I'm not sure whether this is intended or a flaw in the programming, but almost half of the squads travel to a spot that is not so close to a hive, and then freeze in place for a period of time (not sure how much but they do stay for a long period of time sometimes), sometimes they move out to attack after some time, and sometimes they stay still until that hive is cleared out by other squads, then move to do the same behaviour next to another hive.

I noticed the squad size increases the radius of the unit group circle, and the attack move uses a 50 tile Radius area attack command. What happens is the squad moves to a point where their outer circle touches the 50 tile Radius from their attack target. This means the squad could stop sometimes over 100 tiles away.. that's 3 large squares on the map when grid is displayed.

The attack area radius can be made smaller, but then I have found another issue. The squad just runs straight into the nest and gets wiped out because they don't stop to defend themselves properly. The unit AI in this game is really poor sometimes..

Thank you for your attention, is this fixable by any chance?

I will reply with a .zip file download link here with a possibly improvement by reducing the area from 50 to 10 tiles and you can test it for me and let me know if you think it is an improvement

And yes indeed the AI in this game is poor, just look at how easily can biters get stuck and cause massive lag.

Also use smaller squad sizes, like 50 maximum, will help

Yes, I noticed that using smaller squad sizes helps, right now I max out at 20 because above that this https://mods.factorio.com/mod/robotarmy/discussion/5fd449035860836bc4d665e0 starts occurring.

I will reply with a .zip file download link here with a possibly improvement by reducing the area from 50 to 10 tiles and you can test it for me and let me know if you think it is an improvement

I tested reducing the area from 50 to 10, it didn't help.

Did they move in closer to the area?

No

Can you do an experiment for me, get this v5.0 from Github Unstable branch, put it into a folder called robotarmy_0.5.0 and run the game, make a sandbox new game with the mod enabled and cheats /infinite mode enabled, and start up a little droid assembler area to deploy droids. NOTE: Please do not load your old v4.x robot army games or save over them while you have v5 on.

https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio/archive/Unstable.zip

test out watching how the droids behave with the new methods of controlling them.. they are 'owned' by their home droid assembler now, and you can control their setting with a droid settings module attached with circuit wire to the assembler. The "global" settings modules don't work anymore (will make the defaults just a in-game adjustable mod menu set of variables )

Unit Control will disable the AI as normal, until better integration is completed. Unit control for 1.1+ only just released so i haven't had much chance to really look into it and get the integration working.

Unit Control is intended to be fully integrated with Robot Army on the release of v0.5 , probably with a settings-module and global default to allow the assembler to control the squad or let the human do the manual control.