Autonauts vs. Piratebots is a programming game where you program robots to gather resources and then process those resources into weapons so you can equip warbots and defeat the piratebots. It’s a decent take on the concept, but it’s got several annoying flaws.
First of all, and this one is completely subjective but it bugged me the whole game, your bots’ main armament are swords and bows, only unlocking “hand cannons” near the end, and even then they look like black powder. The tech tree is kind of ridiculous anyway, in that the only metal resource is generic “metal” so it’s not like we’re alloying copper and tin together to make bronze until we can get forges hot enough to melt hematite into iron or anything, and if I’m commanding a bot swarm, I want little treaded rovers with tiny and adorable miniguns on the back.
Secondly, every single recipe is just slightly more complex than it should be, mainly in how it always requires earlier techs as inputs even when that doesn’t make sense. Military units require gold, gold is obtained from selling food, so at first you can toss raw wheat into the spaceport for peanuts, but then you can unlock kitchen tables and ovens to bake bread. At first you grind wheat into crude flour to make crude bread. Later you upgrade your millstone to something that requires electricity and a wind farm and now you can grind up wheat into good flour to make good bread. Except actually you also need some crude flour as part of the good bread recipe, so in addition to your windfarm powered awesome mill, you also need a bot-muscle powered lame mill. Sure, this means the good bread recipe is more complex and thus requires either more bots or more cleverly programmed bots, but since there’s no cost to getting more bots besides the hassle of programming them – or just copying their programs if it’s to harvest more of a resource you’ve already set up a production line for – this doesn’t really make it any more challenging than if the good bread line was identical to the crude bread line except that it required better mills powered by a windfarm. Adding the windfarm is the part of the upgrade which isn’t just busywork, cut the rest.
And thirdly, directing armies is too automated to be intuitive as an RTS but not automated enough to be satisfying. Towards the endgame my (active) defencebot cap was 25, so my standard army was 10 knights, 10 archers, and 5 sappers, each of which had slightly different programs: WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot. I never fully explored the programming options, so it’s possible there was an unexplained method whereby I could set my production facilities to automatically download the appropriate program from the database into units as they’re completed, and to do so until there are 10 active bots running WarBot, 10 running ArcBot, and 5 running SiegeBot, so the fact that I had to set each bot manually as it came off the production line might be my fault for not bothering to explore all the options. But definitely there’s no way to then write an Overmind program that waits until WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot are all topped off before telling them to attack the nearest pirate outpost. Having them attack outposts based entirely on proximity rather than picking targets based on the strength of my army versus the strength of the target outpost would’ve been slightly inefficient, but a lot of automation is like that: You lose some finesse in exchange for the ability to turn it on and then forget about it.
On the other hand, this could lead to a point where you’ve got new production lines taking advantage of all the new tech already up and running, and now you need new tech from powerful pirate outposts, and you’re just kind of waiting for the army to finish threshing through all the pirate outposts between you and the target outpost because you’ve automated their attacks. But if you want directing the army to be more engaging, then the interface of reprogramming bots to target a new outpost (which you can, fortunately, do en masse so you only have to rewrite the program once per command issued) is way clunkier and less satisfying than the standard right-click tile to move, right-click enemy to attack.
It was also terrible for my productivity because its only obvious stopping points are when pirate bosses are defeated, which took me like six hours each. This is definitely a personal issue, but I found it hard to break the game into smaller chunks. The pirate bosses aren’t the only outposts with new technology, but the use for one new technology is often vague until you find another new technology that uses the resources gathered by the first new tech in order to produce something directly useful, which means the smart thing to do is to ignore all your new tech until a pirate boss is defeated, then look at all of it at once in order to set up a production line in a more efficient manner rather than creating workshops blindly and hoping they aren’t on the other side of the map from the resources they turn out to need as inputs.
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