Basic Biters

[Zaqzorn]

after playing factorio now for a long time it kind of feels like the biters are more of an inconvenience than they are a threat. i often use mods to make them harder/smarter but i would like a difficulty increase in the vanilla game or at least a harsher increase in the difficulty curve of the biters.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Age old discussion. They're supposed to be a nuisance, it's a building game not Age of Empires.

Problem is if you make the biters harder you'll only get more requests to make them easier. More intelligent biters would probably be the best course of action but due to their numbers this requires a massive amount of processing power be allocated to that which the devs don't want to do, they're trying to reduce the impact of everything in the game at this point.

After playing Bob's Mods, where both enemies and weapons are scaled up relative to their vanilla balance (same ratio but the gap is larger), I can't say it improved the gameplay for me. It made it an extremely tedious task to expand anywhere and eventually I spend like two hours walking around with Laser Bots (much more expensive than vanilla Destroyers but only about 25% as effective against top tier enemies) clearing out and walling off a massive area just so I don't have to deal with them anymore. Even this was such a pain I was seriously considering changing the mod myself so stuff actually did decent damage.

[Frightning]

after playing factorio now for a long time it kind of feels like the biters are more of an inconvenience than they are a threat. i often use mods to make them harder/smarter but i would like a difficulty increase in the vanilla game or at least a harsher increase in the difficulty curve of the biters.

Have you tried playing a deathworld yet? maybe with lowered resources? It's actually possible to make an 'unwinnable' map with the right mapgen settings. The default biter settings are meant to to only make them a nuisance, not a serious threat. But there is definitely room to make them far more difficult to deal with by changing the biter settings (note that starting area size has a pretty profound effect on how easy or hard it will be to deal with the biters because of how that affects resource accessibility).