Drones vs hauling (long distance)

[AirToob]

I have 2 drones (wonderful things) and since I have no areas set, they will collect things from long distances (unlike my first game, where I didn't realise they were being restricted to the local area).

I was wondering if it would help long-distance survivors to remove their priority for Deliver, the idea being that they would move faster back to base and let the drones pick up stuff for them.

So far I haven't seen the drones collecting stuff they have scavenged/salvaged, but that may be some kind of cycle time or prioritisation for the drones.

The drones seem idle for reasonable periods - any thoughts on how they behave WRT long-distance pickups?

[AirToob]

Just seen a drone doing a long-distance collection, so I'm guessing it's just a matter of waiting for them to get around to it.

It does seem that the survivors move quicker back to base when they have finished scavenging if their hauling is turned off and the drones take care of it, so maybe this is a good strategy?

[Flin Fredstone]

In my last game i had mining, scavenging and delivering turned off for all survivors and just let the robots and drones take care of it.
Downside to that though was that i had to manually tell my storage drones to go pick up mined carbon from far away because they had to much to do in the camp.
I have not used area flags though, so maybe that would have made it easier ? Dunno, rarely use those flags.

[AirToob]

Originally posted by Flin Fredstone:

In my last game i had mining, scavenging and delivering turned off for all survivors and just let the robots and drones take care of it.

Robots aren't available in my game (?).
However having turned off delivering for ALL survivors now, but letting some of them scavenge and mine, the two drones seem to be doing fine and so are the survivors.

Only downside here is that the survivors are idling more...

[Zep Tepi]

Drones seem to target closer deliveries before further ones. They do eventually venture out to get the far away stuff like mined carbon. If a survivor is carrying things long distance and you don't want them to, directly give them an order back at camp and they'll drop what they're carrying and get back sooner.

Drones do pick up salvage eventually if no one else carries it back in. Survivors will default to bringing stuff back if they're not rushing home for some other reason.

I've stopped trying to use flags because they seem to break more things than they fix. Probably useful if you've got a plan for them though.

[AirToob]

Originally posted by Zep Tepi:

Drones seem to target closer deliveries before further ones. They do eventually venture out to get the far away stuff like mined carbon. If a survivor is carrying things long distance and you don't want them to, directly give them an order back at camp and they'll drop what they're carrying and get back sooner.

Drones do pick up salvage eventually if no one else carries it back in. Survivors will default to bringing stuff back if they're not rushing home for some other reason.

I've stopped trying to use flags because they seem to break more things than they fix. Probably useful if you've got a plan for them though.

I now have 4 delivery drones (powered during daytime only from a day/night sensor, me being a power miser) and none of the 7 survivors have Deliver enabled, so the drones do all the hauling. No areas set. Works fine and seems to be no problem collecting far-away resources.

Got two balloons now so survivors are rarely idle.

[Dagmar]

Once I started building delivery drones I just dropped everyone's priority for that to 5, because drones are definitely cheaper than manual labor.

[Kelreena]

Originally posted by Flin Fredstone:

In my last game i had mining, scavenging and delivering turned off for all survivors and just let the robots and drones take care of it.
Downside to that though was that i had to manually tell my storage drones to go pick up mined carbon from far away because they had to much to do in the camp.
I have not used area flags though, so maybe that would have made it easier ? Dunno, rarely use those flags.

In my experience, when you manually assign drones to pick up things like a stack of carbon, they seem to "remember" that there's other stacks in that area, and will keep going back for a while. If they get "interrupted" by stopping with the carbon and picking up (for example) some harvested food lying on the ground, you'll need to "re-remind" them that the carbon's still out there.

When it comes to carbon, I get my people to mine it, but then leave it and send them home. I then toggle off the option to collect it until after everyone goes to bed, so the drones pick it up at night.

Can be a little monotonous, but you usually only have to do it maybe two nights in a row and it's all collected (I use at least four drones).