Biter - Gameplay Update?

[Kazaanh]

I was wondering will we ever get any update to the natives of the planets? More biter-variants? More wild-life animals? Some kind of global hive-mind with biter queen/s? New biter types like rhino-biter that would charge straight into walls? Shield-biter that would absorb X bullet type? Flying biters? Digging biters under your base? Suicidal biters?

What if biter evolution was tied to pollution even more? Like they would mutate and receive new abillities, new biter-breeds i know its represented a bit in statistics but visual representation would be much better. Imagine a late-game behemoth biter with mounted laser rifle on top of his back. Biters should evolve together with you. Maybe adding a different hive-personalities, like one would focus on swarm attacks, another one would focus on hitting on your outposts, using mechanized-biters as main force, non agressive biters, territorial biters. Possibly to allow smaller hives to merge into bigger ones and launch full on scale invasion against player?

What I would love would be an abillity for biters to take over your lost bases and reuse it to militarize themselves with armor, laser weaponry etc instead of destroying everything. Now that would add a new challenging threat and some in-game narrative. That would be a lot of work though i imagine.

If you are one of those people who plays on peaceful, or doesn't like fighting biters at all. Just don't post anything simple " I dont like biters because its a building game ", any idea would be nice how to make them more relevant in both pve&sandbox environments.

One of my ideas for friendly and peaceful biter contact , would be a diplomacy. Like figuring out some kind of signal-translator for biter-speech so you would be able to communicate with them. That could possibly yield new tech, unique resources or something like that ( biter hive farms yay ) . Maybe capturing biter queen and having your own colony to use against other colonies. Alternatively you could catch a live biter, and experiment on him to research new tech to help you battle them. or ( bio-fuel form their corpses )

Right now they feel kinda boring, adding new mechanics like egg-nests and biter-harvesters , biter-scouts would be nice. You could just destroy egg-nests to severly hamper their development or kill queen to make them go total-berserk, killing a biter scout before he lets the other know you exist etc.

Player would have to get new tech to fight against new biters too, especially military aspect of the Factorio needs a small expansion. ( more variety of traps when , automated tanks where you could issue orders when )

[sathill]

Well cool ideas are already in games where killing monster is arena is main theme.
Few examples. Big spider after killed "spawn" few smaller spiders and when small spider get killed spawn even more smaller spiders etc. To kill them use poison because all "spawns" will be poisoned too. Invisible enemies at night. Enemies that "charge" in straight line then need to turn (predicting player movement). Small obamas attacking player crude oil fields with democracy (joke)

And this is all fun etc but in late game enemies just got owned by artillery and nukes so whats the point really. Im mean bigger games with more content are usually better but most players just wanna build biggest base possible before potato die.

[Elharion]

It would be a nice addition.

There are two things that are annoying IMO.

1) Expanding the base while turret creeping. So much fun since the artillery introduction ^^

2) The biters attacks are not a challenge on the endgame. I think there are two main issue :

- the pathfindings, looking at the biters attacking in an old conga style is killing the hive effect that would put stress on my defense.
- Currently we can scale up the defense with a lot of different way. But once the endgame is reached. There is no difficulty left.

I would love to see new biters, or biter getting stronger and stronger once the evolution factor reach an arbitrary defined value.

As I understand, the evolution factor would never reach 1.00.

So it could be hp = maxhp * evolution factor ?

I love the rhino biter concept ^^

[purdueme91]

You could really ramp up the difficulty if the worms were addressed.

What about worms that would undermine your walls or that could attack anything in your base not covered by concrete? I remember a mod with worm riders and maybe the underground attacks.

Then you would have to add seismic sensors or ground penetrating radar to sense then and add some kind of defense to counter them.