What is the purpose of sentry drones?

[ojek]

Initially I thought that sentry drones are supposed to defend my base - but I was just attacked by ~4 robots, my whole base was fighting the enemy EXCEPT of my sentry drones - these guys were just hauling materials, I even stopped them and manually ordered them near enemy then gave them back the controls, but they just kept hauling items. I clicked on the "Fight" button in their menu, for most of them it did nothing, but one of my sentry drones started behaving differently after I did that - he started jumping between two enemies, not actually fighting them, he was just going back and forth between them. So, my question is - do I need sentry drones for anything? They sell for quite a bunch of cash, if they can't fight, should I just sell them?

[-₪EPIC₪- Fail]

ohh wow. They are kind of expensive too. I was hesitant to spend that much on a drone I didn't need just yet but, think I will hold off a little longer if this is the case.

[Crystal Sharrd]

Did your Sentry Drone have a weapon?

[-₪EPIC₪- Fail]

I have bought a weapon once and a damn human picked it up before I could issue it to a drone. You can't tell a human to drop the damn thing without mind control.

[spajus]

Combat AI is really dull at this point and will be heavily reworked eventually. Right now if you have a lot of friendlies and few enemies, majority of friendlies decide to ignore the enemies and just go about their business. The algorithm that picks who is idling doesn't account for bot type or weapons. I'll have to fix this.

Sentry has 200 health, the only bot that has more is Orbotron with 300.

What I'd do is take direct control during combat and drive the units manually. They will attack anyone within weapons range or close proximity without a weapon, and you can make them go where the action is.

[wolf4295]

i have similar experience, arming the droid doesn't help, all it did was move even further away from the fighting. i assumed that maybe due to the laws of robotics the droid wouldn't harm a human, but same thing with the bugs, it ignored fight. At one point i had 2 enemies, 1 human and 1 droid, mine was armed with a rifle and settings in theory permitted it to fight, battle started, i expected if it was a 3 laws problem it would target the droid, it just patrolled a small area around 6 spaces from the fighting and repeatedly adjusted it's path to maintain that distance, even a cat was fighting, and security droid hung back and avoided any fighting, nor did it fire the weapon. (probably recording the battle to post on the Security Droid Facebook page about the outrageous behaviour of living entities). OH! and locking it in a room along with an enemy doesn't work either, it just moves away from enemy, and does nothing while enemy breaks down door to exit.
Sorry, can't say much about controlling it manually, that requires to hands for button combinations etc, i've been in an accident and have limited movement in one arm at present.
i'm still enjoying the game though.

[ojek]

"even a cat was fighting"

[spajus]

Next build will have the following changes:
- [Balance] Sentry and Orbotron units will be relentless and never go into "High Alert" state during combat
- [Balance] Robotic workers that have a weapon equipped will have much less chance to go into "High Alert" state during combat

"High Alert" is the state that makes the fighter ignore combat and do regular work.

[ojek]

Awesome, thanks for quickly addressing this!