Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

[Serenity]

There is a lot of room between "biters should be a mere annoyance" and "biter should always keep up with your progress". I don't want infinitely scaling enemies either, but putting their ceiling a bit higher (with new resistances and tactics) would be very nice. So just tougher endgame enemies so your defenses need to be strong and more diverse. Could work as an option, so you can also have an easier endgame

[bobucles]

Don't forget how the armor system gets into play. 10 damage might be functional against 8 armor but 8 damage against 8 armor is a recipe for death.

Early to mid game biter strength is more like a rising lava floor. As long as you can stay slightly ahead of the lava you'll be okay. The moment you fall behind it's game over. All of the pressure exists when you're scraping along, being 2 feet above the lava is serious but being 10 or 100 or 1000 feet above the lava is not scary. As such that level of serious pressure ONLY exists for early game factorio and is gone the moment you research fire/lasers.

[adam_bise]

I think options for biter difficulty should be available just like the terrain options when creating a map.

There are just some things that mods can't fix.. like pollution behavior. The ability to tweak how much pollution is absorbed by spawners would allow pollution to creep past the first few rows and create many more simultaneous attack waves.

Here is a map that illustrated what I mean. I would like the polluted area to extend far into enemy territory and create many more attack waves.

pollution.png (266.02 KiB) Viewed 3333 times

[BlueTemplar]

There are just some things that mods can't fix.. like pollution behavior. The ability to tweak how much pollution is absorbed by spawners would allow pollution to creep past the first few rows and create many more simultaneous attack waves.

Here is a map that illustrated what I mean. I would like the polluted area to extend far into enemy territory and create many more attack waves.

What you're proposing would decrease the overall number of biters attacking you (more pollution being absorbed by terrain).
And probably make for smaller waves.

[Darinth]

There are just some things that mods can't fix.. like pollution behavior. The ability to tweak how much pollution is absorbed by spawners would allow pollution to creep past the first few rows and create many more simultaneous attack waves.

Here is a map that illustrated what I mean. I would like the polluted area to extend far into enemy territory and create many more attack waves.

What you're proposing would decrease the overall number of biters attacking you (more pollution being absorbed by terrain).
And probably make for smaller waves.

Depends heavily on how it was implemented. If biters had a cap on the amount of pollution they could absorb, but were still effected as if they'd absorbed it all... the biter waves would increase, with the amount of increase inversely proportional to the absorption cap. Such a system could in fact entirely prevent biters from absorbing pollution, while still having them act as if they were absorbing all of it and thus spreading out only limited by other terrain based absorption effects. The result would be a massive (probably unsurvivable) increase in the biter waves.

[BlueTemplar]

Huh, looks like that spawners actually work a bit like this - but in an opposite way !

I think options for biter difficulty should be available just like the terrain options when creating a map.

There are just some things that mods can't fix.. like pollution behavior. The ability to tweak how much pollution is absorbed by spawners would allow pollution to creep past the first few rows and create many more simultaneous attack waves.

Here is a map that illustrated what I mean. I would like the polluted area to extend far into enemy territory and create many more attack waves.

pollution.png

Wow, due to a bug, you were actually right !
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-283

Spawner pollution hoarding fix

As you might know, the Spawner/pollution/attack mechanics work this way: Spawners absorb pollution that reaches them, and after absorbing a certain amount of pollution, they send a unit to join an attack group. The amount of pollution depends on the type of unit, and later units need more pollution. There is also a cooldown limiting the amount of enemies sent to attack per time.

So far, so good. But there is a fundamental problem with the algorithm we use, as we randomly figured out by looking at the debug data of a Spawner next to our base.



As you can see, the Spawner needs 200 pollution to send a unit to attack, but it already accumulated more than 100k pollution, which is enough for next 500 units. Basically, the problem is, that the Spawner can accumulate an unlimited amount of pollution at a much higher speed then it can ever use. So the first row of biter nests can easily prevent the other nests from accumulating any pollution, which kind of breaks the difficulty scaling and the whole mechanic. Whether you make a little bit of pollution or a crazy amount, the amount of attacks might be the same.

