I have tried several configurations for patrolling and none are really doing what I would expect from a patrol, RTS like. By far, sorry...

My expectation would be that the bots move from a pole to another then retrograde until the start to the first pole. They can wait some seconds at a pole, but that's it, they should move to the next pole.

What I get instead is that they do indeed move to the first pole, then the second. For the third, they will 'take their time' going there, like half of them will go to the third after one minute. For the fourth, that's even worst, only a few that managed to get to the third will, after some time, move to the fourth. And then, nothing else. None will backtrack toward the guard station.

basically, I see some movement, a kind of 'trickle' of movements from a pole to the next, slowly, partially. But less and less bots will go to the next pole. At their glacial pace. And none will ever do a 'loop', as a patrol.

Not working, sorry. Even if the mod is excellent...

(2) guard station. Should they not move to fight bitters in a decent radius, I would expect at least 32 tiles? They seem content to stay around their station and react if there is a bitter at 16 tiles, not much more.

Only the move-attack order really work in the mod.That's still something of great interest, but the others features don't, really.

Yes the patrol system was a quick and dirty feature added and still work in progress. The whole mod needs to be fixed, there are lots of other changes needed.

The patrol stuff has issues if the squad gets too spread out, but the guard station doesn't spawn them instantly so it ends up making a chain of small squads rather than just one, to keep together. And then they have path finding issues and collisions.. it's ugly

So you would advise only to bother either with 'auto-hunt' or 'attack-move' and that's it? That's still something great, but I should perhaps stop trying to have the rest be usable?

I see in an end note that you envision at some point colonists and food for them ,this would be just great. And they don't need a good AI, just have them loiter around their houses, consume food, and produce something (a kind of money that can be used to buy something on a market?)

Yeah, just use auto hunt or attack move for now. Don't worry too much about the rest.

regarding colonists -
There is a mod called Colonists and Colonists Army by Jonkeda, https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Colonists and https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ColonistsArmy where it adds this. It's basically what I wanted to make, and he integrated it to a version of Robot Army and redistributed it as Colonists Army. I think it requires colonists before you can produce soldiers? Anyway check it out.

edit: oh, I see you've already posted on their mod portal discussions -https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ColonistsArmy/discussion/5ca9a5b04dc373000ba4db2d

The funny thing is, the gui messages are due to my old marines/colonists/RTS tech demo mod I sent him to help him with his mod lol. He copy-pasted and left my test code in there, so the GUI printouts messages are there.

I tried to find this code and remove it and failed. What should I remove. Although I don't see much point in using his mod really, as it's for me mostly a reskin of robots into 3 marines (which are using the player model, so not very immersive). I mean, I applaud his efforts, but for now I prefer to stick with your mod, the 'original flavor'!

Lol thanks. Yeah just stick with mine, wait till I get around to doing my own civilian mod