Bitters don't attack unless provoked

[mtilsted]

I am having the problem that bitters bases behave different if I kill all the Bitters at a base.

Look at the attached game. There is a bitter base to the left of my avatar. It is peaceful. It don't send any bitters to join any attack wave. it is just there doing nothing. Now If i go left, towards that bitter base, and all the bitters from that base will try to attack me. Now I run away from them and towards my 4 turrets. The turrets kill the bitters but now look at the behavior of the bitter base. At least 95% of the newly spawned bitters will now join an attack wave as soon as they spawn, leaving the base empty. This should not happen since killing the bitters without touching the base should not change bitter behavior.

But because I "visited" the base and killed all the bitters, that base will now continue spawning attack waves forever. If I don't visit it, it stay peaceful.

btw: I still think that the real bug here is that the bitters are not joining attack waves before I provoke them and kill all the bitters, because the base is covered in the maximum pollution it can absorb(The square is light red all the time in the pollution map).

This is in 0.14.20 without any mods.

[Koub]

For added context, here is the beginning of the discussion that leads to this bug report :
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=37383

[Rseding91]

Biters don't attack non-stop when they have pollution over them. There's a threshold before an attack is sent and a cooldown so they're not constantly attacking.

[mtilsted]

Biters don't attack non-stop when they have pollution over them. There's a threshold before an attack is sent and a cooldown so they're not constantly attacking.

I know, but they should send a lot of bitters to join attack waves if they are covered in the maximum pollution they can absorb. But they don't.

But the real question is: Why does this behavior change once I kill all the bitters from the base? Once I have killed all the bitters at the base once, the base sends so many bitters to attack me that the base is empty most of the time, because biters join the attack wave as soon as they spawn. But according to the documentation killing bitters should not change their behavior at all.

[mtilsted]

I made a video which shows the issue. It is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBz2-CQ ... e=youtu.be

Notice: The Bitter base which my cursor is moving around is not sending any attack waves. Even when covered in lots of pollution. But as soon as I visit it, and then run away and kill all the biters, the new bitters which spawn start by joining an attack wave. And they will keep joining attack waves until my turrets run out of munition, and I get killed

And it is still only the exact base I visited which sends bitters. All the other bases are still peaceful towards me with no attack waves.


I have attached the game I loaded called Provoke2.

And I know this is done on Linux, but the exact same thing happens in Windows.