60 droids ready, why don't they attack?

[vanatteveldt]

Not sure if you want this here, on mods.factorio.com, or on the forums...

I've assembled 45 or so terminator bots from a single droid assembler, set squad size to 5 and hunting radius to 10k, but they refuse to venture out. Surely the base up north (see minimap) is less than 10k tiles away, right?

Am I missing something?

(edit: after manually setting a rally point and removing it they did attack almost immediately and kept attacking other bases, any idea what is the problem?)

[kyranf]

Hi, thanks for the report. Can you confirm for me what version of the mod you are using, and what version of Factorio you are using? It does seem strange that they didn't automatically attack when they reached the squad size. Where did you place the rally point?

[vanatteveldt]

Thanks for your response (and for making the mod, of course)! I placed the rallying point above the outpost, i.e. about halfway to the base. The problem repeated with a second squad, i.e. they just stayed there until I placed a rallying point.

I tested the mod earlier in another location, there it seemed to work fine. The distance to the enemy bases should be fine in the screenshot above, right?

I'm using the latest experimental version of factorio and the robot army mod from the portal, version 0.2.3.

[vanatteveldt]

I experimented a bit more, and in other parts of the base they had no problems attacking. Can the water between the assembler and the nearest base be a problem?

Screenshot of my map: near my location 'vanatteveldt' is a squad that is refusing to attack. On the other side of the outpost you can also see a squad that is refusing to attack. An earlier squad launched from the same location went south and is happily clearing away nests (as you can see on the screenshot). So, I'm guessing that the distance is the problem, but you can see more nests just west of where the squad is hanging out.

Interestingly, a squad I later launched from near "nuke plant" did go on the offensive, not at the nest to the south, but went around the lake to attack the SW nest (which is probably closer in a straight line). It seems to me that this distance is about equal to the distance from the outpost to the nearest base, no?

Any idea?

[vanatteveldt]

Never mind, I think I got it figured out: there was a lone worm chilling out in the peninsula that is part of the outpost (see the little red dot in the first two screenshots an inch south of 'vanatteveldt'). I'm guessing that that was the nearest target, so they wanted to attack it, but couldn't path to it because of the outpost walls, and then just froze?

After killing the worm, the bots went on the offensive after a couple seconds.

Closing the issue, no idea if this behaviour is preventable, but at least now I think I understand it :)

[kyranf]

One way you can check to see if they have a path somewhere they cannot get to, is to use the F5 debug overlay with unit group info and path finder info all turned on (in F4 settings). You can see the squad's unit group circle, and it should show a dotted or slashed path line to their intended destination if they cannot get there. If they can get there, the path line will appear different.

[vanatteveldt]

Cool, I didn't know that; I haven't actually used the debug mode at all yet.

It turns out terminators have difficulty dealing with large 100%-evo bases, maybe I should create squads of 25 or so...