Available Droids

As of v0.2.1 there are 5 available droids you can manufacture and deploy to kill the biters or your player-enemies. They are the early-game Clockwork Riflebot, mid-game SMG Battle Droid, Rocket Launcher Droid, and Firebot and finally the late-game Terminator armed with dual lasers. A brief summary is given below for each.

In general, all droids have a "Undeployed Item" recipe, which is the important one, and then the "Deployed" item which is just an intermediate stage generated by the Droid Assembler for spawning the units. This is an example:

Undeployed item - placed by player or inserted into Droid Assembler for spawning. These are signified by the grey background in the icon and the black border

Deployed item - only exists for a short time before being consumed to spawn a droid near the assembler. These icons have no border or grey background.

Clockwork Riflebot
The slow droid with a rifle is the new Clockwork Riflebot - an early game troop you can use as a very capable yet cheap stand-off and skirmishing force. They are very low-tech, and require only green circuits, gears, and copper plates. Imagine a brass clockwork soldier that's kind of slow and shitty, but is deadly accurate and despite being slow in fire rate, packs a punch that one-hit kills early game biters.

In small groups placed around your base (either below size to hunt, or using guard stations) to supplement turrets (they have infinite ammo remember!), they can easily fend off early-game biter raids and will slowly self-heal as with all droids. The clockwork riflebot scales into the mid-game by taking advantage of the gun bullet damage and fire rate research along with the player's SMG. (In fact, the SMG battle droids also use these same bonuses.)

Battle Droid
The Battle Droid uses a low calibre Gatling gun as its weapon. As a mid-game unit, this guy can handle up to big-biters with some bullet damage upgrades. With shorter range than a riflebot, these units are still very good for fast killing of weak biters and for protecting blobs of riflebots or rocket droids. Damage scales with the bullet damage upgrades, making these able to kill large biters and behemoths (just not quickly..) in late-game, but you will still need a lot of them. These units should be the mainstay of any automated army set-up, useful for deployment in small groups for active defence, or large swarms to overrun biter nests with support from rocket droids.

Rocket Droid
The rocket bot is intended to support SMG and riflebots in mid-game combat against large biters/spitters and large worms. The rocket bot has a long range, slow firing, and high damage rocket attack. It is advised to make mixed squads of SMG/Rifle and rocket bots, for protection of the rocket bots but also because they work well together. The rocket bot is basically a sniper.

Firebot
The firebot is a mid-late game unit which has more health than a normal battle droid, and carries a flamethrower for a weapon. This bot can cause forest fires and the messy results of their weapons can harm weaker friendly bots! The Firebot works well in mixed squads with rocket-bots or in late-game as swarm-killing support for terminators. Firebots are 100% immune to fire damage so they will happily co-exist in large groups.

Video of firebot during development

Terminator
The terminator is a late/end game droid soldier with dual lasers and high speed treads! These guys can rampage through the world slaughtering natives and collecting alien artifacts faster than any other unit type. They can quickly kill the largest of the aliens, but can sometimes get distracted (and lose effectiveness) by swarms of smaller units, so it can be beneficial to support them with SMG or rifle droids. They benefit from Combat Robot Damage upgrades, and are best deployed in groups of 10-20 for maximum longevity.

Flying Combat Robots

There are also flying robots which are basically the same as the Defender, Distractor, and Destroyer combat bots from the vanilla game - swarms of cheap flying bots are needed in large numbers. See Flying Combat Robots page