Factorio Forums

TL;DR

currently bots only fly directly to their destination, regardless if its the best path or not, this could be improved.

Why

making the bots fly a more logical path, such as following the roboport connection paths. until they get close (or as close as they can) to their targets would help from keeping the bots flying out into the vast wasteland only to turn back when they run out of fuel and try again once recharged. this would also benefit bases that may not be a box or rectangle in shape and may have biters between parts of the base. as if the bots followed the path of roboports between the parts of the base they would not fly directly over the biters where they should not be. this would also help keep the bots from taking ages in some cases to get from one area to another as they would not need to go back and forth multiple times before they get to their targets.

How

Im no AI programmer or any other type of programmer. but it seems to me that if one could make a logic check when a bot gets activated to find a path using connected roboports to get as close as possible to the target before it starts its journey that this could be achieved

.

Well there are actually several topics on that subject, all presented in different manners, so they end up scattered in different subforums (some are probably in the bug reports, as people think that a stupid bot AI is a bug, some in ideas and suggestions, because some people think that the devs just didn't think of making not-stupid AI for logibots, ...). Therefore, all this will be difficult to moderate, because if I were to merge all this into a single mega thread, it would become unreadable.

Here are a few links (totally NON exhaustive, believe me) :
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=55677
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41428
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=53033
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49643
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46219
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42214

And finally this is a "meta-topic" with links to other, all related to logibots, their charging, pathing, ... :
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=18093

And the answer for all of these is probably : unlikely it will change in the future, because any optimization in the AI's "intelligence" would have a very significant hit on the calculations, thus inducing de-optimization of the game.

Or said otherwise : all AIs are mostly stupid in Factorio, because a powerful AI needs computation, and with the kind of game Factorio is, these computations would have to be done MANY times (because you don't have just 3 bots, or 3 biters, but many of them.