Can never have enough food :/

[hthought]

how do you guys handle energy for the bots ? I have 8 bots and 2 dedicated cooks who only combine stone and coal for food and store it, nothing else, and i still run out of food. And the storage boxes are very close to the command center too. I don't even see how to make more robots at the moment without moving further, but how can i move further if i dont have enough food. Bit weird. How do you handle it ?

[hthought]

Guess I just saw that the battery is much much better for energy, that is gonna solve some issues for sure. For now it looks like 3 cooks will be the way till i get into batteries.

[LeftPaw]

The command that has them eat if less than 15 is a bit to low. Your robot will often run out of energy just heading for a food source. It should be more around 25 to 30.

[hthought]

It looks like batteries are not a viable option for energy at all. Which means I basically have to stick with the stone+coal combo.

I find myself constantly making cooks just dedicated to making and storing this food and still not being able to feed everyone. I have like 8 cooks and from time to time some robots get idle because they cant find anything to eat. This is just bad design i think and it's a shame cause the game is very good. I wanted to continue playing it but this has been way too annoying and I think I will give it up for now and return if there are better options for feeding the bots.

[HubertNNN]

Have you set your bots to eco?
I found out that with all bots running in eco you need around 1 cook per 3 bots.
Also a nice trick is to eat 3 coals each refueling (each gives you 25 power and you refuel at 15, so you will end up around 80-85 power after eating depending on distances). This reduces the number of refuel trips (and fuel wasted on those trips).

[hthought]

Originally posted by HubertNNN:

Have you set your bots to eco?
I found out that with all bots running in eco you need around 1 cook per 3 bots.
Also a nice trick is to eat 3 coals each refueling (each gives you 25 power and you refuel at 15, so you will end up around 80-85 power after eating depending on distances). This reduces the number of refuel trips (and fuel wasted on those trips).

I actually tried it with all bots set to eco apart from the cooks and I am able to stock up quite some food now. The difference it huge. I don't get why eco mode is not the default one. The way it is right now the default mode is almost impossible to feed. Eco is fine. Should definitely be the default one.

[Wat]

Originally posted by hthought:

How do you handle it ?

I set all bots to check for energy and, if (99 - food energy) or lower, go make food and eat. Only after checking for food, then bots do something else.

Since there is no explicit cap in algorithm size, everyone multitasks in cooking, eating and other activities.