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[Tyrindor]

Jumping into this conversation to agree with statement that biter respawning is practically non-existant on default RSO.

I'm not an expert on modding but I notice a considerable difference in respawn rate (or how/where they choose to respawn?) in 0.13 RSO over 0.12. Venturing out into the outer reaches also didn't really increase base difficulty, if that is also intended.

Base difficulty doesn't change that much - there are few thresholds where bigger worms arrive. They also get slightly larger with distance.

And RSO doesn't do anything with enemy migration. There is a new algorithm for that right now in base game that might have changed things. Also base game migration delay is quite long and RSO leaves tons of space to spawn in.

And setting biters to high or very high frequency and/or size doesn't help?

I do use Natural Evolution so have no idea how vanilla behaves but biters are very interested.
Default migration timers are very long I thinka nd there is a lot of place to migrate so might be slow to come to your base.
I did a test with default settings recently and migration worked properly.

Default enemy settings in RSO are meant to be easy. You need to increase them in map settings if you are looking for more challange.

I haven't found a real easy way to test nest respawns, I will play with biters 1 step above default next time and see if it more suits my taste.

My problem isn't really the frequency or size of the bases, it's the fact they never respawn. I saw some respawns in my outposts 1000-2000 blocks away from my base, but nothing remotely close to my base respawned. The new spawning system detects how many player entities are nearby and that's the factor for how often nest spawn in that area. I'm guessing that RSO cranked that way up to the point of nests never spawning within a huge radius of a big base.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean in last part. New migration penalises areas near player structures - it's just not that binary as previous one so victory poles don't work.

Please check in debug menu (F4+F5) and look for expansion candidates in F4 menu. You can see then where enemies would like to expand.

I can set game speed to 100 and let it run for hours and not a single nest ever respawns within pollution range of my main base - even with an evolution of 92%. I can Uninstall RSO and do the same, and nests start spawning again. My first two maps in 0.13 were vanilla, and there was a huge different in mitgration. The nests were popping up all over the place, and by the time I reached 90% evolution I needed tons of turrets and walls around my base and outposts. I haven't built a single wall or turret in any of my RSO maps since 0.13 - I just kill bases nearby and the threats gone forever.

So I don't know what to say. Something RSO is doing seems to be affecting mitgration mechanics in 0.13 - even if unintended. 3 different people mentioned it in the last page, and there's been a couple reddit posts about it. I'd assume you haven't seen it because you play with natural evolution which changes mitgration mechanics.

[snowhusky5]

This is unrelated to the biter migration issue, but here is another problem I noticed. Basically, with default settings, the 4 starting resource patches have waaaaaaaay lower richness than any other resource patch, even the closest ones to spawn. The richness of the starting patches is actually at a good amount IMO (maybe a little high), but the other patches are much too high, especially the ones right next to the starting area. Here's a few screenshots of a map (seed 1357), using the YARM mod. The 4 starting patches are on the top of the list, the numbers on the left denote how far away the patches are from spawn (in blocks), the numbers in the middle are the ore amounts. About the north/top half of all the patches on the map are listed. The ones at the bottom are the closest, and you can see a big difference:

all default settings (peaceful):

lowest frequency, size, and richness (peaceful):


You might want to change the default settings, because as is, someone could simply expand to one ore patch of each type outside their immediate starting area and have plenty of material available (until they start the rocket building process probably, since it is super expensive). I will mess with the settings myself tomorrow, to hopefully get a slower increase.

Also, your configuration lies when it says that donut shapes are disabled

[orzelek]

I'll try to look into biters not biting - I'm assuming it's with only RSO installed no other mods present?

As for resource balance - it's a tricky thing. Currently it generates using same rules but different base richness for starting area and outer areas.
There is some additional scaling there based on patch size that could affect everything to be higher. This one will be difficult to balance.

As for donut shapes - you can get donut like shape with certain configuration even with dounts disabled. Since it randomizes positive and negative meta balls for each resource field it can drop high negative one in medium positive one and you'll get a hole in resource.
Try to enable donuts to see the difference with actual donut generation. Shapes can get much more tangled then.

[Tyrindor]

I'll try to look into biters not biting - I'm assuming it's with only RSO installed no other mods present?

I have bobs mods installed, including bobsenemies. It's possible there is a conflict but I think I tested with just RSO when 0.13 first launched.

