Defending your base is just to easy!

[Avezo]

I remember back in .12 or something, I had 2 layers of laser turrets and 3 layers of walls. Usually biters' wave would manage to destroy a piece of the wall anyway.

I am fine that I do not have to set up such a riduculous defenses anymore.

[5thHorseman]

Biters exist to get you to research military (beyond what is needed for the rocket). They do not exist to pose an endless threat you must deal with.

Complaining about lack of combat in Factorio is like complaining about lack of factory building in Battlefield.

[Spatial]

"Death world" definitely sounds like having an endless threat you have to deal with.

Also it's nasty and pointless to make such arguments. For those who don't want biter hell, peaceful modes exist so everyone can be happy.

[Koub]

Most people ask for biter combat automation. Automation is meant not to require constant attention from the player, but to set up whatever is needed for things to work, and let the automate do the job.
Asking for a combat that continuously puts pressure on the player is antinomic.
I'm not opposed to some kind of rebalance, but I don't want to have the impression I struggle every single second to survive, even at endgame. At one point, my technological level should give me overwhelming supremacy over the indigenous lifeform - what it does.

[DustFireSky]

I don't understand, why players don't want it. This, what we are talking about can easily setup through a game setting. Why the hell, the users cry and say: "Please, NOT", if we can handle such things via the game options ? I don't understand these people. They can play their biter friendly setting and we our hell setting. What's the problem guys ?

Have I overlooked something or is this just: "I don't want it, nobody want it thing ?"

[BlakeMW]

Because a game has a focus. And Factorio's focus is not survival against the biter menace, it's factory building. The difficulty settings only change the nuisance value of the biters, it doesn't change the focus of the game from a factory builder to a survival game. There are mods and scenarios for turning Factorio into a survival game! Factorio is also highly moddable for a reason, it's so that things that will never become a part of the core focus/nature of the game can still exist for players who want them.

(However I do have to say that in 0.16 perhaps Deathworld is a bit too wussy)

[DustFireSky]

Biters are a standard feature and are a integrated default thing. This cant be a mod, it must be a game setting. Mods adds new things. Biters aren't a new thing, they are there. In the vanilla game. And whatever the focus is, that's not a excusable to be against a game setting for this! My opinion.

[cpy]

Flying / water biters would be nasty. Here comes torpedo turrets and flak cannons! Yay!

[Hannu]

I remember also 0.12 and my base without lasers. I had about 20 assemblers to produce bullets and trains hauled them to borders. If I remember defense needed about 15k red magazines per hour. Huge attack waves destroyed always couple of walls, several construction bots and often also a turret or two. After that they have weakened biters and powered weapons in every update and now (on 0.15) biters are no real threat anymore (in normal settings), except very annoying attacks against trains. I would say that less than 10 % play time is used to build defense structures. In 0.12 I used tens of hours to clear and fortify vast areas, which was very annoying and boring. I think nukes are great even they are so overpowered in many sense.

Develop has been intentional and I think that vast majority of million players play couple of tens of hours at casual level and difficulty is OK for them. Factorio is intended to be a logistics and building game and not a combat game. In my opinion devs should give larger scale of difficulty levels. There should be adjustments for biter health and their attack power or they should depend on general difficulty setting. At highest level behemoths could have 20000 units health and their attacks could be several times harder. Of course it is easy to mod and there are mods, but many players do not like mods and such adjustments would be relatively easy to program and would not affect to majority's game at all.

[Hannu]

Flying / water biters would be nasty. Here comes torpedo turrets and flak cannons! Yay!

Yes, such enemies would certainly be nasty, but in my opinion by very wrong and unentertaining way. In such case I would have to just spam thousands of turrets everywhere and maintain them first manually and then automatically. It would even take away only small bit of defense strategy planning the game has now, because player could not use lakes to minimize resources needed to defense anymore. It would also make railworlds very disadvantageous compared to compact bases.

[DustFireSky]

The Question of the Question! Tada!

Why play the people with Biters, if they don't like them ?

Curious!

They want a defense automation how Koub said, but everyone overlook the question: "Why they are playing with biters, if they annoying them ?" What's the point ? U don't need them to play the game guys. Biters don't drop research science packs anymore!

