Factorio Forums

Hi factorio crew,

I really love your game, I love all the turrets and I enjoy going through the extra work to transport oil to the front to be able to use flamethrower turrets.
I even build them at mining sites and go out of my way to make sure they always have oil to burn away threats to my mining drills.
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=47404
Unfortunately the flamethrowers are not very compatible with repairing construction robots, since they will always try to repair walls (which are necessary for efficient flamethrower turrent usage) even when there is still fire raging right in front of the walls. So every time the enemy attacks my walls, my drones fly in and get burned. More robots come out to repair those bots and spitters start spitting at the bots while those are endlessly repairing each other while getting burned even more while doing so etc., etc..

This is why I am suggesting the implementation of a new expensive end-game research which makes constuction robots fire resistant and/or immune to fire damage.
It might also be worth considering, to make them fire immune by default.

If you don't implement this, it gives most players a very good reason to never use flamethrowers which would be really sad, since they are already more difficult to use than the other two turret types.

Debunking workarounds:
Building roboports juuuuuust close enough to repair turrets, but juuuuust not close enough to repair walls, is a bad workaround, because you can't get any logistic-robot access close to walls then, it makes your base look even more BOXXY, and a single roboport's area is bigger than 99% of the mining bases, also: I actually appreciate it, if the robots repair the walls, too, so this work around is bad. Please solve this issue, one way or the other.

Building defenses is very simple and repetetive already, it would be a shame to demoralize players who love to use all 3 turret types.

Another thing to consider: Aliens never use fire, so the research doesn't protect bots from aliens!
Also: When it comes to PvP, you could implement an Option for the host to block this research from the game. But that is for you to decide, I don't care about PvP.

P.S.:
Another good argument:
As soon as one of your landmines explodes, the construction robots will hurry to replace it with another one. Obviously landmines only explode when aliens are near, so that's where your fire turrets are going to fire at, so the drones replacing the mines will always get burned, especially since you devs increased the fire's duration in 0.15.0.
So even if the drones take their time, they will probably get burned.

TL;DR

Remove or reduce the fire damage received by construction (and maybe also logistics) bots.

What ?

Either:
- prevent patches of ground fire from effecting these drones, after all, they fly, so ground fire should not touch them
- increase their fire resistance to a point where they are not instantly toast
- tell drones to not fly into fire (if fire on path -> do not suicide, stop at x distance and wait until it's gone /// if damaged by fire -> return to nearest port, then repair, then try again)
- same for biters actually (do not fly near/through biters/spitters) ...yea, wishful thinking^^

Why ?

It's annoying to see your only losses in an advanced state of the game being construction bots,
them being fried by your own flame thrower turrets.
This happens when they try to repair (mostly walls) that have been damaged, and are close to remaining fire patches still burning from flame thrower turrets that just shot at some biters.

Yes, this happens only rarely, but it does happen constantly,
yes, it's easy to auto-replace the losses,
yes it's a neglectable amount of resources,
but it's still annoying.

That's nice, but I consider bots suiciding like that rather a design flaw, that should be fixed, instead of a "matter of taste" that gets satisfied with a mod.

Now that biter self-collision has been removed (which is AWESOME btw) I'm finding that my construction bots are dying in my fire a whole lot more than they used to. Here's my graph of construction bot losses since the update. My defenses are definitely heavy flamethrower turret, and I suspect many more defenses will need to be with this new change. And when I watch my defenses many of the robots are dying entirely due to the flames when they run out to attempt repairs, without getting hit by any biters at all.

Now, this could be partially due to having a large +320% bonus flame damage (both to turrets and to flamethrower ammo... I think they stack?)

So, perhaps this is a good time to reconsider this suggestion. I'm thinking give robots resistance to fire that can be or is increased as fire damage modifiers are increased. Thoughts?

Edit: Other losses have not increased like bot losses have, in case anyone was wondering.

DragonMudd wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 16, 2019 9:15 pm

Now, this could be partially due to having a large +320% bonus flame damage (both to turrets and to flamethrower ammo... I think they stack?)

Yeah, it is a research-dependent issue. The faster your bots are the higher the risk that they fly into the middle of an attack and the more damage the fire does... well... the more damage it does.
Now, you could argue that in a high-research game you might as well push laser or gun turrets to arbitrary strength and use them for everything, but that kinda makes me sad for the poor flamers.

So I'm in favor of this suggestion (or something else that adresses the issue).

Considering how potent flame turrets can be, it could be seen as a balancing factor.

As far as current gameplay goes, you can try not providing repair packs at all, just provide spare walls and other machines. That way the construction bots will come out less often. This means your flame wall needs to be an isolated logistics network though.

You can use the circuit network to turn the roboport off/on and detect enemies in range by oil consumption from the flamethrower.

While we're tweaking flamethrowers can we increase their min range and make flames not kill landmines? Make landmines actually feasible.