Are Bitters unnecessary?

[conn11]

I am thinking of turning them off for good.

The biggest issue for me is that I'm never in a position of actually defending my factory. I always keep them out of my pollution area, and simply venture out to clear them out whenever they - or I - have expanded too much. The battles can be fun and challenging, and do put a clock on things in the early game (have to get some military tech pretty quick to start clearing them fast enough).

I don't ever see any point in playing it in a defensive manner, and never have walls or turrets or defenses of any kind. I know that playing defensively will boost their evolution very quickly due to pollution, and evolution is the real danger. Of course, once you have enough tech to defeat the behemoths, defending doesn't cause them to evolve any further and defense becomes an option - but this is too far in to the game for me to care. It's easier to keep clearing them at that point, than to build defenses from the ground up around a giant factory.

If it were a more defensive game against them, I'd be more interested - but as it is, my factory is never threatened and clearing nests just becomes a chore and a distraction.

Or you do play defensively, scale up your military factory sections, knowing they will evolve quickly due to evolution, but have better thing to do than manually clear an area and finally let artillery take care of them. Laser turrets and/or flamethrower turrets are a rock solid defense at any stage, therefore defense is a perfectly valid strategy. Or as suggested just use peaceful mode.

[mudcrabempire]

The viability of defense/offense is also a question of difficulty, size of your factory and your skill.

Going to the biters and killing them before they attack you works decently, at normal difficulty and for the first part of the game. The higher your skill, the longer you can get away with it. But at some point your pollution cloud becomes so big that manually going to the biters and keeping them away takes most of your time if not being straight up impossible. Also, regardless of the viability, going to the biters requires constant attention and monitoring, whereas a defensive perimeter is much more forgiving to people who tend to forget "details" like that (me, for example).

If you play on a higher difficulty (or if you play in Soviet Russia), biters will come to you (sooner or later), whether you like it or not and they will wreak heavoc if unchecked, so a good defense is pretty much mandatory.

About evolution from killing bases vs evolution from production of the defense: Setting up a good defense and all the research may increase evolution initially, but if you use solar/nuclear powered laser turrets, once you have the setup, the defense is free/almost free (except repairs every now and then).

[jamiechi1]

As for "Bitters", I had some in England once. And I liked it, and found it somewhat necessary.
As for "Biters", I have that feature disabled. I prefer to play the game without them.

[Ranakastrasz]

Biters asd a soft time constraint, and a semirandom modifier to your play, but both decay in effectiveness as you get later in the game.

Until you have good defenses, overpollution and cutting doen forests is a bad idea.
Having to get weapons and ammo and killing enemy bases takes time and resources, but guves you more building space. Larger bases don't just take more resources, but more powerful tech.

Space constraints are good, because it makes premade blueprints harder to use, and encourages spaghetti and creative designs. One reason I don't care much for landfill or cliff explosives.

However, once you have defenses, pollution matters less. Waves can be automatically handled most of the time, and as long as your tech and defenses keep up, varying by difficulty, you are fine.
With landfill and cliff explosives and turret creep or tanks or artillery, you can freely expand in any direction.

I agree with removing alien artifacts, as annoyed as I was when it happened. It wasn't really needed. Biters worked fine as is.

Honestly, the "new tutorial of horrific death" showed what biter attacks were supposed to represent. Attacks scaled to your polution, so as you produced more, attacks increased as well.

[Darthlawsuit]

Cover the world in biters with rapid expansion . So much that expanding costs huge amounts of resources. Now make resources dense but medium size. You will struggle to get what you need to survive and just expanding requires a large economy.

[splein23]

Especially in the endgame I find it much too easy to keep the biteers under control.
With the artillery and the tanks you only need about one shot per nest. With stronger biters it could become more interesting.
Or the artillery and tanks should be weaker.

I agree that biters are too easy especially once you get laser turrets. They just become a nuisance after lasers because you can so easily just turret creep them or later on you can easily kill them with higher tech. There's a way to fix this though.

1: Biter bases are surrounded by ground creep that prevents building on it. More evolved bases would have a larger creep area. The creep would disappear after the base is destroyed. This would prevent cheesing them by creeping up to them with turrets.
2: More biter types and stronger biters. Like biters that spawn biters kinda like Nydus Worms from StarCraft or biters that explode when destroyed. Possibly flying or burrowing biters.

As it stands, there's all this military tech in the game that is completely not needed which is kinda sad. I want all that military tech to be needed and useful.

[astroshak]

Bitters are necessary depending on what you are drinking. I don’t drink alcohol, so for the tiny minority like me, bitters are indeed unnecessary.

