Dormant Hives Released by Pollution

[espritcrafter]

So I'm just making stuff up here.... Not sure how much this pertains to the storyline.

So you are a few engineers were "industrializing" this huge resource planet and preparing it for a wave of colonists to land and populate it. You went up into your ship to do a low orbit scan for resources, when for w/e reason, there was a malfunction that caused your ship to crash. Before all of this happened, biters were very rare, and were not aggressive.

The pollution from your ship's crash landing (nuclear fallout maybe?) created a huge surge of pollution that stimulated and woke up dormant biter hives that were hibernating deep underground. This is the backdrop for your current situation (that I semi-made up), and sets the foundation for my idea I would like to present.

When you produce a certain net amount of pollution, small pockets of aggressive biters spawn throughout the map, including within your previously safe zones. Perhaps have the spawns cluster around major areas of pollution. As this repeats, the groups spawned will get larger and stronger, until they begin spawning with hives or even worms. It might also be interesting to have packs of worms spawn w/ no biters.

After I get solar panels, I feel that the biters are no longer a threat, and I could really take my time to clear things out. The pollution I produce at my furnaces and assemblers are of almost no impact, and gets absorbed by the environment faster than it can spread to a biter nesting area. I feel that this would add back in some of that sense of danger, and give you some more pressure to optimize your setup to minimize pollution.

Any thoughts?

(If mines could be upgraded to "attract" biters with lights/sounds, then this would also make mines more useful. Just scatter a bunch throughout your base.)

[n9103]

Erm, the devs spent a good amount of time hunting down and closing off cases that allowed biters to spawn within a player's base. Pretty sure they don't want to go back on that work. Plus, I don't think anyone really wants to be forced to cover their entire base with turrets either.

[ssilk]

I think the base (the bases, the outposts) should be needed to be protected at the borders only.

The inner area should be protected - if needed - by some kinds of defense-robots (a "defense area", everything inside is automatically attacked). On the long run, this will also make the border defense obsolete, which is on the long run, also too time consuming. (in my opinion)

[espritcrafter]

I find that I spread my territory so wide that I don't really need any border defense... I don't get attacked, since all of my polluters are so far inland, that none of the pollution ever makes it out. And this is playing with all resource settings put down 1 level, and all enemy settings put up 1 level. I get a warning popup once in awhile, but that's just because I sometimes have turrets near enemy hives, and a single wandering biter ponders far away from its hive. Only fighting that happens is when I decide to expand my territory.

This is the reason I felt that there should be some other factor that triggers some sort of attacks. Maybe send all nearby biters that are defending their hives on an attack wave instead of causing internal trouble would be more palatable.

As it is right now, border defense is non-existent for me except for an occasional single stray once an hour or so.

[DerivePi]

Consider Dytech Warfare mod for a late game offensive/defensive challenge.

For me, I like to have a safe zone so that I can ponder and develop complicated machines in peace. With the mod, developing the safe zone takes a bit more and extends the tension a bit.