Construction bots: storage upgrades and multiple builds per trip
Posted: Fri May 10, 2019 6:59 pm
That's what the research description says ... but regardless, constructor bots only ever ferry one item at a time to one ghost, then they go and fetch one more.
It wouldn't be an issue really, if it weren't for laying concrete. Tiles are square. Area is squared distance. It takes one bot one trip to place one tile. It takes the same bot four trips to lay a 2x2 section of tiles. 3x3, nine. It takes that bot about a billion of your Earth rotations to lay a 50x50 square of tiles. You can throw more bots at it, but that's linear, it's always going to lose versus exponential. Meanwhile the player can whop down a massive square of concrete in the blink of an eye. (To the extent where it's annoyingly easy to spam huge amounts of tiles in the wrong place.)
So make it less linear. I realise there are algorithm challenges here, but let construction bots pick up the same number of items as their logistics brethren, and do more than one build per trip.
Failing that, make a special case for ground tiles. Have bots able to place a 3x3 or 5x5 or 7x7 square of tiles at once, depending on the state of cargo size research.
That way, I might have my car park finished before armaggedon comes.
It wouldn't be an issue really, if it weren't for laying concrete. Tiles are square. Area is squared distance. It takes one bot one trip to place one tile. It takes the same bot four trips to lay a 2x2 section of tiles. 3x3, nine. It takes that bot about a billion of your Earth rotations to lay a 50x50 square of tiles. You can throw more bots at it, but that's linear, it's always going to lose versus exponential. Meanwhile the player can whop down a massive square of concrete in the blink of an eye. (To the extent where it's annoyingly easy to spam huge amounts of tiles in the wrong place.)
So make it less linear. I realise there are algorithm challenges here, but let construction bots pick up the same number of items as their logistics brethren, and do more than one build per trip.
Failing that, make a special case for ground tiles. Have bots able to place a 3x3 or 5x5 or 7x7 square of tiles at once, depending on the state of cargo size research.
That way, I might have my car park finished before armaggedon comes.