/topic

[Pi-C]

As for "Bitters", I had some in England once. And I liked it, and found it somewhat necessary.
As for "Biters", I have that feature disabled. I prefer to play the game without them.

I've always been irritated by "biters" being called "bitters". Then it dawned on me that it must be a portmanteau, combining "biters" and "spitters" in one word. Please don't tell me I've been wrong and it's just a common typo!

[DaveMcW]

Personally I prefer "spiters" as a portnamteau.

[Claviduck]

Do not forget that there is a wonderful mod out there called "spliters", combining the best of 2 worlds, splitters and biters

[BlueTemplar]

[Inglonias]

I see biters as similar to playing SimCity with random disasters. It's a fun challenge to prepare for and rebuild after for some. That said, I typically play with disasters off in those games because I don't enjoy that challenge too much. For me, it's just someone kicking my sand castle over. The biggest difference is that in SimCity (or that Cities Skylines expansion) you can trigger them at will. Here, less so. Biters happen whether you like it or not unless you use artillery (which forces the biters from whatever you just exploded to your artillery pieces)

I've played this game for a few hundred hours and never launched a rocket until I turned off biters.0 Now I'm on track to finish a game with biters turned on, but dialed back. I honestly don't like the challenge that biters present too much. They're just something I need to deal with before I can go back to building my factory the way I like it.

[Stakhanov]

I may be in the minority , but I find biters absolutely integral to the factorio experience. For planning to pose a challenge , it must be under the pressure of attack waves that must be handled with whatever tech you have , in a perimeter size you can afford. This is why I play and host worlds with high difficulty settings , either deathworld or with the Rampant mod (using both at once without other mods makes for a terrifying experience). Once you call down artillery and launch rockets into space , it feels like having beaten the biters in a fair fight. Then you can increase the challenge further - amplifying pollution , shrinking the start area , raising evolution factors , and/or multiplying tech costs.

I do feel the biter threat rarely catches up with high military tech , as the game can easily be unplayable early on if biters attack before turrets can be researched , or with too many medium biters when you have no piercing ammo - big biters rarely feel threatening to anyone prepared.
A solution might be to increase the waiting time to release biter waves as the evolution factor increases , resulting in massive end game waves if pollution is carelessly allowed to spread. Something to give defenses a proper test.

[mudcrabempire]

Hmm, I kinda think of biters in a similar way, but I didn't have the experience that they have bad timing. Did you play deathworld of deathworld marathon? In my experience, marathon does a nice job of slowing down the pace of the game (you have much more time to do stuff, but obviously you also need more production to keep up with the biters).
1:Race to get towers/ammo and get a good perimeter.
2:As medium biters start to show up, it's a race to get some damage upgrades (I never had problems with mediums using just upgraded basic ammo) while setting up your factory.
3:For big biters it's a race to set up gray and blue science and get flamethrowers and lasers.
4:Once you have that it's a race to get space science (for damage upgrades) and large amounts of turrets before behemoths start showing up in large numbers.
And at any time, it's a race for new resource patches, before your current ones run dry. But again, they are usually well between being accessible and being a tough challenge.

A solution might be to increase the waiting time to release biter waves as the evolution factor increases , resulting in massive end game waves if pollution is carelessly allowed to spread. Something to give defenses a proper test.

Might be interesting but would have to be combined with better coordination between the biters in one wave. Right now, even for large waves, only the front row attacks while the rest of the column mills around in confusion. If they don't attack all at once, even the largest waves are useless.
Maybe tie the waiting time to the amount of pollution that reaches the spawners instead of overall evolution? So a group of nests in a huge cloud of pollution will wait longer but then respond with a truly massive attack.

[BlueTemplar]

Yes, Deathworld Marathon* having the best biter balance (for experienced players !) was my experience as well - but obviously YMMV !

*for 0.17.0 - has changed a lot since then, so the above advice might not be applicable any more ?

[m44v]

My simplest idea for make biters less boring in the late game is to add infinite evolution. Remove the evolution cap, instead of adding new biters once you reach the behemoth stage they just increase their resistances to physical, laser and fire damage, so long there's still pollution. You gotta keep up with your infinite damage upgrades or the biters will eventually eat your factory.

I think this has good synergy with the rest of the game, combat tech is always neglected, is always mining productivity upgrades and many players doesn't produce military science after reaching the infinite science. Of course, some tweaking is needed for avoid natives evolving faster than you can upgrade your weapons and there should be the option to disable infinite evolution for players that are ok with the status quo.

[netmand]

Without biters you'd most likely be blowing up your own shit.