I'm playing with the Alien Biomes mod and my bot army has been totally defeated by a swamp of shallow water. The biters and I can run across the water fine, but the bots refuse to.

Is this an intentional design choice? If so, could we either (a) have a flag to swap that option or (b) add a technology to research that makes the bots handle shallow water?

If not, I would like to help in any way I can to resolve this issue.

Hello!

The mod and game does not intentionally make the bots not able to cross the water. The bots use the same movement method as the biters, and same code for pathfinding, so i'm not sure why the biters can get over the water but the bot army can not.

Is there a way you can landfill the swamp to make a bridge across it? Or is it like an entire biome of shallow water? It's possible the alien biomes mod somehow modified biters specifically to allow them, but it doesn't know to also automatically modify the robot army units to add the same feature.

I would suggest you use the flying robot units in the meantime, but in the current release of Robot Army I think because they use the factorio 'unit group' feature they can't path-find over water or walls.

in my development build which is available on Github you could try backing up your save game, and trying to load that newer version (still in development!!!) and use the flying robots there, which act individually and DO pathfind over water and player's walls.

Is there a way you can landfill the swamp to make a bridge across it?

Yes, and this works fine. So as a work around, it's totally doable.

Or is it like an entire biome of shallow water?

Enough shallow water that I'm sure any pathfinding around it is extremely annoying. I'm pretty sure it's intended to be the equivalent of a swamp, or maybe like a river delta.

I would suggest you use the flying robot units in the meantime, but in the current release of Robot Army I think because they use the factorio 'unit group' feature they can't path-find over water or walls.

I'll try this and report back what I find.

Just testing my v5.0 unreleased version, and the new control methods and with the flying drone units, water is never an issues haha! They just zoom right over it and slaughter everything and zip around the world so fast.