On biter difficulty

[psihius]

Hello everyone.

I was chatting with FishSandwich and I kind'a nailed the description of how game feels on harder levels of biters

Warning: I'm copy-pasting the chat message as is, some hard language is present (nothing you don't hear in the movies though)

chat log

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8:25 psihius: they just need to tune that middle part where you are like locked into the base
8:28 psihius: because right now it's like - well, I can deal with them, with some care. Whoohoo, GRENADES!!!! Oh fuck. HOLY SHIT! (spend 5-7 hours inside the base, on occasion raiding smallest biter nests you can find for some artifacts for armor and stuff), *MK1 power armor done* well, with some capsules now I can at least kill something. *MK2 done* I'M TERMINATOR, EAT THAT FUCKING SCUMBAGS
8:28 psihius: does not feel right
8:28 psihius: :D
8:28 FishSandwich: lmao
8:28 FishSandwich: That pretty much hits the nail on the head.

So, I would like to open a discussion on how other players feel about this and encourage developers to do some balance tweaking based on the difficulty levels, maybe chip in some AI improvements. Shake the sandbox with some changes, besides the long term improvement plans

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

I agree to some extent. When the base's start spawning medium biters, it becomes too difficult to fight the enemy and you are forced to turret creep. And with the new spitters it just got even worse.
You can't fight them effectively until you reach power armor 1, in which i hope you stored up 50 or so alien artifacts just to build. Run in, throw some capsules, and leave. Typical distractor capsule hit n run tactic.
But there are tanks now, which allow you to fight them before power armor, And are cheap. If you are playing multiplayer you can just suicide crash into the nests, Else its a run and pray to hit while hit and running, Because its pretty difficult to drive the slow tank close enough to even do a good amount of damage to a huge base, before needing to do another lap. (its easy, but the damage part is slow)

[Garm]

I've actually killed a ton of biters with one tank and poison capsules for worms.


In fact it is the end game combat, that feels grindy for me. almost no feeling slow end tedious eradication.

[Rahjital]

Wait, what? I can't agree with that at all. In early game, all you need is any armor and an SMG with piercing rounds (unless your name is Zisteau and the game throws big worms right next to your base), in mid game you have the tank, which is blue science but very cheap both to research and build, and in late game you have power armour. And if you decide to mass produce distractors or destroyers, biters become about as threatening as trees. Just don't neglect weapon research and you won't have to hide (of course, this doesn't apply as much if you ramp biters up to be everywhere, but then you are intentionally breaking the balance in biters' favour )

I think that if anything, biters become really boring once their evolution reaches the top. They just come, get moved down, occasionally a spitter gets to spit before getting vapourised and a construction robot fixes the damaged turret. Pretty much zero change from 0.10 where a horde of big biters came, occasionally a biter got a nom of the wall before geting vapourised and a construction robot fixed the damaged wall. Hell, speaking about walls, they are rarely even needed anymore because big biters are too few to ever come close. And all enemies die and respawn too quickly.

The devs did say they plan a combat rebalance, though. Who knows, perhaps we will see it or at least a part of it in 0.13.

[just_dont]

I'm pretty sure you're joking about tank being "mid game". You can get it out in the midgame, by crafting blue packs semi-manually, but that require you to specifically focus on it, and in general it's hardly any different from rushing laser towers without much automation (it IS possible, but in no way it's a natural progression).

Or perhaps your definition of "midgame" is rather extravagant. For me, proper blue packs automation signify the end of midgame and the beginning of lategame. There are not much mandatory tasks left after you get blue packs production going, the rest is strictly lategame: you research what you want, you make extra assemblies to mass-produce what you want, and you can pretty much play without constraints.

The car is midgame, but the tank is not really. And the car is useless against medium worms/spitters/biters.

[psihius]

Well, it feels like some of you are not talking about the "most frequent, the biggest, the very good" settings for the biters, and that's what i'm talking about. The end game means that you have capsules and enough of them to be killing everything you want (although at those settings you can get overwhelmed if not careful).
They just come in such big hordes, that tank just gets almost alpha killed - happened to me a few times, the big spitters just one-shot the tank on a drive-by, had to GTFO on foot like crazy, because power armor MK1 just could not handle the punishment and capsules were not yet in full swing.

Sometimes it depends on the map layout, sometimes it's pretty easy. And sometimes you get a giant base right on your doorstep and you just can't handle 20 spawners throwing biters at you - they just swarm you. In MP it's easier, but not by a lot. Many play with "starting area - big or very big", that also gives a lot of breathing room.
The default settings are pretty easy when you know what you are doing and don't really pose a challenge, the hardest stuff just locks you behind the walls of the base for some extended period of time and you just have to have distractor capsules, or you just get killed in 5 seconds by a swarm of 40-60 biters and spitters, unless you do the turret creep.

