Post end game combat proposal

[MrBuisson]

TL;DR

Zone clearing automation in late mega base game using the suicidal tendencies of construction bots.

What ?

Use our suicidal contruction bot to tell the factory should send some combat bots where they just died. We all had the issue that those construction bots love to travel straigth, ignoring any danger on their course. Instead of mourning the loss of one more construction bot, player could make use of this (note : it''s not a bug, it's a feature ).

Mass construction bot suicide setup

factorio_nocleaning2.jpg (1.66 MiB) Viewed 1945 times

If player can feed combat robot into roboport, and 2 (respectively, X) of those are send where a robot is attacked, combat could be automatised with few brain power requiered. First construction bot would get [rip] killed. Factory send then 2 combat bot at its place of death. If those bots are destroyed, factory send 2 more bot per killed robot, until the area is cleared. Surviving bots comes back after a while.

proposal

factorio_nocleaning3.jpg (110.96 KiB) Viewed 1945 times

few points could have to be adapted, like robot life expectency (not that my robot colapse before it reaches its target, or let it be to spice up robot deployment)

Why ?

Once player get close to mega bases, combat starts to be quite repetive and non threatening (except for players firing a nuke at their feet ). At some point, clearing the next zone is nothing else than blocking one hour of game for something quite boring.
Combat automation is covered in many mods but relatively complex system makes it non user friendly (patrol area with circuit logic, robots with limited AI trying to find bitters ...)

Having a system with little change to the game mechanics benefit to the player and (I hope) to the devs.
Because you can expect such system to be a nice ressource sink it won't be of use until player base reach a large scale - you only stop caring about construction bots once you have 20k+ of them. This avoid breaking the early-mid-semi late combat balance that I find quite interresting.

This way, mega base player can focus on building a post deep into enemy territory, connect it with the main base and ... look at the swarm of robots cleaning up everyting on the way. Automation is the way of life for any player reaching this point
The cool things is that this would only clear zone where construction bots would be going (and a bit larger maybe, depending on how much combat robot move around their targets). This alow to keep separated base for example, as no combat robot would never be called where no construction bot is flying. And it also get rid of this anoying spitter you forgot somewhere in your base...


See what I mean

Cleaning pain in death world setting

factorio_nocleaning.jpg (877.2 KiB) Viewed 1945 times

Just for info on the picture scale, the grey bands are exactly the width of the red zone from roboport

[The_Mtn_Dew_Master]

It would be good if you can put combat robots in the robo ports and have those kill the enemy if they have destroyed a construction or logic robot or if it has been plan with something like the deconstruction planer. But how far would they be allowed to go from robo ports or would they simply just go kill the enemy and simply die out on there. And it would also be good if the robots don’t take try to take a massive short cut and get killed because no one likes that when your robots just try to be helpful but end up killing them selfs.

[Longbolt]

I like this suggestion. Factorio is about automation. Combat needs to be automated.

[olafthecat]

I like the idea!
Would be very useful in virtually any circumstance!