Big worms vs early game

[Jackalope_Gaming]

Something that's been bugging me for a while now is it's possible to run into a big worm very early on. A map I just started had a big worm in the second base I cleared, and I'm not even into green science yet to get the starting turret and bullet damage upgrades. I kill everything else around it, but shooting down that big worm proved to realistically be impossible. It simply had too much health regen and damage resistance for even six turrets to start making a dent in it.


The good news is they can't move, but they still deal a huge amount of damage against the character with the beginning iron and steel armor and a single one in the early stages is quite difficult to kill. Heaven forbid there are more around.

As a somewhat experienced player I know I can quickly get green science going then get piercing ammo and turret them down, but for new players I'm wondering if it might be very disheartening to run into one of those and either die because they're not sure what hit them or figure out a way to get turrets attacking them and either not be able to kill them or find it's extremely tedious to.

In poking around in the turrets.lua file which has the worms, I've noticed there are lines pertaining to the starting area and one in particular called starting_area_weight_max_range which might be a way to prevent big worms from spawning so close to the starting area? But these values are all the same for every worm, so I'm not sure what to make if it.

Basically, could big worms please be prevented from spawning within however many chunks of the starting base? Some way to maybe let them creep closer once the evolution factor is higher might allow the start game to not have to worry about them, but end game will. They feel too punishing to have as a possible obstacle at the start.

[ssilk]

I don't know why you need to kill em. I let 'em live until I've power suit and built around him.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Worms don't change as game time progresses, so big ones must spawn at the beginning. They won't spawn in your starting area, but beyond that you just have to ignore them until you have the tech to go up against them.

[ssilk]

Exactly. They are there to show the player, how helpless he is without tech. After dying several times you will see that.

[BlakeMW]

Big worms do not spawn within a fair radius of the starting area, usually there will be dozens of exploitable resource patches before you encounter big worms. For me this has been very consistent. The only time I've found nearby big worms is when playing RSO instead of vanilla, also I think the starting area size might influence how nearby the big worms are. On standard vanilla settings though you should have about 25% more than a radar scanning range before you run into big worms.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I've seen that start games are pretty inconsistent. It is not uncommon for game-breaking anomalies to occur just far enough away that you might not realize it until after you've got a nice production chain set up. Sometimes you have a lot of resources, except for iron or copper which is nowhere to be found within the starting area, and once you fully explore the range you can get to without aggressing enemies you find that you'll have to get through some big bases to get the resource for the first time. Other times you get a perfect set of resources, only to discover a while later that you're on an island, completely boxed in by water.
These aren't rare anomalies, either, they are far too common for comfort. If you haven't had it happen yet, then consider yourself lucky, but I'd also assert you must not have made very many fresh games before you used RSO.

[BlakeMW]

I don't use RSO much, but I do remember one RSO game where there was a big worm in the nearest biter nest. But I do play largely on deathworlds so my experiences are more with heavy biters. The threshold where big biters start appearing in a death world is very, very clear, because you'll be happy driving your Tank around with near-impunity, then when you reach the Big Worms threshold it dies in a dozen spits and there will be no way to go any further (the Tank is basically immune to medium worms, but dies quickly to Big Worms, so the difference is super clear). Sometimes I've driven the Tank around the Big Worm threshold laying down solar outposts or looking for resources. I play on standard settings enough to not have seen anything which contradicts the principle that big worms don't seem to spawn within a certain radius of the starting area. With one exception: When biters found a new nest, the new nest can have big worms, even inside the radius where they don't spawn at the start of the game.

Btw these anomalies should appear in map exchange strings.

[TheSkiGeek]

Big worms do not spawn within a fair radius of the starting area, usually there will be dozens of exploitable resource patches before you encounter big worms. For me this has been very consistent.

In my first game (everything at default settings, no mods), two of the three closest nests had big worms. I had enough room to expand in other directions, and I could deal with the biters from those nests, but they can be pretty close to you. I can imagine that with very high alien spawns it could be a more game-breaking problem.

[Harkonnen604]

but for new players I'm wondering if it might be very disheartening to run into one of those and either die because they're not sure what hit them or figure out a way to get turrets attacking them and either not be able to kill them or find it's extremely tedious to.

For that reason new players should start with campaign.

