I've used the MK3 Spideys in the past and love loading them up with lasers, roboports and legs, but wanted to branch out a bit and use the other models. So I've made some Immolators and Ghost Weavers but they don't work as I expect.

Immolators: load them up with flamer ammo (incl legs, shields and PLD) and they burn everything around them, including rail signals and laser turrets or other useful base items, but launch them into a biter nest and they get smashed by acid spit and destroyed really quickly. How is one supposed to set these up?

Ghost Weavers: WTF do you do with these? I've loaded the 2 different cells (reconstruction and disintegration). Walking past damaged items, nothing happens and when they are sent out to combat, they seem to repair AND destroy at the same time? What are these supposed to do, and how many cells of each do you need? I was expecting the damaged stuff to be repaired.

Thanks for anyone who can educate me. It's been an expensive lesson so far!

Ghost Weaver is intended as a builder spidertron, supposed to be used with bots to build stuff, one of the laser can heal / repair stuff (it doesn't have any auto aim for healing) while the other laser is to damage (it doesn't have that much damage though it does have unlimited ammo), in general it just has more storage compared to mk3.

Immolator was a test fire related spidertron, the idea was that it should have a passive ability and an active ability:
passive ability: it leaves a trail a flames wherever it goes ... and not ordinary flames but purifier ones, blue flames that deal a lot more damage than normal flames (you can disable this in the settings since in multiplayer games it can be really chaotic and creates a lot of pollution), you can easily kill bitters with this by just running away and letting them follow you and dying from the flames.
active ability: it unleashes a wave of purifier flames starting from your point, this ability will melt your biters away, at least when used in the proper situation (the buttons for it i think was shift-F, check options for mods it should show there)
It also flamethrowers similar to the tank but that fires further in comparison.

I guess the conclusion would be that the immolator is more for the pyromaniacs lovers out there while the ghost weaver is more for the builders out there that are not fans of fighting, on a side note these 2 spidertrons are more in between mk2 and mk3, so they are specifically made to be weaker than mk3.
Maybe some ppl have other opinions about the 2 spidertrons and to be honest i'm quite curios to hear about them.

I was having trouble with the repair beam and just figured it out. If others are having trouble, no cells need to be created, auto targeting needs to be disabled and 'shoot selected' needs to be used.

Thanks for the feedback and comments. I'll have another try.

I guess the answer for the Immolator is to NOT place it inside the factory, but let it loose outside. I don't intend to drive.

hmm i should really find a way to make that fire from immolator not damage friendly stuff, it would help in all perspectives. I'll try and look over it after i find the json for fire.

Responding to a very old thread, but it seems this hasn't been resolved (maybe there was no easy fix)
But as far as the Immolator goes, I also just made one and made the mistake of placing it down right in the middle of my base and then trying to move at all only to cause complete chaos. I also found out that bots get hit by flames on the ground, which that seems weird, but oh well that's a whole other thing haha.
I then thought that's I had saw something about the F key being some kind of toggle for the flames and so checked the mod settings in game and saw shift+F. Didn't really read it, just tried it and boy was that a bad idea.

Anyway, should you end up reading this Charleans, I'm absolutely loving the mod!
But I think a, potentially, easy fix for the Immolator might just be to add a toggle for the flame walk? An easy way to just hot key it on and off at will.

Funny enough I also almost always die whenever I test the immolator. Hopefully 2.0 will make me and Resar more active in factorio so that we can try and add more quality of life fixes.

I feel like a lot of people are waiting for that point lol.
I had been playing factorio a lot on my steam deck and got down to the point where I'm at about 20 tps now so I just decided to wait for 2.0 and restart haha.
Look forward to seeing some updates from you though, even if it is only QOL, this is really one of my favorite mods.