Factorio Forums

[yeah i know mods but being official would be nice. if not, modders please! as far as i can tell the mods havent gotten close enough to this yet] [also clearly not everyone may want this direction, so another game mode would be easily possible id imagine]

i love this game for its complexity and pretty much endless player potential to grow and get more efficient... but one thing that keeps me from playing this game way way more, is if it was more RTS... if we could build robots (infantry) robot controlled tanks, and permanent combat drones

of course if we get this boost, the zerg... er, alien creatures... should get some kinda upgrade too, make them more complex, slowly build out their base (give them more buildings with uses, like new unit spawners, towers, traps maybe, anything awesome)


this game has everything to make a truly great rts, just, without the rts yet. ill hope for this i guess

sorry if this is brought up all the time... though if it is, id take it as a hint for success

See viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6 RTS direction

Trouble is, consider how many biters there are in a game. If you make them clever, they use more CPU and the game gets slower the bigger it gets.

I think all that is needed is some tweaks to how they react to when you attack them. Currently the spawner goes from spawning one biter per minute to one every three seconds or something crazy, and when there's fifteen spawners in the nest you're raiding it gets out of hand very quickly.

IMO they should have a "buffer" of say 5-10 biters, and spawn one biter per x time (say a minute). If there is room in the buffer, the biter goes into there. When the player approaches, the buffer is deployed to attack the player, but production stays at x. That way you have the option of dealing with the initial wave then clearing out the nests, there are of course still worms to defend it and for larger bases you will still have a few biters chasing you (20 nests = 1 biter per 3 seconds). This can scale with evolution to make raids more difficult later in the game.

I would have thought this would be relatively simple to implement with minimal resource cost but adds a lot of strategy to attacking nests, and if you can prove you can withstand the initial onslaught then why make you wade through it constantly? Batteries become more useful as combat isn't so extended, and then we reach why I bring it up here.

If you can command units it gives you openings to attack. You could have a main force move in and engage the biters, drawing them out while a strike team flanks the spawners. Also if you destroy a spawner, its buffer is destroyed with it so pre-emptive strikes have value, and the buffer could contribute to biter attack forces leaving only say 20% behind so if you counterattack you will meet less resistance.