to charge.

----

Perhaps an option where construction bots won't try to repair an entity if it was damaged in the last X seconds?

I just use 2 powersuits, 1 full of roboports and 1 with shields

zebediah49 wrote: Removing the roboport is, of course, prohibitively expensive in terms of suit power when it takes minutes to charge.

It's not as bad as it used to be, now that the batteries have a much higher capacity. A couple of batteries will let you swap in several roboports without losing your legs/shields.

Probably releasing bots should be bound to a key, like spacebar. Or UI icon. Both for building and for repairing tanks.