Droids are NOT real boys!

[HFY]

I do wish for more control over it all though, being able to determine how many to build rather than keeping an eye on a planet for when to not grow anymore. Maybe I want to just build 2 warrior droid, or 5 more miner droids. I really wish for a simpler way to handle this.

Queues for pop assemnly would be a step forward.

Maybe you could enqueue a "stop" flag, too.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

So here are a summary of some the problems with robots in Stellaris.

• You cannot queue up exactly what you want (10 mining droids, 6 farming droids). The assembly planet will happily construct whatever it feels like, 1 at a time, with no managable queue. No production plant in the world works like that ... you specify what you want manufactured and how many.
• There is no limit to the number of robots that will be churned out, irrespective of housing, crime, amenities, energy, existing robots. Assembly continues unabated forever. Until you enact a decision to stop it, or demolish the assembly plant.
• When you research a tech, all your robots instantly become droids.
• When you research synths, all your droids instantly become synths.
• There is no option to continue building just robots once you researched the tech for droids or synths. The change is not optional.
• There is no project to convert all the billions of droids (whether its a hardware upgrade, or a software roll-out).
• There is no 'droid' or 'synth' trait that allows you to easily spot the difference between one and the other, or that can be added/removed to your design specs.

To address the above issues, the following logic should apply:

• robots should be go through an upgrade to become droids or synths. It should be a TRAIT for sanity's sake!
• You should be able to specify how many and of what type you want (a build order, or construction queue).
• There should be a natural limit to how many robots/droids/synths you have on a planet (JUST LIKE POPS). Pop growth is constrained by housing, happiness, unemployment. If robots are going to be treated like pops (stupid, but whatever), than they should have natural limitations to their growth as well.

Various options of how robots can be managed differently in Stellaris:

1. The assembly plant only 'enables' robot construction. You still have to place a build order, and the order is added to your construction queue. This way you queue what you need on the planet.
2. Change the assembly plant to a 'docking station' or 'droid controller' (see Surviving Mars, or Planetbase). The docking station can 'manage' or 'service' or 'charge' X droids. This serves as a natural cap for robots/droids/synths on your planet. To increase the cap, you can build multiple docking stations. This way there is an opportunity cost to the number of droids your planet can support.
3. Reduce the efficiency of assembly in proportion to the number of existing robots, so that it takes exponentially longer to construct new droids as total number of droids on the planet approach the capacity of the assembler to service them and keep them operational.
4. Let the machines break. And be replaced. And no, you dont have to increment their age and no it wont cause lag. Just give them a date of construction attribute, and occasionally filter for droids constructed before date grouped by planet and ordered by date of construction and pseudo-randomly scrap some of them. Don't be an idiot about it this wont cause lag. You dont need to track their age, or increment it. Its just one sorting algortithm.

 

[Seisho]

I'll give you one thing, you are certainly not deterred by stating a unpopular opinion

 

[MichaelJanuary]

I'll give you one thing, you are certainly not deterred by stating a unpopular opinion

Well. A few people made points that I had to think about, and ofc the overall point is whether any change would be net improvement.

No argument made to me has convinced me to change my mind, and no one has denied any of the 'problems' I listed. The only question then is whether this breaks immersion, and whether it can be improved or not.