Inter-nest diplomacy and War.

[Joefesok]

The long and short are as follows:
This post is made under the assumption that Alien Peace/Diplomacy (viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3762) is implemented at some point, and has a number of assumptions that aliens start using resources similar to this: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3440

Short:
Nest clusters communicate with each other periodically, and on either on a random or per-resources available basis, nests will become friends, stay neutral, or become enemies with each other. The player can influence this if they become friends with aliens. If the player angers many nearby nests via pollution or destroys a large number of nest clusters, the biters of the world may band together to rush the player down.

Long:
Nest clusters send biters to "talk" to each other. Nests are generally given a bit more intelligence with their location, preferring to be closer to food and water sources, though this scouting range can be fairly small. Fewer nests spawn initially to allow this system room to grow. Once nests communicate, they will generally agree to a trade. If there is a resource disparity or one nest is chosen to randomly be more aggressive than the other, the nests may declare war on each other, though most of the time they will just trade. This aggression could be based on a form of stat, or just a random chance. After a time of peace, nests may agree to some form of pact, and become one larger nest, spread out across the area.

Here enters the player. Through the trade system outlined in the Alien Peace proposal, the player could potentially pay neutral nests or beseech friendly nests to attack neighboring nests. This allows the player to potentially widen their area of influence through not actually fighting.

Finally, Alien nest clusters may drop their disputes and fight the player as a coalition if the player demonstrates high aggression or causes large amounts of pollution. This may eventually grow out of control to army ant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_ant) sized affairs with the player fighting every single nest cluster in their sphere of influence, or perhaps the world if communication remains unchecked.

For this to work well I think Biter spawn rates would need to increase. Additionally, this opens a new endgame scenario, albeit the one that essentially means you failed, where you effectively just re-enact rocket defense and leave the planet.

Unfortunately the system might be taxing on one's processor, and it sounds fairly code intensive.

EDIT: I'd also like to apologize if this has been suggested before.

[ssilk]

I wanted to say something similar to
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21213#p133310

[Joefesok]

And I'll say again, I think that if alien diplomacy is possible then diplomacy and war should also be possible.

[ah9illator]

Fairly new here so please forgive me if:
-this has been posted before
-I'm breaking any rules
-it's already planned
-this belongs somewhere else
-makes no sense

TL;DR: Make a way for the player to be able to control biters and use them to their advantage.

Long: I had an idea that I thought would be pretty cool. What if there was some sort of way for the player to control biters, whether it be via genetic engineering, 'robo-biters', or through sound waves from the new speakers, achieve peace, or something like that. I thought it would be cool to have some sort of endgame mechanic that would allow the player to harness biters to act similar to the robots and roboports or be used for offense/defense. The biters could also be 'trained' to maybe patrol walls or create an army that the player would be able to unleash on other biter nests and things. The biters could maybe be created in a lab after researching them or maybe if the player attacked a spawner and took it down to very low health, they would be able to 'infect' it with the modified biter genes, and take over the spawner and have it create friendly, controllable biters. If the control mechanism was biological in origin, the player would perhaps have to research biter genes or engineer a pathogen to infect and mind control them, or if it was mechanical/electrical, the player would have to make some sort of device to place on biters and control them, sort of like that RoboRoach thing from a few years back. In order to keep it balanced, the 'infected' spawners would have a chance of occasionally spawning rogue biters that could convince friendly biters to revolt and attack. Or the pathogen route is chosen, infected biters would not be hurt/controlled, but it would give them sort of a lingering poison effect on you if they attacked you. Or if the RoboBiter roach route was chosen, the player would have to trap and attach the mechanism, and it wouldn't be guaranteed to work forever, and other biters would now be hostile towards it. The new controllable biters would also have a small chance to randomly defect and start attacking your factory, but since it is technically one of yours, your auto defenses (turrets and such) would not attack it, that would be left to you or your biter army. The biters would be able to attack or defend your base, maybe shuttle resources back and forth at short distances but not be able to preform anything complex like repairing. Anyway those are just some ideas I had, and again, sorry if this is not a good idea or too complex or anything.