Enemy AI in relation to difficulty

[DigitalShadow]

Let me start by expressing how much I love this game; It really does push the boundary and innovate a new niche of game play. That said, I feel the current enemy ai implementation to be a bit of a background nuance. For as much replay value that this game has to offer, the alien intelligence becomes too predictable between plays. I've tried a few mods to address this issue, and the best approach I've seen is the "Rampant AI" implementation. While this greatly extends the replay value for my personal tastes, I still feel there is a bit of a wall hit for that certain type of "survival" feel. I love building factories in peaceful mode, don't get me wrong, I fully encourage this avenue of continued development. I also love the current ai implementation, I'm not suggesting getting rid of it, its just the first element of game play to become stale to me. What I would love to see (and may yet attempt to implement on my own, via modding) is a higher tier, or different spectrum of game play, that differs with the enemy trying to kill me by being more intelligent rather than simply scaling in number and strength. In sandbox mode, especially, it seems the only difficulty regarding the aliens seems to be frequency and size of nest. This seems to cap with biggest and most frequent enemy settings, with very small starting area(No starting area well surpasses my ability thus far).

Some specific examples I run into frequently is being able to trigger enemy attacks to control their number over time, by luring them into a choke point. They also only ever build up their numbers until they reach a certain threshold, then beeline towards the attack, come what may. I quite like the concept of using ant behavior to aid in addressing some of these issues. From what i understand, ants achieve a sort of hive mind capable of semi intelligent behavior. First principal of their behavior is decentralization; there is no central controller triggering events. Each and every unit makes it's own decisions based on it's neighbors behavior, thus giving rise to complex swarm behavior. Their primary method of communication appears to simply be pheromones. "Rampant AI" does implement some of this to what I think is great success, but I believe it could be taken further with spectacular results. A simple "death/danger" pheromone signal leads to the enemy skirting around turrets to the soft fleshy parts of my base, and tactical retreats when they start dying off too quickly.

The ant metaphor also seems to have a secondary appealing side effect, where enemy bases may take the form of underground holes(or termite mound, or wasp nest, etc) in which they can build up out of sight. It would also help take down the monotony of creeping turrets one at a time through a forest of hives. A "big" base could just as easily be represented by a single but larger entity.


tl/dr: For replay values sake, consider making the enemy scale in intelligence, not just in size and population.