What I would like to do: Tell combat fabrication bots to patrol an area so that they repair things. What actually happens: Combat fabrication bots get stuck trying to assist a nuclear missile launcher or a factory using their really inefficient nano-lathe. I can see this happening with regular fabrication bots. Putting them on patrol and having them automatically assist construction as well as conduct repairs makes sense. I don't think combat fabbers should do this. I just want them to repair things while on patrol, which I think is a reasonable expectation. If I wanted construction assistance I would have made a regular fabber, which is more energy efficient.
They are just as energy efficient now so that's not a major problem. If it is on patrol and nothing needs a fixing, it starts helping with a factory then something needs a fixing. What happens?
Exactly. Really, I am fine with them not helping themselves to construct assist. I don't see anyone using this command to assist construction, that would be worthy of manual assignment. Making them unable to assist when on patrol and just repair is cool. One step further, there should be some sort of prioritization they have for repair anyway though, so they don't repair stupid shtuff. Then we could mod it, of course. However, something default telling them structure first, units next, and things like artillery and turrets over mexes and powerplants and radar over factories and such.
Seems to me like the ideal solution is to implement area-assist, which would let fabbers assist anything in the area, while changing area patrol to use a repair > reclaim > assist priority structure. That way, there's a way to approach each goal.
That's the problem -- now that they have stumbled across something that needs help building (like, say, a nuclear missile), they are hung up on that for the duration. Something somewhere else in their patrol path needs fixed but they won't get to it anytime soon. Patrolling near factories will get them repeatedly hung up on assisting the factories. I suppose "patrol" could have clicky-boxes for "repair" and "assist" so that we can customize each patrol setting with what we want to do but I think it would be intuitive enough to just say that: Fabricators repair and assist Combat fabricators only repair [either they cannot assist at all, period, or they can, but only when specifically ordered to] If I really want to, I can get around the problem by microing my combat fabricator placement and their patrol paths, so that they avoid construction areas, but that's rather micro-intense. So micro intense that I just don't bother ever doing it, in fact.