I did another test today and set biter to the highest settings possible, then cheated in MK6 power armor with a ton of the auto firing MK6 thingss. Proceeded to clear out hundreds of nests with gamespeed set to 100. I then stood on the starting zone until the playtime clock said 20 hours played. Proceeded to run around where all the nests were. I did get some respawns, but only like 6 small nests and that would have been over 20 hours of actual playing.

[snowhusky5]

I just went and tested the biter expansion problem (with only EvoGUI enabled besides RSO), and there is definitely a problem with the biter expansion while using RSO. I used the console to map out a 1024x1024 area around spawn, then cleared all the biters in it, then mapped out a 2048x2048 area around that, then sat at spawn with 100x game.speed. After 7 in-game hours of waiting (and increasing the evolution time-based rate so it had reached about 80% by then), there were no new biter nests in the 1048 area. Then I did the same thing without RSO, and after 5 in-game hours, there were several new biter nests of spawners inside the 1048 area.

I'm not entirely sure why this mod would be causing this. Perhaps setting

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data.raw["map-settings"]["map-settings"].enemy_expansion.enabled

is somehow messing up the biter expansion, like if the new biter expansion AI is different from that variable and by setting it to true you are re-enabling the old expansion behaviour. Also, perhaps the biter bases with RSO are just too small and/or sparse, and aren't reaching some critical mass, or you don't kill enough of them in normal play to trigger an expansion response, etc. Maybe you could try disabling RSO biter spawning and re-enabling the vanilla biter spawning.

If anyone else wants to test this, here is a convenient console command to get some gear:

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/c game.player.insert{name="power-armor-mk2", count=1}; game.player.insert{name="fusion-reactor-equipment", count=2}; game.player.insert{name="exoskeleton-equipment", count=5}; game.player.insert{name="energy-shield-mk2-equipment", count=10}; game.player.insert{name="flame-thrower", count=1}; game.player.insert{name="flame-thrower-ammo", count=100}

[orzelek]

I just did a test on 500x500 area and biters got to center after 7-8h. And next base spawned near 10h mark.
The thing is that in vanilla biters far out are dense which means there is no place to expand there - so they don't have that many expansion candidates far out from player.
In RSO on default settings there is plenty of space on the map so a lot of migration will happen far outside. And if you clear large area out of bases you will protect it for long time since there is still a max range of migration thats by default 7 chunks. And biters will then migrate between their bases after that going to center and to you - it's random a bit but seems to work this way.

Also in my test migration was concentrated on outside and sometimes on edges of the map which only enforces the fact that you are then safe in the middle. Also forests will prevent migration into certain areas completely.

My current conclusion is that if you want to fight biters actively then you need to increase enemy base frequency.

I'm thinking I could add some additional functionality to increase enemy base density a bit after certain distance to reduce the amount of free space far out.


Using the chart area function:

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/c game.forces.player.chart(game.player.surface, {left_top = {x = -2000, y = -2000}, right_bottom = {x = 2000, y = 2000}})

and the debug feature that shows expansion candidates you can easily see the vanilla vs RSO difference.

I'm not sure atm if I want to make enemies more dangeours by default. I will leave the enemy expansion enabled for now.
I will adjust spawn chance a bit to increase faster with distance from center.

[snowhusky5]

Anyways, I'm going to be playing with the vanilla biter spawns, since I'm more into the base defense aspect of factorio than the quest to launch a rocket. Turns out it is pretty easy to re-enable vanilla biter spawning with this mod, if anyone else wants to, you just have to comment / otherwise disable the code in data-updates.lua relating to biters and turrets, and turn the config option to disable RSO biter spawns to true. I'll also mess around with the resource settings to find a set that I enjoy, maybe I'll edit it into this post. Thanks for the prompt replies and everything!

[orzelek]

Anyways, I'm going to be playing with the vanilla biter spawns, since I'm more into the base defense aspect of factorio than the quest to launch a rocket. Turns out it is pretty easy to re-enable vanilla biter spawning with this mod, if anyone else wants to, you just have to comment / otherwise disable the code in data-updates.lua relating to biters and turrets, and turn the config option to disable RSO biter spawns to true. I'll also mess around with the resource settings to find a set that I enjoy, maybe I'll edit it into this post. Thanks for the prompt replies and everything!

Hmm tbh I could add this as separate option under the one that disables spawning.
Might be easier then trying to rebalance them - people that prefer vanilla spawns will be able to get them.

Edit:
If you grab latest version from mod portal you can use the config options to chose between RSO or vanilla enemy spawning.
I'd recommend getting a radar mod to search for resources with vanilla spawns