I noticed in this discussion the following:

1. People don't want a harder setting in the settings, because ? Yes, because ... ? The don't want it because it isn't a combat or fighting game ? They are against a setting, because ... they just don't want it ? No one has said, they must use it, but whatever, they don't want it. Absurd.
2. People say, the focus is the factory. Okay, that's fine. But we have the combat and the fights in it. If u hate it, play without the biters. Simply as it is They hate it, but they are still playing with the aliens. Also absurd.
3. People hate to build the defenses, but are playing with biters ? Also Absurd. Sorry. Words fail me.

Have anybody thought about before he post his argument ?

Since the first page of the discussion i havn't get ONE argument, that destroy my suggestion! What were the downside of my suggestion, if we had a GAME SETTING for that ? We haven't a downside. That's the point!

[Zavian]

The game just loses something when you remove biters or set them to peaceful. Atm they aren't really a threat provided you do pay attention to defences, do some military research, and try to keep most of the spawners outside your pollution cloud.

I'm not in favour of making them tougher or more dangerous across the board, because if you like to expand your base to megabase, then you end-up clearing a huge chunk of land for space to build, + power production + ore patches, and making biters tougher just makes a necessary chore even more tedious. A game generation setting to control their hit points or attack stats and/or spawn rates, in addition the options that we already have would be fine though. That way people who want a more dangerous deathworld can have it, whilst I can have biters that I need to consider, and deal with, even if I never choose to make them dangerous enough that they threaten to overwhelm me.

[Koub]

The Question of the Question! Tada!

Why play the people with Biters, if they don't like them ?

Curious!

Because most people want some dose of challenge. Just enough to challenge them, but not to overwhelm them. It's like people who do competitive running : they like making the effort, and trying to compete against others of their level, but wouldn't take as much pleasure with 50 kg bags to carry, bare-foot on piled glass, while getting shot at with real bullets, while being forced to listen to Rebecca Black.

Actually, I'd be happy to see a pair "biter multiplicator" settings for biter health / number / armor / resistances, to make the experience of people as hellish as possible (like we have multipliers for science costs).
But I think forcing all people who play the game to be trampled by biters just to please the 0.5% people who prefer spend their time trying to survive the biters instead of building their factory is not a good way to make Factorio enjoyable for the masses.

[Frightning]

I really don't understand that OPs complaint here. You can totally make the biters an unrelenting menace by using the existing customization options in the vanilla game (try very small start together with jacking up pollution modifier and expansion rate and size, with max biter settings).

[golfmiketango]

Personally I like the idea that as I approach very late game phases of gameplay, a kind of detente evolves between myself and the biters where they are not really a threat but just a logistical inconvenience. I feel like I've earned the right to control huge populations of bugs without much effort. This is in fact how humans relate to most prospective predators. Like, if I go downtown I really stand almost zero chance of getting mauled by a bear, but if I'm in Yellowstone National Park, its a valid concern but still a risk I can mostly control. I would not really enjoy it if the whole game became a giant endless war that I can't ever hope to win.

[Jap2.0]

Most people ask for biter combat automation. Automation is meant not to require constant attention from the player, but to set up whatever is needed for things to work, and let the automate do the job.
Asking for a combat that continuously puts pressure on the player is antinomic.
I'm not opposed to some kind of rebalance, but I don't want to have the impression I struggle every single second to survive, even at endgame. At one point, my technological level should give me overwhelming supremacy over the indigenous lifeform - what it does.

Personally I think that people want something more like the mod Robot Army as an automated way to deal with biters. Sure, turrets are automated, but not automation in the style of Factorio, in my opinion.

[sicklag]

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[sicklag]

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[sicklag]

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[5thHorseman]

I don't understand, why players don't want it. This, what we are talking about can easily setup through a game setting. Why the hell, the users cry and say: "Please, NOT", if we can handle such things via the game options ? I don't understand these people. They can play their biter friendly setting and we our hell setting. What's the problem guys ?

Have I overlooked something or is this just: "I don't want it, nobody want it thing ?"

Given infinite development time, sure. But the Factorio developers don't have infinite time. Completely rewriting the biters would take a lot of time, which - considering this is not the game's main focus - is a misuse of resources.