The solution is simple, the Spawner now has an upper limit to how much pollution it can absorb, which is 3 times the most expensive unit it can spawn for the current evolution factor.

We made some basic testing after this change, and it seems that it is survivable enough for the release, but we might want to tune the default pollution/evolution/attack modifiers during 0.17 stabilisation.

[MoleOnDope]

I agree that, on default settings, the bugs tend to be more of an annoyance than an actual threat especially late game.

However, I know exactly how frustrated I got on my first two maps that I had to abandon because nooby me just couldn't keep up with the enemy hoardes. And of course not, you know nothing about pollution correllating to the intensity of attacks, about the amazing laser turrets, advanced and possibly OP combat tech... It takes time to get to know all that and it is a real challenge for most people.
And with 0.17, Biters are still getting several buffs (more nests closer to the starting area, pollution affecting more nests, no more belt traps...)

If there's highly experienced players who need an extra hard nut to crack, that's great! There's an absurd amount of options in the map generator you wouldn't find in most games and that allow for pretty much any hardcore playstyle you could imagine. And if that doesn't suffice, there's a whole universum of mods I haven't even dared to look at yet.

So, generally cranking up the difficulty for a comparatively small group of experienced and skilled players can't be the way to go. That would have straightup driven me away from this gem of a game, and most likely many others too.
The options to do so manually are there for those who need it, I think the default balance is just fine.

[bobucles]

It's good to see that late game difficulty was sagging because of a bug. That means more late game difficulty after it gets fixed of course!

edit: Aw man. It also means my isolated island biters won't be infinite sponges any more. Actually, what happens if biters can't find a path? Will all the spawners fill up and the pollution simply creep out forever?

[BlueTemplar]

Natural Evolution Enemies and Rampant mod have more then 150.000 downloads combined. This shows that there is demand for Biter focused gameplay.

Bob´s mods average about 3-400k, logistics has 500k. Angel´s smelting/refining/petrochem ~300k.
Should we make that mandatory for vanilla?
Thats all the versions combined anyway.
Every patch a modder released over the years. Rampant has 40 version numbers for 0.16 alone.

That means over 1 million players are not interested for harder biters. So biters should stay as they are .

Yeah, you can't really compare like that, due to mod versions.

The most popular mod version is probably
Bob's Functions Library mod 0.16.6 with 150 K downloads.
Bob's Enemies 0.16.0 has 128 K downloads, but then they're often downloaded together...
Whereas Rampant 0.16.34 tops out at 8.4 K downloads,
Natural Evolution Expansion 8.0.2 at 6.9 K downloads,
and Natural Evolution Enemies 6.4.0 at 6.6 K downloads...

So the only thing that we can really say is that ~15% of the Bob players do NOT want stronger biters (some of which are probably playing without biters at all...)

IIRC we're close to 2M Factorio players total these days ?

[quyxkh]

Download number != steady-play number, not for Factorio, not for mods. I'd bet the ratios are wildly different for different downloads, too.

[BlueTemplar]

TBH, with default settings, I struggle surviving the biters at least early game. Not everybody is good at fighting.

As such that level of serious pressure ONLY exists for early game factorio and is gone the moment you research fire/lasers.

However, I know exactly how frustrated I got on my first two maps that I had to abandon because nooby me just couldn't keep up with the enemy hoardes. And of course not, you know nothing about pollution correllating to the intensity of attacks, about the amazing laser turrets, advanced and possibly OP combat tech... It takes time to get to know all that and it is a real challenge for most people.
And with 0.17, Biters are still getting several buffs (more nests closer to the starting area, pollution affecting more nests, no more belt traps...)

If there's highly experienced players who need an extra hard nut to crack, that's great! There's an absurd amount of options in the map generator you wouldn't find in most games and that allow for pretty much any hardcore playstyle you could imagine. And if that doesn't suffice, there's a whole universum of mods I haven't even dared to look at yet.