[BlakeMW]

In my first game (everything at default settings, no mods), two of the three closest nests had big worms. I had enough room to expand in other directions, and I could deal with the biters from those nests, but they can be pretty close to you. I can imagine that with very high alien spawns it could be a more game-breaking problem.

If you still have it please share the map exchange string. I suspect the nests with big worms must be from the biters moving in and founding nests in the starting area because the player hasn't moved out to explore/occupy territory. This would be in keeping with it happening in first games - I remember my first game I was petrified of venturing out towards the biters. That would leave plenty of time and opportunity for the biters to invade. If this is the case, then it is squarely due to inexperience of the player allowing the biters to move in, it would be comparable to an RTS game where even on easy mode the AI will threaten a player who has not the slightest clue what they're doing - it might let the player diddle around for an hour, but it'll eventually attack - if it can't even threaten the player on their first game it will be comically pathetic by the second game when the player has some clue what they're doing. It should give some breathing room - which in factorio would be the big worms not being there are at the start of the game, but there should at least be some consequences to not taking advantage of the breathing room.

[TheSkiGeek]

In my first game (everything at default settings, no mods), two of the three closest nests had big worms. I had enough room to expand in other directions, and I could deal with the biters from those nests, but they can be pretty close to you. I can imagine that with very high alien spawns it could be a more game-breaking problem.

If you still have it please share the map exchange string. I suspect the nests with big worms must be from the biters moving in and founding nests in the starting area because the player hasn't moved out to explore/occupy territory. This would be in keeping with it happening in first games - I remember my first game I was petrified of venturing out towards the biters. That would leave plenty of time and opportunity for the biters to invade. If this is the case, then it is squarely due to inexperience of the player allowing the biters to move in, it would be comparable to an RTS game where even on easy mode the AI will threaten a player who has not the slightest clue what they're doing - it might let the player diddle around for an hour, but it'll eventually attack - if it can't even threaten the player on their first game it will be comically pathetic by the second game when the player has some clue what they're doing. It should give some breathing room - which in factorio would be the big worms not being there are at the start of the game, but there should at least be some consequences to not taking advantage of the breathing room.

Definitely possible. I didn't push out much until I had some weapon and armor upgrades, with the intent of wiping out the nearby bases - only to find that I couldn't get anywhere near them without getting killed! I had a good assortment of resources near my starting area (except stone, as I found when I started trying to wall things off), so I didn't have to expand early on.

The thing is, I think at that point it was still just small and maybe some medium biters -- there weren't even any spitters being spawned yet. They were just an annoyance. I could have easily taken out the nests if they didn't have a bunch of big/medium worms around them.

In terms of game balance, it would probably be easier for new players if you only started to encounter those as you pushed further out, OR once the evolution level gets higher.

Edit:

Here's the exchange string:

Code: Select all

>>>AAAMACMAAAADAwYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAMDAgoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
AwMCCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAMDAgoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAwMCCAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlAwMCBQAAAHN0b25lAwMCzarVwRAOAAAymAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ADAC9/JME=<<<

It looks like you're right. The nests I ran into near my base with the big worms aren't there in the editor, so they must have spread and spawned after the game started. (One was just across that lake to the south, the other spawned in the 'corner' to the left, between the big ocean and those little lakes.) Scrolling around I found some more nests that had them at the start, but they were much further out, around how far I'd cleared when I launched a rocket. It seemed pretty fluky -- after those two, it was quite a while until I ran into another nest that had them.

[blueimpb]

This just happened to me on an absolutely-plain-vanilla game (map exchange string at end of message).

The nearest base to the north is a little two-spawner base. Not a big deal, except it's got a Big Worm right in the middle. Those two spawners were thus completely unapproachable and also interfered with getting to the decent iron deposits farther north.

>>>AAANAAMAAQADAgYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAMDAwoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
AwMDCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAMDAwoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAwMDCAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlAwMDBQAAAHN0b25lAwMDEPSEtQAAAAAAAAAAAwBikoMH<<
<

[TheSkiGeek]

It looks like 0.13.3 just "fixed" this - enemy base expansions won't spawn medium worms until 0.3 evolution, and big worms start at 0.5. Should avoid the "oops, I've been walled in by big worms in the first few hours" issues.

[blueimpb]

It looks like 0.13.3 just "fixed" this - enemy base expansions won't spawn medium worms until 0.3 evolution, and big worms start at 0.5. Should avoid the "oops, I've been walled in by big worms in the first few hours" issues.

awwwwwesome