Help biters

[Openhand]

Biters are too difficult, i played a marathon (science and materials x4) angelbob game and they are invincible, biters are too much of an issue and i quit!

I'll just have to start a new game because i can't do anything anymore, just have 4 miners or something because anything more will trigger their aggressive instincts and attack my base and i don't want that, i'm like 97% resource starved.

Next time, i'm going to play with biters only evolving if i kill them, and slower, and probably without marathon on angelbob, seems it was designed without marathon being enabled.

Time and time again, biters make the game experience pretty miserable for me, lasers might have fixed this but they are really expensive to get in angelbob marathon and by the time i have lasers there will be large biters out, so too little too late (already facing large biters now that resist my damage like 95% piercing magazines)

What is fair about lasers being 0% resisted and physical ammo being like 95% resisted, why is this the case?

Think next time i'm just going to skip useless damage type and rush lasers as fast i can, or maybe flame thrower, i dunno.

I need big help :'( i feel like i'm starting to cry, damn biters, just leave me alone.

[5thHorseman]

There is no shame in totally disabling them. I leave them enabled with pretty standard evolution settings, but then just set them to not expand ever. This way, I have to deal with them but never have to face them if I don't want to.

[Openhand]

They were easier before, and they made them harder and harder and harder consistently.

Now they will leak through any gap in my base, seems i basically need a wall of turrets and stone, and laser turrets at that.

Angelbob marathon was a mistake.

I did what you did, no expansion for a railworld with lower richness on the resource fields scattered around, thats why i got starved i guess, and also poor starting area.

I want to start a game where they exist but they are too easy again, so i can ramp up the difficulty to "just right" afterwards.

Maybe just better map and starting area, richer ore fields, no marathon and no alien expansion might do the trick, but i hate how they evolve just passively over time, no matter how careful i play, so i'll remove that at least, i can leave "when killed, evolve" and "when getting pollution" i guess.

I was looking forward to a big logistical challenge with my last playthrough but i got a emotional draining survival puzzle game instead once resources started to thin and the biters evolved to much too fast, can barely afford any ammo even and when i managed to get up to 100-150 piercing magazines and like 20 gun turrets, it does very poor damage and i cannot even invade them to kill one of their bases that protects a mineral field or are within reach of my pollution cloud.

Pollution should matter though, its gameplay, but over time? no thanks, and expansion just makes it pointless to kill biters.

[Mr. Tact]

Angelbob marathon was a mistake.

Yeah, that combo with biters sounds like a recipe for disaster. If you were very familiar playing with Angel's and Bob's, and knew how to do things extremely efficiently you might pull it off, but it would be tough.

I have mixed feelings about biters. I feel they make sense and it adds another level of difficulty, but barring extreme setups like you are talking about, they are ultimately just an annoyance. I think the core of the game is build planning and resource management which doesn't tie in well with fighting aliens. So, in the end it comes to personal taste.

[Openhand]

Every time i stop playing, it is because of biters.

They should be pests, but not to the extent it is like 75% of your focus to solve all the time and go around repair turrets and refill ammo etc.

Automating it also cost a serious amount of resources, which in angelbob marathon will be scarce unless you change ore field richness etc.

I think a game like Creeper world 3 arc eternal got similar thing like biters, it is a constant force pushing against you, creep, you spend matter/energy to build defense against and eventually collect everything you need to go to the next level.

Biters is basically creep, but much harder to fend off eventually, well it depends on creeper world map i guess, there are some pretty hard ones.

In creeper world i think the resources are infinite? that would help to make things easier tbh, or really thick fields of ore in factorio, the ammo and repairing and everything iirc is easily done automatically, unexpensively, in factorio it is a pretty huge issue to solve, i'm not sure repairing/rebuilding/refilling turrets should be a difficult thing to do?