So, generally cranking up the difficulty for a comparatively small group of experienced and skilled players can't be the way to go. That would have straightup driven me away from this gem of a game, and most likely many others too.
The options to do so manually are there for those who need it, I think the default balance is just fine.

What version of the game was that ?

If you have an issue with biters, why wouldn't you want to try new weapons on them ?
In my first game, I've noticed the TANK! tech fairly soon, and was very excited to reach it... (Other people seem to be attracted to laser turrets...)
(I quickly got tired however, seeing how the biters seemingly could barely "scratch the paint" on it - that was a default settings 0.15 game, and so I didn't have any really big nests with large worms nearby - it's probably not a coincidence that I abandoned that game shortly after...)

And nobody proposed "generally cranking up the difficulty" :

It is not my point to make the game impossible with scaling up evolution or expansion speed.
I cleary suggest this as an ENDGAME feature like endless research is also an ENDGAME feature.

Non of these should have an impact on the normal gameplay until you reach said engame.

(Like bobucles, I'd say too that the issue starts when you reach oil in the late green science era.)

And by the point that you reach oil, set it up, and start making depending items, you likely have more experience than the median player.

[GrumpyJoe]

As much as im against the OP idea, I feel I need to jump in here to bring it back on topic
Because people are suddenly talking about their first maps experiences, mid game pollution etc.
I think with more and more of experience, every biter level is manageable, doesnt matter if you like it or not.
If you absolutly have to, you can always turn them off.
There are different reason, and all are valid
Im the first to admit that i first turned them off because they were too hard. I turned them on again and even completed a deathworld. Now i turn them off again, because there ARE a nuisence more than they are a threat and at the planned size of my base will only hurt in performance, nothing else


He HAS a point about the endgame biter scaling tho. IF you are into fighting biters as a motivation.

But i think its a philosophical problem, rather than a balance one.

Since its the only other recent game i play, i´ll compare Factorio to Rimworld:
In Rimworld, you kinda play tower defense. Or whatever the OP meant.
You tech up, you enhance your colony and pawns.
The harder the setting, the harder the events the game throws at you.
You can play it on peaceful, but thats rather dull, as it also doesn´t send you much "good" events either.
I haven´t ended a game since B18/1.0, but i guess even with peaceful setting, at the end you will still need to fight for your ship, to finally leave the planet.
Essencially, its almost the same, its about assigning jobs, build your colony with short routes, micromanage storage zones and crafting jobs etcs...
BUT the game tries to outright murder you, if you go above a certain number of pawns. The more your colony is worth, the more raiders with different behaviours get thrown at you and at more difficult settings you get nature events that work against you and non-humanoid factions that can really screw you and your colony up. To a point where you just lose the game.
Thats the base game, thats the design idea, or least what it evolved to (only playing since A16)

Imho, Factorio is different. Altho its also about automation/efficiency, it is NOT designed with a final showdown in mind.

Since you can tweak the settings to your likings, i wouldn´t mind lategame scaling biters.
IF the devs have time for that.
But a look at the forums recently (0.17 hype) you can see thats not where their focus is, or should be.
When you read between the lines, some FFF posts, even after 6 years, sound kinda surprised (if not frustrated) by the time it took them to get 0.17 released, with some of the planned features coming later than they planned/expected.
With that in mind, i dont understand anyone asking for a totally different gaming experience, when you can just mod it.

To quote one of the pinned posts of this forum:
I´ll just leave the link

[MoleOnDope]

However, I know exactly how frustrated I got on my first two maps that I had to abandon because nooby me just couldn't keep up with the enemy hoardes. And of course not, you know nothing about pollution correllating to the intensity of attacks, about the amazing laser turrets, advanced and possibly OP combat tech... It takes time to get to know all that and it is a real challenge for most people.
And with 0.17, Biters are still getting several buffs (more nests closer to the starting area, pollution affecting more nests, no more belt traps...)

