Make biters more visible

[doc]

First I'd like to say I'm absolutely loving this game, I've clocked up nearly 100 hours since discovering it through Steam. Right now I have only one major bit of feedback which is please, please make biters more visible against the background. The problem seems to be much worse playing on my laptop (which doesn't have great screen contrast) than on my big desktop monitor. But having just lost yet another chest crammed full of items purely due to not realising there was one more biter on the screen, I thought I should comment. The problem is the biters just blend too much into the overall colour scheme, and there is so much detail everywhere they can end up extremely well camouflaged. I usually only find them by looking for the damage indicators on structures. Unfortunately this has broken down now I have my Logistic Network up and running ... robots keep repairing things so there aren't any damage indicators! It's also really difficult from the minimap to see exactly where the warnings are, and the warnings hang around even after the biters are dead so this sometimes causes me to think all is clear when it's not.

My suggestions are as follows:

* Change Biter colour scheme, make them very bright and colourful so they stick out like a sore thumb. Perhaps make the sprites a bit bigger also.
* Adjust minimap warnings so you can a) pinpoint the exact tile the warning is coming from (maybe an arrow pointer), and b) make warnings disappear *as soon* as the biters are dead. Have a different "all clear" sound that plays instead of the klaxon repeating when in fact everything is dead.
* Also, would be nice to make ghost buildings a bit more prominent ... maybe a pale glow in addition to the transparency. It's sometimes a bit hard to make out where things have been destroyed, as the ghost building sprite blends into the rubble sprite a bit too.

Anyway keep up the good work devs! This is really only a minor pain point in an absolutely fantastic game.

[ssilk]

In my opinion it's part of the game, that they are difficult to see. You can hear them well!

I put random laser/gun towers here and there to avoid that, especially at points of their interest, like burners, mines and of course the chests. It's also important, to have your basic factory protected by walls.

It's just that easy.

But I think this should be discussed. Not sure, if this is balancing, so I leave it now here.

[doc]

My feeling is that the difficulty of the game should be derived from tactical and strategic factors, not how good your monitor/eyesight are! Particularly unfair on players with visual impairments. Sure there are elements of action in the game but even those don't need fast reflexes... just click roughly in the direction of the enemy. Making the enemies hard to see on purpose seems very much like artificial difficulty, for me at least it doesn't anything to the gameplay except frustration.

Of course I do eventually get an impenetrable wall built. But at a certain stage of the game there are gaps, and sometimes one or two get through

[Evitro]

the difficulty of the game should be derived from tactical and strategic factors, not how good your monitor/eyesight are!... Making the enemies hard to see on purpose seems very much like artificial difficulty

Gonna second this. So many times have I been attacked and not been able to see where. However, I do feel that the biters have a good art style. Maybe add some brighter colors?

[ssilk]

My eyesight is well and even very good players don't see them. They are wild animals and have some natural camouflage, like any wild animal.

Changing that would change the graphical appearance of Factorio, which is in my eyes good as it is and should not change much.

It is also not needed, cause
- you see them clearly on the radar. You can hear them. And you will be alarmed, if they attack you.
- It's part of the game to have them visiting you. The game wants you to be surprised how they come into your base and wants you to protect you against such "visits",
- it enforces you to have some kind of strategy against them: The task is to concentrate on your factory, not on the visiting natives.


What I think is this:

a) Enable to place some kind of ground plate (e.g. very dark stone) that highlights them better.
b) Make the alarm so, that you can click on the alarm to see the part of the map clearly.
c) Have some kind of device (some kind of tower) which is cheaper than radar that is able to "highlight" enemies. Such a highlighted enemy can also be attacked better (can give some kind of bonus for shooting)

Also this: A simple change of the appearance scan be done by a mod (and is already used by some mods).

[vanatteveldt]

c) Have some kind of device (some kind of tower) which is cheaper than radar that is able to "highlight" enemies. Such a highlighted enemy can also be attacked better (can give some kind of bonus for shooting)

+1, not sure if this is what you meant but it would be really nice if (a) turrets/the player can miss biters in the dark, (b) normal lamps and a "flood light" turret help against this [(c) possibly triggered by a pressure plate], and (d) biters prefer attacking during the night.

