make the early construction bots start faster but not be affected by robot speed upgrades, this will make them fast enough early game but not let them be better then normal bots late game

i have had a couple playthroughs where the early bots stayed in use until late game because they were better due to not needing to charge, i think making them never increase in speed will help fix this

The current limitations are:
1) Cannot be used with modular armor or power armor.
2) Cost non-energy resources to produce.
3) Consume inventory slots.

Personally for me, #1 and #3 are enough to switch off of them around the time I get power armor, and in some mod packs even when only modular armor is available.

So I'm wondering, what makes them worth it for you towards the late-game, over the benefit of having a much larger inventory with Power Armor?

I agree that it's not intended for them to scale off of research though, and frankly, I never kept using them for previously stated reasons, so I didn't really notice. I don't see an easy way to disable that behavior, so I'll need to do some research on whether or not it's possible without an unreasonable performance cost, it might be.

3 is less of an issue because I usually have First One's Free (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/First_One_Is_Free) which makes inventory a non issue.
It has been a bit since I used them but I thing 1 might not work correctly.

The big area I end up abusing them is I put them into normal roboports. The fact that that they do not need to wait to charge makes them better then normal robots.

Could you give me the save/list of mods you're seeing this on, just in case this is a mod incompatibility.

I'll take a look into it, they're not supposed to be usable with regular personal roboports.

Just tested #1. No other mods needed, just get a power armor with some roboports and early bots. I dont think you can limit what robots go with what roboports because of factorio engine limitations.

You can limit it via script. That's also what I do when you manually place the robots in the world, to prevent them from being deployed in regular roboports.

But thanks for testing, I'll try to address that sometime next week.

I've got a preliminary version that prevents usage of the early construction robots with regular roboports done.
Since there is no event for a robot being spawned, I had to resort to preventing the combination of having robots in your inventory + a personal roboport in your equipped armor's grid.

I tried to test it in as many scenarios as I could think of, but it needs some field testing before I want to push this out in general.

It'd be great if you could try this forked version out for a bit, and see if it works as expected for you: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/152742193281499136/1001451322387738624/early_construction_1.0.0.zip

I will test what I think of, but I am not using it on my current playthrough so it will still be a testing environment.

it crashed on loading a new game. no other mods, all default settings.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1002029865874247761/1002029961298845768/unknown.png

I do feel it important that to not be bad the changes
a) should not take notable amounts of cpu time, and
b) you should still be able to pickup early construction bots and move then around.

I figured I can bypass the issue by loading though loading a scenario

the changes are, in my opinion, annoying.
there are few cases where this make the mod better and several where it makes it worse
for example,
removing the old bot build- oops there is a chest of trash (bots) all over the floor
moving the main storage- pickup another chest of junk and oops now there is (again) trash on the floor
excided about your fancy new personal roboport? sorry, you need find a junk chest first.
ect.

the changes also do not fix the biggest balance issue (that the early bot can be put in roboports)

my recommendation is instead of pushing the player away from early bots, pull them toward normal construction bots. make the early bots unaffected by bot speed research and players will be drawn toward normal bots naturally as they are faster.
this will be more fun for the player (seeing 'the hand of the designer' is generally not a good thing). And if players sometimes use the wrong bots, so what. It was not terrible before, why is it terrible now?

PS if you are still determined to never let players combine normal roboports and early bots, you could change it so they are normally a 'early bot pack'.
When a Early Bot Pack enters a valid inventory it turns into Early Bots.