If there's highly experienced players who need an extra hard nut to crack, that's great! There's an absurd amount of options in the map generator you wouldn't find in most games and that allow for pretty much any hardcore playstyle you could imagine. And if that doesn't suffice, there's a whole universum of mods I haven't even dared to look at yet.

So, generally cranking up the difficulty for a comparatively small group of experienced and skilled players can't be the way to go. That would have straightup driven me away from this gem of a game, and most likely many others too.
The options to do so manually are there for those who need it, I think the default balance is just fine.

What version of the game was that ?

(...)

Aaaaand you cut off exactly the three lines where I explicitely approved your point

With that in mind, i dont understand anyone asking for a totally different gaming experience, when you can just mod it.

To me, what good ol' GrumpyJoe said (including his further explanations) is the perfect conclusion to this.

[BlueTemplar]

Sorry, but I felt that we *were* getting offtopic...

Well yeah, sure, I can always use mods, that doesn't mean that I don't want to help brainstorming what would be the "best" vanilla Death world experience...

The options to do so manually are there for those who need it, I think the default balance is just fine.

Ok, fine, but if you *do* want a late-game biter threat, which settings would make the late game challenging ... but keeping the early game survivable !
( And should perhaps be the default Death World setting ?)
(And the OP asked about after-the-end game challenge, what settings could provide that?)

Actually, never mind, with 0.17 being so close, it's kind of pointless to find the "best" 0.16 settings - let's just wait to see the changes !

[GrumpyJoe]

Well yeah, sure, I can always use mods, that doesn't mean that I don't want to help brainstorming what would be the "best" vanilla Death world experience...

Actually, never mind, with 0.17 being so close, it's kind of pointless to find the "best" 0.16 settings - let's just wait to see the changes !

I get abit carried away on those topics, because to me it feels like everyone is _demanding_ nowadays.
Thats not aimed at you or the OP, it just feels like everyone feels entitled to get what THEY want.
Not here, the majority of people in this game on the forums is quite relaxed.
Some posts just were abit too much for me lately, especially about 0.17 and WE DESERVE IT NAO, WE BLOODY PAID FOR IT!. And i dont even feel the need to jump in for the devs, they´ll be fine. I just get triggered buy some people´s attitudes and let it out elsewhere (and bring some of it, maybe more, from outside this place).

So yeah, brainstorm
Alot should be solved in 0.17 anyway, not only through the new pollution absortion mechanics. But also with map gen.
I think the best way would be to look into chunk generation and biters. The amount of nests in 0.16 vanilla feels just silly sometimes, death world or not.
They are either off, or just overwhelming in numbers, even with small ones and not much evolution (not saying there are hard, just too much). Imho it not only lacks in late game scaling. Sometimes it feels like there is no scaling at all. RSO does a nice job, i often forget how vanilla does here.
With less biters around the start, you could easily create a wall of red dots on the map later. While scaling up, it often felt just tiresome to clear masses of them for a tiny bit of land, but as soon as you laser turret creep..... Doesn´t even need to be with space science, it already feels boring.
With higher numbers the further you go out, less absorption and possible new map gen (if biter gen isn´t in this patches rework, that should be solvable withing the experimental time) this should help abit.

I cant just see it coming soon, final balancing (maybe new/improved presettings?) etc is said to be worked at for 0.18/1.0
So working with the mod creators and find a good balance should help the most. Im pretty sure the devs know these mods.

[pato]

well the last FFF showed what i didnt expect. Devs buff biters.

This is all i wanted actually.
Will see if it now feels like a challange or if nothing changes at all.