[psihius]

I'm pretty sure you're joking about tank being "mid game". You can get it out in the midgame, by crafting blue packs semi-manually, but that require you to specifically focus on it, and in general it's hardly any different from rushing laser towers without much automation (it IS possible, but in no way it's a natural progression).

Or perhaps your definition of "midgame" is rather extravagant. For me, proper blue packs automation signify the end of midgame and the beginning of lategame. There are not much mandatory tasks left after you get blue packs production going, the rest is strictly lategame: you research what you want, you make extra assemblies to mass-produce what you want, and you can pretty much play without constraints.

The car is midgame, but the tank is not really. And the car is useless against medium worms/spitters/biters.

He's spot on, I think the definition of mid game differs between us. The power armor is late game, tank is past the bulk of the mid game. You need explosives and they are easy to make, but you have to syphon off the oil, and oil usually at that point in the game is not that abundant, unless you happen to sit on like 15-20 spots in your spawn area. Oil is really needed for sulphur, plastic, even sometimes a sizeable quantity of solid fuel - it's constantly a struggle that forces you to expand when you are not ready.
Distractor/Destroyer capsules aren't cheap too, they need a lot of resources, and at that time you usually need an outpost or two, because spawn area resources are non-existent any more.
As he said, you can push for tank specifically, but that's not how usually things roll, and even then - getting 6-7 big biters and about the same amount of spitters of your tank usually means you need a big circle to kill them off and by the time you get back to the spawn area, you manage to get a shot at best and need to GTFO at full speed, or they just block your tank and if you don't have at least shields on you - y'r dead on the spot.

P.S. A friend calls it "The Starship Troopers" level of difficulty. And he's not exaggerating - try it Everything on normal, but biters on max levels on everything and normal starting area. I promise you, you will hate those bugs for a reason

[Adil]

Well, the factory-environment (as in 'player-biters') interaction is horrifyingly underdeveloped at all settings. Cranking it all the way up simply highlights the problem.

[Rahjital]

I'm pretty sure you're joking about tank being "mid game" ... Or perhaps your definition of "midgame" is rather extravagant.

Yes, we definitely see this differently. For me, midgame starts with oil production, and the first thing that comes with that is automating blue science. Most people go for Advanced Oil Processing as their first blue tech, but for me it's Tanks (20 packs, by far the cheapest one) followed by Military 3 for the combat shotgun. Since big biters don't yet appear at that point, you can just ride around with only piercing ammo and bulldoze the nests all you like, provided you don't mind spending half a dozen repair packs after that. After you automate cannon shells, you can utterly dominate them until big biters start showing up in numbers.

I'm not sure what 'natural progression's is to you, but people's play styles are going to be different, and what is natural to one may be strange and unusual to another. I tend to focus on military tech and don't bother with things some people consider absolutely necessary (any kind of robots, both combat and logistic/construction, accumulators, etc.), so that may push me a bit ahead when it comes to fighting biters. Still, that just shows that the game is flexible - if you ever need to get a tech earlier, you can try doing things differently and alter the way you play a little.

Well, it feels like some of you are not talking about the "most frequent, the biggest, the very good" settings for the biters, and that's what i'm talking about.

Well, is it really surprising that biters can be difficult if you crank them up to the max? If you put biters everywhere, you break the balance and make biters more powerful than they are supposed. The game mechanics actually hold fairly well considering the huge changes this does... I would consider the outside of your factory being too dangerous to be a good thing.

I personally play with biters on Low frequency, Big size and Very Good richness so that there are large bases but I don't have to fight for absolutely every inch of ground, and it is as important to navigate around biters as it is to actually fight them. Combat still works fine by that point (and by fine, I mean about as well as it does with default settings). I can see how it would be different in the 'biter hell', of the hardest settings, though I'm not convinced any change is needed.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

guys, its a deathworld! Not no starship trooper enterprise hell of biters!

Early game, mid game, end game. We all see it different but i introduce pre-game to my set. Pre game is when you start the game, You are setting it up, before it begins. Early game starts once you have smelting and red automated. Mid game starts when you research your first blue (which is most likely cracking, because anyone that doesn't is playing ezmode oil settings), And end game begins 30 hours into the game. Very different from anyone elses view i would assume.

Biters are extremly easy, don't get me wrong. Very easy to attack and kill, tons of different methods. Just don't go afk for 10 hours after starting the game or you will be facing the big biters (i think) due to that time evolution stuff.
But it is also very easy for the player to die, couple big spitter attacks and you are dead, get a big spitter base with 10 or so spitters, and your tank will almost instantly get wiped out if you make a 2nd trip without killing them off at your defensive wall first.
But to me, As much as i love deathworlds, Killing biters is too much work at times. Low frequency biters helps, but mid to end game, they can respawn very quickly unless you have a wall stopping them.