[ssilk]

I thought to an "ultraviolet lamp" as extension to the normal lamp. Everything looks very cool then.

[Ghoulish]

My eyesight is well and even very good players don't see them. They are wild animals and have some natural camouflage, like any wild animal.
Changing that would change the graphical appearance of Factorio, which is in my eyes good as it is and should not change much.

A fair point. The thing is, nearly every week there is someone on these forums requesting change to graphical elements in Factorio. For example people who are colour blind and can't see the various resources on the map like stone ore, or red green wires on logistic networks. And the thing is, even though I don't have this problem, I can't see why those who do should have their game experience negated in some way because of it. Bit like how I can walk easily, yet totally see why ramps should be everywhere for those who can't.

Colour blind mode or high contrast, normal stuff like this should be common in a game of the 21st century, right? I'd love to see the devs say 'at some point', because I think they're fantastic at listening to the community, great at telling us what's new or incoming, and the end game will be worthy of the 98% Steam rating. I know this today And the frequency of the request warrants the time.

[doc]

- It's part of the game to have them visiting you. The game wants you to be surprised how they come into your base and wants you to protect you against such "visits",
- it enforces you to have some kind of strategy against them: The task is to concentrate on your factory, not on the visiting natives.


What I think is this:

a) Enable to place some kind of ground plate (e.g. very dark stone) that highlights them better.
b) Make the alarm so, that you can click on the alarm to see the part of the map clearly.
c) Have some kind of device (some kind of tower) which is cheaper than radar that is able to "highlight" enemies. Such a highlighted enemy can also be attacked better (can give some kind of bonus for shooting)

Also this: A simple change of the appearance scan be done by a mod (and is already used by some mods).[/quote]Granted the camouflaged colourings are fairly realistic but gameplay should always trump realism so I don't want to get too bogged down there.

I would be all for making biter attacks more hardcore ... it is much too easy to defend with turrets once you have the resources, and the game should severely punish you if you fail to defend properly. However the mechanism for this punishment should absolutely not depend on such a contextual visual trick.

- you see them clearly on the radar. You can hear them. And you will be alarmed, if they attack you.

Here are some problems. Once biters are in your base, you can't see the red dots on the radar, they're covered by the yellow or red warning triangles! (Which, again, don't disappear until quite a while after the attack has finished) And relying on audio has the same problems as relying on vision in terms of accessibility, and sometimes I want to play the game with the volume low or muted, music on in the background, etc.

In terms of making them more visible without changing the art style too much. It would seem reasonable (also in terms of biology and evolution) for biters to have markings of fluorescent spots. These can be very small but would be enough of a visual draw to spot them easier. In nature (I believe) there are creatures with such markings, that can use them to see each other, but their main predators/prey are unable to see due to the specific makeup of their vision. This would make them more visible at night and explain why turrets are able to see them.

Anyway ... I consider this all "ease of use" rather than "gameplay altering". Since as you have said the biters are supposed to be visible on the radar anyway, there is technically no gameplay difference in making the sprites more visible also!

[Evan_]

I also have to agree with sslik a few others here.

Realistically, a species doesn't get to the top of the food chain by being bright and visible. But who cares about realism..

From a gameplay perspective... I feel we have more than enough ways to detect and eradicate aliens, and doing so requires minimal concentration and time investment from the player on the default setting. With bug-properties set to 'high', such problem would never arise - if you don't build a wall with a lots of turrets, they eat you before you need to start worrying about starting resources depleting. But even with such a world, dealing with setting up the defences is a minor task compared to... well, everything else. I visited a few servers, but yet to see a factory that couldn't have been walled up in an hour tops, provided there is stone - and usually there is, as not many things need it.

[Kaiji]

I agree with OP that the biters need to be more visible, but for me the main problem is that they're not very scary because I can barely see them against the background. They might as well be ASCII for the visual impact they have.

The current biter graphics are fine as an alpha placeholder but I hope they get a good overhaul before release.