How it Works (Tutorial)

##How to Make Droids
###Research Required
The clockwork riflebot needs Military 1 researched before the recipe will become available for production at an assembler. The SMG and Rocket droids need Military 2 researched, plus the required research for their weapons and armour (all vanilla). The final terminator unit is unlocked with Military 3, but you need to be able to make modular armour and laser turrets before you can build a terminator. The droid counter module unlocks with "electronics", and the loot chest for artifact gathering is unlocked with Military 1 along with the clockwork riflebot.

###Assemblers only - not hand-craftable. Droids only be manufactured in an Assembling Machine, of level 2 or higher, due to the 3-4+ ingredients in the recipe. The droid recipes are in the Military tab.

##How to deploy Droids are deployed by building a Droid Assembling Machine (Droid Assembler ) and inserting the Droid (Undeployed) item into it, for whatever type of droid you wanted to deploy. The mod script will scan each Droid Assembler's output inventory for a "Deployed" version of a droid and will cause the appropriate droid to spawn nearby the Droid Assembler, in the direction that it is facing (see pipe arrows). You can also deploy droids simply by having the items in your hand and clicking to place like any other object/item. This means you can keep a pocket-army with you for tight situations.

##Guard Stations In addition to automatically deploying droids from Droid Assemblers to attack nearby biters, you can build Droid Guard Stations and put droid items in for deployment, the same as with the Droid Assemblers. The guard stations allow you to have a group of droids (10, currently) defend their nearby area (they will not go hunting). The guard station will not spawn any more droids if it counts more than 10 within 16 tile radius. See more info about this feature here

##Squad Behaviours
When a droid spawns, it will look around for the nearest squad to join. Squads are just another nearby droid or group of droids. When enough have grouped up (only happens during spawning, there is currently no dynamic squad-joining after spawning), they will move off to fight the nearest biters/enemies. They will reveal the map as they go along, so you can monitor their progress. If there are no other nearby droids to join, the newly spawned droid will create his own squad and new droids will join this one.

You can configure how many droids need to be in the group before they go off to hunt by adjusting the appropriate value in the mod's config.lua file. The default I have set in the mod is 5, but there is nothing stopping you from producing many more than this fast enough that before the squad moves out of joining range, you could have 20+ droids in it.

If the squad size is below the size to trigger the hunting behaviour, the squad will wander around in a small area and defend it from biters. At any time you can spawn more droids by hand into the midst of the existing droid squad (you can see the squad circles using F5), and the newly spawned ones will join that squad and trigger the hunting behaviour if there's enough there. This means you can purposefully deploy under-sized squads by hand as groups of defenders, and let the automated Droid Assemblers deploy your "attacking" units elsewhere for the hunting.

##Droid Activity Module A combinator that outputs how many droids are alive, See Droid-Activity-Module. Use the Droid Activity Module to automatically limit how many droids you have deployed. I use the signal it generates to do a simple "population limit" on all my droid assemblers, with an inserter connected by green or red wire to the Droid Activity Module and a simple logic condition like "count < 200". The inserter will insert droids into the Droid Assembler until the number of active droids reaches 200, and then it will stop inserting. Any time a droid dies, and the number goes below 200, it will insert more.

##Artifact gathering You can have your squads automatically gather nearby alien artifacts by placing down an Army Loot Chest. You can only have one of these loot chests per faction/force/"team", and trying to place more down will fail and print a message. When your force has a loot chest active, squads will pick up artifacts within a certain radius (15 tiles) from the squad's position, and the artifacts will appear immediately in your loot chest.

##Hints & Tips

• If you shoot a droid, it will turn on you and try to kill you! Same goes for rocket droids, friendly fire can cause some seriously funny (yet expensive) situations. I am working on removing this issue (ignoring friendly fire).

• Your construction bots can and will repair (using repair packs) any nearby Droid soldiers that are damaged. This includes player's personal roboport and construction bots and supply of repair packs.

• If a squad of droids is looking depleted, you can manually place the droid items yourself to spawn more droids, and if you place them close enough they will join that squad. Use F5 to see the squad rings.

• deliver droids items out to far-away bases and build a few Droid Assemblers - squads spawned out there are more likely to go and attack biters nearer to that area, and may intercept/delay biter swarms to help defend your outposts.

• This mod allows you to win a battle of attrition - any new biter bases spawned in the "no mans land" will be targeted first and help squash their ability to grow back after all your hard effort in the battlefield.

• Droids will shoot trees or obstacles that get in the way of their pathing, just like a bitter will damage random buildings if they get between them and their targets.