With endless research in turret damage it should still not change much (and i have to upgrade something just to produce pollution at all)

Devs still should give us a possibility to buff biters. i mean you dont have to play with it if you dont want to but its also crappy for people who want to make biter war servers but when it has mods no one joins

[HYPPS]

I've got an idea for biter balance into late game. If you add a radiation pollution level to the map from mining uranium and processing it/using it that evolves the biters in a 4th dimension - (4) for example attack speed (current ones being 1=health,2=resistances,3=damage). You know as soon as you get start to gain interest in uranium the radiation from it should mutate the biters into berserk mode, or like on some comfyplay mewmew server the biters explode(and spawn lower tier biters) and spitters have a chance to turn into worms upon death. It shouldn't effect early game balance, only late game balance slightly. Also for those who don't like this possible balance change have an option at map creation to disable radiation pollution and mutation.

[SyncViews]

well the last FFF showed what i didnt expect. Devs buff biters.

This is all i wanted actually.
Will see if it now feels like a challange or if nothing changes at all.

With endless research in turret damage it should still not change much (and i have to upgrade something just to produce pollution at all)

Devs still should give us a possibility to buff biters. i mean you dont have to play with it if you dont want to but its also crappy for people who want to make biter war servers but when it has mods no one joins

I think really it comes down to the player somewhat. The difficulty settings and dev changes only really matter early-mid game, the player (if they survive) scales past them at some point. Even if there was a new biter tier, at some point that tier is no longer a threat with the current general game mechanics.

You can make the start of the game almost impossible, but long game, if you want a challenge right now, even in 0.17 from my testing, more limitations are needed, which the player can set themselves.

• Don't touch the infinite weapon techs. In fact in most of my 0.16 games I didn't even do the last of the regular ones. On suitably hard settings you are likely beating the first behemoth tier biters while still using AP gun turrets upgraded 3 or 4 times, or a few levels of laser turrets. Even then I never needed a double wall if I had construction bots around to repair/replace.
• Ban laser turret walls, especially ones a distance from the base so that pollution gets mostly absorbed by trees, water, or at least spread out across a large perimeter. They are really easy to build, even before personal roboports and practically end the biter threat.
• Don't use uranium ammo. I found it is really cheap for what it is, so takes out the logistic challenge of getting enough ammo production. Sticking to AP I was really challenged to keep claiming new iron/copper just to survive (especially on expensive mode, with the double cost steel plate).
• Don't use artillery as a defense. While it is really cool, the biters have no counter and it pushes the bases back, drastically reducing the spawn rate and wave sizes.
• Don't clear out biter bases unless they are strictly in the way of expansion. It takes the game hours to respawn them, meanwhile most pollution gets absorbed by trees and water, and what does reach biter spawners is too spread out to form large attacks.
• Don't use efficiency modules. Unfortunately they also drastically reduce pollution, even if you are using nuclear or solar power anyway. Miners, furnaces, etc. with max efficiency don't generate many biters.
• Potentially don't use beacons with productivity+speed, solar, or nuclear. Also increases overall efficiency and drastically cuts base pollution.

[BlueTemplar]

Like mods, self-imposed restrictions also work -
(and with mods, no Bob's Sniper Turrets, no AutoFill, and using TurretDelay without pushing turrets with PickerExtended...)
- but this discussion is hoping to do better than that !

If you add a radiation pollution level to the map from mining uranium and processing it/using it that evolves the biters in a 4th dimension

Wait, aren't Behemoth Biters green already because of the radiation?

[CDarklock]

You can make the start of the game almost impossible, but long game, if you want a challenge right now, even in 0.17 from my testing, more limitations are needed, which the player can set themselves.

Question: should we make some of these limitations that the player can enforce from the start of the game? Like, you can turn off technologies and block an entire branch of the tech tree because now its dependencies aren't available?

I ask this because I've seen a lot of players in other games complain that they are weak-willed people and can't just not use a thing that is sitting right there. Like when you can put insanely overpowered guns on your ship in a space combat game, and they make the game stop being fun because they're... well, insanely overpowered... I've seen people complain that these guns should be removed from the game entirely because (a) they ruin the game, and (b) players should totally not have to employ the minimal self-imposed restriction of "don't buy them." (Which makes a lot more sense in a multiplayer game, but in a strictly single-player game I think it's just weird. "Don't let other people do this because I don't like doing it myself.")