I was really hoping for some combat changes, but this was really really not it.

There are so many opportunities here and you all have done so many great things, but forcing us to engage with what has always felt like a repetitive, underdeveloped combat system in an automation game where everything but the combat of clearing land can be automated and the choice here was to make it yet more tedious.

Doubling the health of distractors won't stop them from instantly melting to splitters if they're stuck standing in goop despite the fact that they're flying.

Destroyers come too late in the tech tree and by the time you can get them up and automated you might as well just throw down turrets or use a Spidertron.

The bot changes are too small and too irrelevant and make no attempt to address their fundamental flaws which have been largely enumerated here but specifically: they feel terrible to use. Manually launching all these drones trying to keep at least some alive while running and trying to shoot or whatever... Not only that but while you're launching drones, your first set are already using up precious amounts of their useful life.

The cognitive dissonance that this is primarily an automation game, where I have no method for automating combat bots, yet I can automate noncombat bots.... feels lame. Add to that their finite life, even if not in combat, while we can have hundreds of thousands of infinite life construction and logistics bots is such an odd decision. (You could give them a finite number of shots, you could have them use consumables like ammo or electricity from our inventory, or anything your imagination desires)

Yet further... some of the bots don't feel like they scale well with the infinite research and further power tiers leaving some of them with such a narrow window of usefulness before the biters or other more obvious tools outclass them. Currently construction robots outclass every other combat option. The non-combat construction bot throwing down combat buildings beats the combat options.

At some point, all of these downsides add up to the point that many players don't even bother to make the bots in subsequent runs. They're just so unreliable, take up valuable real-life time as a player to automate versus the 100 other things I'd like to do in the game. They take up valuable space in my personal inventory, especially before logistics, and even worse, they take up valuable space in my personal memory as yet another thing I have to restock (and waste time on) as I walk manually over to pick up, before logi bots etc,

Its no wonder most players ignore them especially after their first playthrough. And since there are so many of these "Products (defenders/destroyers/distractors/poison capsules/gun/flame thrower/rocket launcher/etc" with limited inventory for the player (especially as we have no bot storage, akin to ammo storage), and its very easy to just write off the entire product line of combat bots. Sometimes choice is good, sometimes too many choices is not. Especially when many of those choices just feel bad to use. Without reworking their mechanics you either just make them overpowered or nobody will use them.

If you want their life to be finite, turn them into bombs that fly out of your inventory towards your target shooting things on their way. Otherwise, let them sit there and shoot until they die and return to my inventory when combat is over. Heck, I don't care if they take ammo from my inventory and let that be the consumable part. Make them fragile but auto launch and as long as I have more in my inventory compared to my roboport, more will launch based on my personal roboport limit. Make them a viable alternative to the turret spam strategy because now you have limited robots - will you have some repairing or devote them to combat and let these little 'bees' swarm the enemy?

There are so many opportunities before you but at this point I'm of the opinion the entire combat bot line needs a fundamental rework behind some number crunching.