Enemies +

[Hannu]

It sounds good on paper that biters should be smarter about where they attack. If you have a far away base connected via rail/power lines, they should probe to attack the undefended sections. It sounds good on paper that biters should form larger groups to have an overwhelming attack.

However, all this does is force players to build more military before building other things. If you want enemies of mixed types of resistance, then the player just builds different types of turrets.

That could be balanced by adjusting number of biters. I would like to have small number of interesting biters. That would give interesting decisions. Now whole map is filled with biter bases and only way to expand is just clear everything by tedious fighting. If there were fewer bases I could explore the land and maybe choose between clearing nearby ore patch or build longer line to free patch. I could go around biter bases and so on.
Of course current amount of clever biters would change overall balance of the game towards fighting game with interesting resource production mechanics. I do not want that. But of course number should be adjustable from zero to insanity and those who like more combat weighted game could use high settings.

Mods can extend on this gameplay and many do. For the sort of game factorio is trying to be combat is in a pretty good spot.

Biter intelligence would be so demanding that scripting can not handle it in reasonable time. It should be hard coded in game to be effective. Clever biter mods seems to be very home made tricks and I do not find them much more interesting.

[Cribbit]

Biter intelligence would be so demanding that scripting can not handle it in reasonable time. It should be hard coded in game to be effective. Clever biter mods seems to be very home made tricks and I do not find them much more interesting.

Have you ever actually tried modding? Have you ever actually tried writing AI? I don't mean to be rude but there's a very wide gap between a textual "I want it this way!" and what actually goes into making it.

[Veden]

The Rampant mod mentioned here implements alien factions, which cover areas like a biomes, each faction is made up of a specific resistances and attacks that are similar for every unit, worm, or spawner within a faction.

The largest bottleneck in modding AI for this game is the individual unit pathing, attacking, and dying which ends up consuming the most processing.

What homemade tricks would you find more appealing?

[foodfactorio]

hehe, maybe a new mod that lets another player be able to see all biters within range of the player (x2) and then be able to select biters, and issue commands to them (like zerglings from starcraft). that way, they can send multiple groups of biters to different targets of the players base, so see if the other player made a base with enough defenses

[foodfactorio]

zerg-found-on-giphy.gif (2 MiB) Viewed 2563 times

(ive got nothing against peta - gif just looked cool for the concept, plus matching alphastrikes name)

[Hannu]

Biter intelligence would be so demanding that scripting can not handle it in reasonable time. It should be hard coded in game to be effective. Clever biter mods seems to be very home made tricks and I do not find them much more interesting.

Have you ever actually tried modding? Have you ever actually tried writing AI? I don't mean to be rude but there's a very wide gap between a textual "I want it this way!" and what actually goes into making it.

I have made mods in Factorio but nothing as complicated as AI. And I have programmed simple "AIs" for fictive "insect" simulators with C. Actually that is just what I suggest. Few very simple rules of operation which can hardly be called as intelligence but they would greatly enhance natural feeling of aliens. For example simple estimations of conditions, natural needs and fears so on. They take some time to program, but if devs hire graphics specialists to use thousands of hours to enhance graphical aesthetics, which is as futile as playing point of view, they should (in my opinion) put few hundred hours to get thing behave more naturally than million identical copies of enemies spawn from nothing and run straight on nearest turret.

[Veden]

I have made mods in Factorio but nothing as complicated as AI. And I have programmed simple "AIs" for fictive "insect" simulators with C. Actually that is just what I suggest. Few very simple rules of operation which can hardly be called as intelligence but they would greatly enhance natural feeling of aliens. For example simple estimations of conditions, natural needs and fears so on. They take some time to program, but if devs hire graphics specialists to use thousands of hours to enhance graphical aesthetics, which is as futile as playing point of view, they should (in my opinion) put few hundred hours to get thing behave more naturally than million identical copies of enemies spawn from nothing and run straight on nearest turret.

Would you be willing to describe in more detail what you consider the differences with this and the homemade tricks you said weren't very interesting?

[Hannu]

Would you be willing to describe in more detail what you consider the differences with this and the homemade tricks you said weren't very interesting?

My knowledge of those mods are very old and probably outdated so I do not want to complain any details or specific mods. At some point several versions ago I checked some but was not very happy. I also read that such mods may cause performance problems if number of biters is very large. I prefer huge (20-50 km^2) trainworlds with belt based factories so I have in any case some problems with UPS. And also with biters, for some reason thousands of biters tend to accumulate on some regions and I have to delete them with command. I am not sure is it fixed, I have not had a really long game after 0.14.

But is it possible to program individual behavior of biters effectively? Simulate what they see and make some decisions. I suspect that if not, possibilities to program interesting behavior is very limited. I may think too much real ants or insects instead just game entertainment and do not expect that biters never will be what I would like. But even some enhancements would be nice addition to aesthetics and game immersion for many players.

[mudcrabempire]

What I´d like to see is biter attacks being more coordinated. I see it time and time again, a seemingly huge colonn of biters marching towards my base and I think my defenses are done for, but then the whole colonn stops and the biters line up to attack one-by-one giving me an easy victory. I don´t even need mazes, they block themselves so good already.

I´m not sure how difficult it would be to implement, but I´d like to see a form of "group-AI". For example: "March mode": Like now. "Enemy detected": The whole group goes into attack formation. "Charge": all biters in the group charge as one.

It´s neither much nor elaborate, but I think it could help to give large groups of biters a real feeling of "tide of enemies swaring over your defenses".