Spidertron: Allow stopping movement when robots are active.

[matjojo]

TL;DR

Allow the player to tell a spidertron to stop walking when robots are active. This can make spidertron-based robot building easier and more automatic.

What ?

A tickbox (or another input style) that makes that spidertron stop walking while its robots are active. When all robots are done the spider continues with its movement orders.

Why ?

• Rail line building is significantly less player-time intensive.
• Resource outpost building is significantly less player-time intensive.

Before we had the spidertron, we had to move to the location of the rail line or outpost with the player, and either create a local robot network (only feasible for outposts) or wait for the player robots.

After the spidertron, the player can stay at their current "project" and use the spidertron remote to put the spidertron robot range over top of the ghosts.
This can be awkward for outpost building because:
The player needs to look at the map multiple times to 1. paste blueprints and move spider 2. Check if spider is done building (multiple times if you check too early or the range is not sufficient to build the whole outpost from one position.) 3. Move the spider back home when done.

This can be awkward for rail line building because:
The spidertron moves too fast to place all rail pieces in one moment order. The current workarounds for this include:
Making many spidertrons to ensure that no rails are missed even at top walking speed. This is never 100% accurate, and expensive for the player.
Making many consecutive movement orders "back and forth" over the rail line. This is never 100% accurate and is expensive in terms of time.
Babysitting the rail building by doing it (also) with player robots. This is 100% accurate (modulo player) but is even more expensive in time and attention.

After this feature is implemented:
For outposts: The player can place the blueprints, tell the spider to walk over them, possibly adding some extra movement points to ensure the whole blueprint is caught, and with the last movement order make the spider go home.
How is this better?

• The player only has to move focus from their current project once.
• The player has to spend significantly less time to build an outpost.
• The player does not have to micro-manage the location of the spider to fix small pieces of blueprint missed by spidertron.

For rails: The player can place the blueprints, tell the spider to walk over them, and as last movement order tells the spider to come back for new resources.
How is this better?

• The player only has to move focus from their current project once.
• The player has to spend significantly less time to build rails.
• The player does not have to make the consecutive movement orders on the map, which look goofy and/or weird. (Opinion)

Other considerations:
The spidertron must make a choice when a build order cannot be completed due to a lack of items.
If the spiderton is moving over a rail line and stops for each rail entity it builds the build order will be slow, and look goofy. It might choose to move until it does not move its robot range away from any ghosts, or try and match speed with robots, or use other methods to smooth out motion.
How does this feature interact with the robots of a player riding the spider?
How does this feature interact with robots flying out of the spider during fights to repair itself or walls/turrets?

[Illiander42]

Other considerations:
The spidertron must make a choice when a build order cannot be completed due to a lack of items.
If the spiderton is moving over a rail line and stops for each rail entity it builds the build order will be slow, and look goofy. It might choose to move until it does not move its robot range away from any ghosts, or try and match speed with robots, or use other methods to smooth out motion.
How does this feature interact with the robots of a player riding the spider?
How does this feature interact with robots flying out of the spider during fights to repair itself or walls/turrets?

To address these points:

1&2: "If any robots are out, spider pauses" handles these safely. Automation doesn't need to be fast.

3: Player robots get included in the "robots out" check. It's what you want basically all the time.

4: Don't turn this on for combat spiders. If it's a player-controlled switch then this is easy.

I really like this idea. It's simple and clean, but does something really useful.