I think it eventually should be that you go look for something special and you have to "fight" more difficult enemies to get it / unlock it, later version maybe travel between planets using those rockets we love building

In minecraft for example they have nether and the end, you go there and you know (after the first time) that it is harder and you can prepare for the journey and stuff, thats interesting.

Rather than having nether come to you after x amount of time, you go when you are ready into the nether.

A similar concept for factorio i think would be good, it would be a way to introduce more cool, interesting, absurd, weird landscapes which look frickin' awesome already but factorio devs could use what they already have to introduce more biomes for other planets / dimensions etc.

A reason for developing military gear without it being strictly for your survival on your starter base, unless you unlock some apolalyptic event or something by defeating a boss or opening a portal or w/e, like in terraria, reusing the same map / landscape but more difficult enemies.

There are tons of ways to make it more interesting and less a shore/difficult i think.

[Mr. Tact]

Every time i stop playing, it is because of biters.

Based on just that I would say at a minimum you should play with biter expansion turned off. Try playing without them. Some people don't like that, but I play about half my games that way.

[Openhand]

Well i did play with no expansion, but i also played with angelbob marathon and that was my mistake maybe.
You mean i should play without biters? well yes, what do they add to the game for me? its part of the game though it is just too big part of the game for me atm, i want to kill a bunch of biters, but why not just have killer vehicles that automatically follow me or something and go for a killing spree? using turrets should be for defense, not for offense like it is done in factorio.

I cannot begin to state how silly it is to go around and placing(building) turrets for offense, and reloading them etc, this is a big flaw in the game imo, the warfare in factorio is handled weirdly, i think they really need to think this over, what is the best form of warfare for factorio?

Something that pushes back against players? and something to go out and slay billions off! it would be hugely satisfying to go around and invade their main hives around the map, where a huge area of the minimap is covered by biter activity and structures and creatures, a good reason to go there in the first place etc.

Biter bases shouldn't be so overwhelmingly common that you cannot go anywhere without stumbling into a base, they basically cover the map entirely in red, thats pretty silly imo, a flaw, cannot go exploring at all without nuking biter bases in the way first. (i never used nukes but yeah, that is pretty much what is needed to be comfortable it seems)

I'll still play angelbob because i love all the materials and chemicals and complexity (logistically and research wise), but yeah.

Mods:
Angel mods.
Bob mods.
some utilities mods.

Settings:
Rail world.(anything else isn't as beautiful and interesting imo)
No marathon.
No biter expand.
No biter evolve with time.
Maybe biter reduced evolve by biter spawner deaths.
Thick ore fields.
Scarce ore fields (scattered around so you have to travel far)

I want to use something other than lasers though, maybe give flame thrower a chance? but i'm starting to get tired of gun turrets being useless and hard to reload, even though thats a logistical challenge and i love those, its hard to afford it and have time to build it early on.

[Mr. Tact]

Well, if you can get all the way down the tree Artillery is pretty effective and still requires the making of ammo...

[Openhand]

Haven't got there yet, but it does seem interesting, it seems kinda quirky tho but i cannot judge it before using it.

Its a bit too late game, by that stage there is already laser walls everywhere i think?

I think physical damage should be good in beginning but later on it gets resisted more (but not as heavily as it is now) and laser should be resisted in the beginning and mid game but more effective later on?

Right now laser is effective the entire game, if you get laser too early and ignore gun turrets etc maybe we should be punished for that?

But i dunno about damage resistance at all, why not just increase their hp? and let it be a flavor thing, both being viable: gun turrets and laser turrets?

Gun turrets it seems to me that they are ineffective early mid-late game. (angelbob at least).

Artillery cannons and wagons is a good idea, it is turrets for offense that make sense, seems awesome to me, but shouldn't it be before laser tech if you think about the technology? it doesn't even have to be electrical, its a chemical explosion that fires a shell right?

Lasers is more complicated than that.

I like lower-tech stuff like that, with quirks and stuff, lasers just seems all mighty to me should probably be later game, but that is fixed with angelbob iirc.