Big Biter at the beginning!

[Mahariel]

Hi, today i start a new game with version 9.1. And after 2hours of playing, the first aliens who came, was a horde of BIG biters which are spawned in the forest directly at my base! Can´t do anything against the big biters at my techlevel. Is it a bug? Something wrong with the evolution factor? I dont know what to do now. And what is the best way to destroy the forests especially at lower techlevel? They get on my nervs because i want to build turrets and cant because of the amount of trees.

[ssilk]

Forest: shotgun, flamethrower. Later poison and of course construction bots.

[Calico]

Did you use a custom map? If you have, did you move far away from the initial starting location (0,0)? Or is it a normal freeplay game and you moved away from your starting location?

[Mahariel]

It´s a custom map that i´ve made. And i moved i little bit away from the initial starting location but not very far.

[cube]

This is a known problem. Biter evolution increases when going further from the strarting point, and moving the starting point in map editor counts as being further as well. This is already in our internal bug list, so it should get fixed pretty soon.

[Mahariel]

This is a known problem. Biter evolution increases when going further from the strarting point, and moving the starting point in map editor counts as being further as well. This is already in our internal bug list, so it should get fixed pretty soon.

Ahh ok. Thanks very much for that information! Yes i moved the starting point in the map editor.

Now i´m motivated to start a new game without changing the start point. At my first free game i chose the peacefulmode to learn the game mechanics and to reach the highest tech level. And now i wanted to have more fun and challenge with normal biters. But big biters in early game as i researched steel is a little bit too much fun.

But i can delete trees and add resources to the map without these heavy evolution increase yes?

[SilverWarior]

As long as you stay in your starting area there you won't have any problems unles generating heavy polution.
When using level editor you can also specify starting map generation parameters. So in order to minimize starting problems with biters you could increase the Staring area size.
I usually use "Big" size for it. This alows me to move a bit farther away from starting position still without worying about biters too much. I don't recomend using "Very big" size as you might have problem in finding biter bases for later techs.

EDIT: Also since you are using editor to prepare map for yourself a few tips:
- surround your starting area with water so you can chanel biters attacks to only certain areas (would alow you to defend your base more easily)
- try to have resource fields near the entryways into your base. Why? Usually mining generates the most polution especially in the begining. And since biters alwys launch their attacks toward area with most polution you will easily manage to protect more important parts of your base this way. This even works if you are not surrounded with water.
- you could look around your startin position and remove already generated biter bases so they are not so close to you. But this won't necessarily mean that when you expand there they won't be there. Since biters do spread sooner or later they will buid their bases there again (not necessarily on same locations). This would give you some head start advantage.

[Mahariel]

Thanks for your advices!

[xng]

And as a sidenote: YOU are the alien, not them... =)

[slpwnd]

I was looking at this but actually the spawn shift has a negligible effect whatsoever. So the reason is probably something else. Could you please provide a save so we can have a look at it in more detail?

[slpwnd]

So today this mystery has been solved:D I was testing the scenario-pack supply challenge mission and in order to do that I built some spawners in the map editor. And whoaa when I started the game there came red and blue biters on me.

Biter evolution factor should increase when enemy spawner is killed but due to a bug in code it actually increased in the onDestroy method which is btw: called periodically when hovering with the spawner to be built. So the effect was that it was enough to play just a little with biter spawners and the evolution factor would skyrocket. This will be fixed in 0.9.7.