station masters - how are you enjoying combat bots?

[Death Approaches]

on the one hand, expensive and chew E-cells like skittles. on the other, less crew to send drafted for derelicts in your system (as shuttles are automated and bots can get around on their own, other than rescuing people from aliens or stasis pods, humans are mostly unnecessary - cept for logs and discovering secret stashes)

which brings us to feet - on the one foot, they're pretty badass - against aliens. the other foot, when going against humans they better already be hurting.

against bots, considering you had to research both types before you can even get them unless you bought the knowledge from Haven, you better hope it's a BIG derelict with long hallways; exploding chimps and hamsters in tight quarters can start an explosive cascade that takes out ALL your expensive combat bots. (it's happened multiple times over here.)

so - are they worth your precious system points, or not? opinions? tirades?

[Madussa Momma]

I really like combat bots for exploring derelicts EXCEPT when there are a large number of Haulers/Crawlers or Chimps/Hamsters. Large numbers of either of those and you go through combat bots like Tic-Tacs. Better have a big supply of needed items to build new combat bots.

On the down side, combat bots need a lot of work in the programming department when it comes to combat on stations and ships. Most times the combat bots seem to not know where they should be going. Example: on stations when the chimps/Hamsters 'land' on the station asteroid and the player gets the 'crew combat' notification the combat bots seem to get themselves stuck in the station and don't go outside the station to combat the intruders. Same scenario when on player ship. The combat bots cluster up in some corner of the ship and occasionally figure out where the actual enemies are and go to do some combat, usually after a majority of your crew are either dead or severely injured. I can tell that this programming has been tweaked and encourage further tweaking.