Aliens and Evolution progress

[inick]

I've loved this game. Granted, IRL, I abhor automation. This game not only has done automation right, it's fun, engaging, quite playable. I understand games can sometimes bend the rules of real life, we've all seen it. I've got one tiny irritant to the current gameplay and it's eating at me.


So, the native aliens don't like you. They can make that very clear. There are three metrics that affect evolution in them and it is unstoppable (you can never widen the gap by natural gameplay). Time (understandable as you leave them alone, they learn to evolve), pollution (understandable, this can alter DNA and they learn to evolve), and spawner kills (<ERROR>). OK, I don't get this. You are eliminating aliens and somehow they gain evolution stat by killing the spawners? I don't get that. I suggest instead of a positive influence to evolution when you kill spawners, it lessens the evolution. Reduce the percentage is fine with me... but 20% time 20% pollution and 50% kills should negate some of the evolution. Please make it so that you have to essentially kill a really large region (think..50x50 chunks) worth of enemies to make a substantial cut into the evolution value. I'm not asking to revert then a Big Biter to a Medium, the Big Biter still lives. But the new base spawners are then reduced from Big to Medium because of the 50x50 (or, 100x100!) kill area.


Many youtubers who show off a killing video, will easily wipe a 50x50 area, I feel that's like just a start. You've got massive ammunition, gear, distance, etc all going around, for what....an increase in their evolution. Please - adjust spawner kills to reduce the evolution value.

[Shiandow]

Arguably spawner kills are the most realistic way to drive evolution. Can't have evolution without natural selection. Time and pollution just increase the number of mutations, natural selection gives them a direction.

Of course it would be far more interesting if the aliens actually mutated over time (at a faster rate with higher pollution), in that case killing off the weak ones would leave the ones that are hardest to kill, which would make it a scale model of actual evolution. But that would be quite a big change from the current system.

[ssilk]

This is a blancing question. Moved from Suggestions to Balancing.

[mattj256]

If the game were more realistic you could have an evolution meter which measures how powerful the alient technology is, and an anger meter which measures how much the aliens hate you and want to attack you.
As a gameplay mechanic, it's important that destroying aliens makes the game harder. The game would be too easy if you could wipe out all the aliens in the beginning without any consequences.

There are mods that change alien aggressiveness or alien evolution factor.
These are my favorite mods related to this topic:

Misanthrope
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Misanthrope

Rescaled Evolution Factor (hasn't been updated for Factorio 0.13)
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