Fighting with progress

[Alexandrus]

I know that a mod like for example dytech offers more difficult biters, but I would approach this without game changing modifications.

The current issues with fight I have are:

1. The biters are predictable, they always follow the same path
2. Once you destroyed nearby bases, you have no further attacks
3. Once you have your laser walls up, you can forget about the biters
(solved) 4. It is hard work to clean large biter bases

Proposals:

1. Coordinated biter attacks (same time, many camps). This is especially evil for people who don't have enough accumulators
2. Variation of biter paths, approach a target from different angles
3. Increase the range of the attacks with progress, pollution range so far is insufficient for later game
4. Some artillery. It should be a crazy biter magnet. It should be expensive like hell. That would be an alternative to building a laser defense
into the middle of the enemy base (these gigant bases where you don't get close without being hunted by 50+ big biters)
A continuous attack from all bases around (crazy style) to destroy the artillery would be ok. Better then the try to destroy one building with a tank
and hope you don't get stuck in a tree while being hunted by the entire biter camp.
Edit 4: Seems I should play more with attack bots, the "magnet" idea remains (and I think is not really unique to me).

5. Biters should attempt to rebuild their bases. This also makes for a challenge to keep your bases in new territory. (Do they expand? Never seen it?)

I saw some interesting things in the release messages from 11.04 http://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-71, new buildings etc.
These would be ideal triggers for really nasty biter behaviour.
Edit 5: It was mentioned they do, but I guess they do it very slowly. Maybe some facts can be added.


Don't get me wrong, its really a lot of fun building these heavy laser walls. But I am a bit disappointed no one really tests these defenses later on.

[Nemoricus]

5. Biters should attempt to rebuild their bases. This also makes for a challenge to keep your bases in new territory. (Do they expand? Never seen it?)

They do. However, if you've built something where their nest used to be, they'll avoid that region for nest building.

Also, another issue with biters is that they're entirely driven by pollution levels, so if you clear out all of the nests in your pollution zone, and keep them out, you're pretty safe. Of course, this gets to be more and more work the bigger the zone is...

One thing I'd like to see is this: Biters need resources of their own to build and expand nests, as well as for making biters/spitters. This would give another avenue for dealing with enemies by disrupting their supplies. Of course, this also upsets them considerably...

[Marconos]

I know that a mod like for example dytech offers more difficult biters, but I would approach this without game changing modifications.

The current issues with fight I have are:

1. The biters are predictable, they always follow the same path
2. Once you destroyed nearby bases, you have no further attacks
3. Once you have your laser walls up, you can forget about the biters
4. It is hard work to clean large biter bases

You make some valid points that I'm hoping they address. In the meantime here are some thing you can try to spice things up for yourself while they advanced the game and hopefully balance things better.
1. Agreed, turn up your biter levels and you may have more difficulty.
2. If you follow my suggestion in point 1, it makes clearing about large nests earlier much more difficult.
3. Don't use lasers or only use a few and rely more on gun turrets. The increased maintenance and materials makes things much more difficult. Also if you really like lasers, don't stop using them but don't due laser turret pushes and the like. They can greatly cheapen the difficulty in the game.
4. As the bases get larger, go with MK1 armor or better with Distractor or destroyer bots and you will find the hives drop easily. Once you get to about 30 destroyer bots you should be able to fairly easily clear out hives clusters of 20 - 30 + hives in size.

3.

[Alexandrus]

@Marconos: No lasers? I admit, thats indeed hard:-) Do you mean turrent updates? I don't know what turrent pushes are.
I will play around more with the bots, maybe thats enough a replacement for an atillery.

@Nemoricus: I have a savegame where I build a laser wall around a really large area. It becomes easy with roboports and construction plans.
Upsetting biters in a really large area would make some interesting gameplay. Some "magnet" which is necessary for really high tier technology. E.g. some building for processing alien artefacts...

They rebuild too slow.

[joekool92]

This is the same issue I'm having, vanilla factotum is too easy after you have walls, lasers, and roboports. So long as raw materials and power are coming in you become practically invincible. The enemy types and behaviours are too static.
My ideas are:
1- more enemy types that can render the standard laser wall less effective
A- suicide bomber types (likened to mine craft creepers) that have randomised targeting (will randomly attack any player structure in a polluted area)
B- some enemies evolve laser resistant armour (I see some player armour and whatnot list resistances, why shouldn't enemies have them too?)
C- enemy structures (enemies have their own turrets, why not walls?)

2- manifest destiny
A- enemies attempt to expand into player territory aggresively
B- nearby enemy bases will join up with each other and/or travel between nests

3- new defence structures
A- long range artillery with minimal range and slow tracking, can damage player structures.
B- grenade turrets, use grenades as ammo and have not limited range than artillery but higher tracking and rate of fire

4- randomised pathing
A- existing enemies randomise their attack patterns and attack any player structures rather than focusing certain points
B- coordinated attacks- enemy nests randomly execute group attacksfron multiple points

[Alexandrus]

Thinking about it...it seems one could increase the probability of "base founding" with pollution.

[Elijah]

Yeah I agree. Biters should get a bit of love.

[SHiRKiT]

Actually bitters don't actually respawn their bases. You can beat the game without barely suffering attacks if you do this:
- Go further and destroy biters bases around your base while they are level 1 biters.
- Make yourself a "wall" of transport belts in a big (I mean BIG) radius around your base. Like 1 belt every 100 tiles or so (not measured, prolly 3-5 chunks)
- ?????
- Never get attacked again

Issue is bitters only spawn in certain chunks, and the chunks that are chosen to spawn bases can't have a player built structure in the surroundings (I think it's 7 chunks, 4 in each direction), so you abuse this mechanic to the limit. You block their ability to build bases near your base with transport belts (?????), which I think it's totally lame.

Just activate the debug menu to see this mechanic working =\