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Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym
This is quite possible -- I'd say certain. Even if the zoneminds AREN'T fighting there's always that chance of a war -- so to survive you'd better be ready.
As the zoneminds are mondo practical -- sentimentality doesn't enter into their psyches -- I'd suggest that a GM definitely have their zoneminds very, very cautious about each other -- even, say, paranoid.
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Only half true. Berlin and Caracas' attachment to the biosphere, Mexico City's desire to stamp out biological life down to the last spore, Moscow's project to catalog human culture, that's all sentiment, loosely defined. It often interferes with their strict defined economic self-interest.
That said, they
are paranoid about each other. One source of weaponry against battlebots would be other battlebots that have been taken down, which is the mirror image of that.
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A robot invulnerable to other robots or humans might be desirable -- but is it actually economical? Let's say you could make a robot of a certain capability for the same price as five slightly vulnerable, but armored robots, each of the same capability. If you lose two of the armored robots, but three survive, you're ahead of the game of having one invulnerable robot.
Remember, the zoneminds don't care. Not about anything but themselves. If a zonemind's survival depends on the death of a billion humans and a hundred million robots, the zonemind will cheerfully sacrifice all the aforementioned. So if it makes economic sense for the zonemind's projects to build a hundred million vulnerable robots instead of 20 million invulnerable ones, it will do so.
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True. Nor is possible for them to make entirely invulnerable robots. They can make very tough ones, but all have limits.
As for tactics, to a first approximation, study anti-tank tactics. The robots are not perfectly analogous to tanks, but there are similarities. For ex, even the valuable Centurions have tracked propulsion. Presumably, they're vulnerable to the sort of attacks tank treads are.
Note too that in an all-out war, approximations of the same logistical issues that plague human armies will plague the robot armies. They don't have to worry about food or water or
mostly about disease*, true. That helps a lot in comparison with human armies.
But machines wear out, parts break down, fuel has to be shipped or recharging facilities set up. If a large mass of Juggernaughts loses 10% of their membership to breakdown over the course of an operation, that's quite a few broken robots waiting to be salvaged or raided.
It a mass of Hoplites outruns their logistical support, even if their power supply is fine they could easily run out of missiles, making them somewhat vulnerable.
Remember, war is still war, even when it's waged by AIs. It's about
logistics.
* Over time, some microorganisms may well evolve to attack vulnerable but nutritious bits of a robot, anything made of hydrocarbons might potentially be vulnerable, but it'll take a while to be a big issue, absent someone weaponizing them with biotechnology, which requires a resource base. OTOH, I could imagine a
Zonemind trying it as 'out of the box' thinking. Imagine a Zonemind first removes the vulnerable element from its own robots, replacing it with something else, then releases the pathogen into the environment.
This might take the form of microbots spritzing bigger robots with the organism, for ex, or any of several other methods.