Suggestion for Biter behaviour improvement(?)

[DEFENESTRATOR-666]

I've had this idea for a long while now, and I actually haven't checked the forums to see if this has been suggested yet or if a mod like this exists so if it has or does respectively, my apologies, I didn't intend to plagiarize.

As it is biters are mostly a pest that don't pose a threat unless it's a death world or you produce more pollution than you can handle. If you run out of iron and you can't make ammo, etc. Their level of threat is proportional to your supply efficiency, and if that falls then you fall too. This makes sense of course, Factorio is a game about building supply chains to support a growing demand. I'm also aware that some players choose to play without biters since they don't like the stress of having to race against increasing biter aggression. So, just like you are given the option to turn off biters completely, I think it would be cool to have an option for different or more advanced biter behaviour.

What I was thinking is, what if biters functioned somewhat more like ants rather than mindless petrol huffers and used a sort of pheromone system? Ants drop pheromone trails to aid in building supply routes and spreading information about resource availability to other gatherers. In that same logic, they also spread (if I remember correctly) different pheromones in order to warn ants of danger or to invite to a hunt.

Say for example you have 50 biters die into your wall initially, some of these release a pheromone (think pollution in game terms, but the type that repels rather than attracts), that deter other biters from attacking there again for a while (or permanently), making the next wave seek a different attack location and forcing the player to spread defenses evenly. Perhaps nests could communicate with one another to synchronize attacks and stress out your production capacity, creating openings in your defences. I'm aware this may result in the player base being surrounded by repellant pheromone, forcing the player into a sort of siege phase. Perhaps the biters could start growing worms just behind the repellant pheromone to attack you out of gun range?
Obviously these are just a few ideas, I think the introduction of this sort of system would introduce a very different type of challenge to the game and would give more relevance to the military aspect of the game which I believe is kind of underused.
I don't know the next thing about game design or balance though, I can barely code more than an HTML page so I'm not sure how unreasonable this request is, but considering it's using existing game mechanics (pollution) I believe it wouldn't be incredibly hard to code. Maybe the biggest issue would be balance.
Either way, I think this could be quite fun for a certain kind of person, thanks for reading all of my ramblings.

[NotRexButCaesar]

Sounds kind of like the rampant mod. The reason that this hasn't been implemented at the current time is because of performance concerns.

[ssilk]

There are many ideas around pheromone controlled biter behavior and how to make them more interesting.

One good starting point is viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440&start=30 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)

But the threads there are old. For newer ideas around that most of this search
search.php?keywords=Pheromone*&fid%5B0%5D=6
point to relevant stuff.