Make things for warfare.
Mods introducing new content into the game.
New ways to deal with enemies, be it attack or defense.
The 3 vanilla combat robotics techs seem to have disappeared.
They were renamed. Defender, Distractor and Destroyer, basically they're named after their robot now. it's in the 1.1.0 patchnotes.
That’s not the problem. There aren’t any techs with those names either.
I don't know what's causing this. it shouldn't be my mods. I just loaded the game, and they're there on mine. More info would be required.