from Hacker News

Some flying robot behavior improvements

by vblanco on 9/1/23, 1:34 PM with 50 comments

• by joshstrange on 9/1/23, 1:55 PM

  As happy as I am that FFF's are back I hate that this is going to suck me right back into Factorio (there are much worse things for sure).

  It's probably for the best that I can only really play Factorio on my computer and not on my Steam Deck (yes, I _can_ but it's annoying enough to not have a mouse/keyboard that I don't). It's really an amazing game that you can dump literally thousands of hours into, trust me I have. I'm looking forward to new expansion even if it's still ~1 year out.

• by dragontamer on 9/1/23, 4:57 PM

  Hmm.

  These are certainly welcome changes for the bot-users. But now the balance of belts vs bots has been upset once more.

  Belts were immune to these issues, and were a key advantage for handling these cases. Now that bots solve these issues, bot-based bases are going to gain more "strength" in the meta.

  I recognize this is a bit of a (https://xkcd.com/1172/) joke, but I'm serious! Factorio is a game and a meta-game, with belt-based players in (friendly) debates vs bot-based players.

  Since belts vs bots haven't changed in literally years, things have settled down and the debates have stopped. But now this changes things once more. I kinda-sorta feel like belts will need a +10% or +15% speed buff or something to keep the balance, because these are _huge_ improvements to bots IMO.

  --------------

  I guess belts are still fully deterministic and zero-power. So they're still useful in this new meta. But this "loop" example was commonly solved by running a belt (or train) across the troublesome path. Now bots can solve the problem by themselves.

• by jcranmer on 9/1/23, 2:27 PM

  > When deciding which roboport to charge at, the robots crucially did not consider the current robots on the way to that roboport, only those already in the queue, and did not factor in how many free charging spots the roboport has open. By adding these two extra parameters into the equations, the distribution of the robots improves quite nicely.

  A great example of how omitting one factor can really change the qualitative behavior of your heuristic. I didn't know that the robot pathing to charging stations took into account queue length, since I was so used to seeing the infamous circles-of-depleted-robots queuing around roboports. Turns out they already had some smarts, but because the smarts omitted the (perhaps only in hindsight) metric of robots-heading-to-charge from the queue estimate, the practical effect it was trying to avoid (brigading around a single charging port) wasn't actually avoided.

  On another side note, it's been a while since I've done the math, but it turns out that each roboport can only support about 50-100 robots. If you've got more logistics robots on a route than that, you need more roboports to keep the item flow up. If you don't have enough roboports, you're doomed to see throughput collapse as they're stuck in charging queues, although now I'm interested to start running tests to see how throughput is affected in such a degraded mode.

• by Sverigevader on 9/1/23, 2:24 PM

  Every time I bring up Factorio at work (mostly for the FFF's) it comes with the disclaimer: "Do _NOT_ start playing, you'll have no free time left".

• by sc68cal on 9/1/23, 2:10 PM

  I am super happy to see them fix the path finding issue for robots, where they'll now fly to a nearer roboport to recharge instead of flying out of range, and then turning back and getting stuck in an infinite loop.

  Great game

• by cbm-vic-20 on 9/1/23, 2:06 PM

  I've spent hundreds of hours in Factorio, even lauched rockets, and have never got far enough along to build robots. Maybe it's time to get back in there.

• by harshalizee on 9/4/23, 6:58 PM

  As someone who loves Factorio but now no longer have the time to sink hours into it, I wish they came up with an easy and quick mode. That and somehow improve the early game slog that can be pretty dreadful.

• by CodesInChaos on 9/1/23, 2:29 PM

  One small improvement to logobots I'd like to see is disabling over-delivery to my inventory. If I request one stack of items, I don't want to end up with up to one stack + 3 items. For requester chests over-delivery should probably be kept, to reduce flight traffic.

• by euroderf on 9/1/23, 6:16 PM

  Hey c'mon peepul. Hasn't anyone unleashed an A.I. on Factorio ?