[MOD 0.12.20+] Misanthrope 0.3.7 -- Better Biter Mechanics

[kyranzor]

Try Misanthrope 0.4.1 beta, supposedly rails were removed from being primary targets.

[credomane]

I haven't tried misanthrope yet. Going to give it a go in my next map. Are you opposed to adding biter types to the game? Here are some ideas I had. Mod might already do some of them or been mentioned by others.

New tactics:

• The Stream: Biters form a continuously growing group. Once the group reaches a certain size they begin to charge your defense in single file in an attempt to drain defense resources. Primarily used as distractions
• The Stream Pulse: If The Stream is growing faster than it is dissipating a "pulse" might get sent. A pulse will consist of a group of biters breaking off at once to charge the defense.
• The Swarm: Biters form up a massive group and attempt to overwhelm defenses. Potentially bad if a stream attack is underway elsewhere.
• The Ambush: If biters discover an unprotected building, they destroy it, then hide nearby somewhere. In trees/forests, "under" boulders, etc. They completely ignore the player until close to the destroyed building then swarm the player from every hiding place. If spotted (read: attacked) before the trap is sprung then either randomly flee or attack player.
• The Guerilla: Special team of biters that run around attempting to ambush the player in high traffic areas. These are the scary guys. They only want the player characters.
  • Will sometimes setup a double ambush with "The Ambush" teams. Ambush teams sets trap then flees when player over whelms them. Guerillas charge in behind the players.
  • Will attempt to sneak through weakened/distracted defenses. Then lie in wait for hours before making a move on the player from inside the base.
  • Randomly destroys unprotected buildings then leave. Putting the player on edge not knowing if they are walking into an ambush or not.

New enemies:

• The Sergeant:
  • Fast, hides, squishy and is the leader of the different tactic groups. Kill this guy to cause biters of this guy's team to revert to the dumb hive mind tactics of attacking the pollution targets with no strategy.
  • These guys rarely spawn instead of a behemoth spitter would have. Such as 10% of behemoth spitters become a Sergeant instead.
• The Ram:
  • Tough defense, lots of HP, can only attack in a straight line after building up enough speed. Then must retreat to attack again.
  • These guys rarely spawn instead of a behemoth biter would have. Such as 10% of behemoth biter become a Sergeant instead.
• Tank:
  • Extremely tough defense, slow and no attack.
  • These guys tend to be first in line to approach and attract defensive fire so weaker members can appraoch/sneak through defensive lines.
  • Favored in guerilla lineups that are wanting to infiltrate bases/outposts.

[atlas242]

I have been playing with this mod, on maps, and am sure this mod is making the save and load times absurdly long, as in up to 5-10 minutes. Is anyone else experiencing this? My theory is that because it alters all the buildings, this is causing an un optimized method somewhere. Tested my current map which I started with misanthrope, with and without misanthrope. Without misanthrope load time,2 seconds, with 10 minutes.....
Another update:
removing the misanthrope mod, makes the map unplayable. Map loads up instantly, then after going and killing biter nest, the fps slowly drops to single digits. Not sure how or why.

[Afforess]

I have been playing with this mod, on maps, and am sure this mod is making the save and load times absurdly long, as in up to 5-10 minutes. Is anyone else experiencing this? My theory is that because it alters all the buildings, this is causing an un optimized method somewhere. Tested my current map which I started with misanthrope, with and without misanthrope. Without misanthrope load time,2 seconds, with 10 minutes.....

I'm hoping this is fixed in 0.6. Most discussion is going on the mods.factorio.com portal.

Another update:
removing the misanthrope mod, makes the map unplayable. Map loads up instantly, then after going and killing biter nest, the fps slowly drops to single digits. Not sure how or why.

Can't speak to the issue with removing the mod. You might want to post a bug in the factorio bugs forum.

[GrimerX]

How is it intended to play with Misanthrope + Marathon? I like the idea but 18 minutes in* I am getting swarmed and am just approaching the ability to build a steam engine Hence no research and the pistol can't shoot enemies fast enough even if that's all I do...

*I started a new game after trying to add Misanthrope mid-game to an existing Marathon save. nom-nom-nom, heh.

[AlyxDeLunar]

I just launched into Factorio after a long hiatus. After a bit of campaigning, I decided to hunt out for mods. I've always had a love of tougher combat in Factorio, and your mod has made that amazing.
Seriously, the clever jerks managed to keep me in the pre-electricity phase for an hour because they kept destroying my mining drills. It was wonderful!

This mod is amazing, thanks so much for the fun experience so far.

Also, looking through your code...you've put a ton of work into it, so a huge thanks.
I made the mod Dynamic Expansion back in the day, at the time I had entertained the idea of eventually making something like this, but I got distracted by other things. I don't think I could ever have accomplished anything as cool as this though

[GrimerX]

How is it intended to play with Misanthrope + Marathon? I like the idea but 18 minutes in* I am getting swarmed and am just approaching the ability to build a steam engine Hence no research and the pistol can't shoot enemies fast enough even if that's all I do...

*I started a new game after trying to add Misanthrope mid-game to an existing Marathon save. nom-nom-nom, heh.

I kept getting mauled early on so I made two changes - seems the main issue (in early game at least) is pollution spreading too far and triggering biter nests.
1) Removed the emissions boost - you have a lot more equipment when playing Marathon so that probably balances out
2) Removed the reduction in pollution absorption. Maybe not necessary but we'll see how it goes. Not sure if that just affects absorption or if it also affects how many biters are produced due to increased absorption. If the latter I might put it back.

I also changed to research turrets, military and armor before automation And didn't scale production quite as much as I normally would. Probably a good thing; I have turrets up and the pollution cloud is just about to reach the first biter base... stay tuned

Ian

[Mattyrogue]

So... I've been playing with Misanthrope with a friend for the past twenty or so hours, and a few observations;

1. I'm not sure if its our settings (which are on normal by the way) but Biter/Spitter bases seem to be much, MUCH smaller and spaced out. A lot of the time we find attacks coming from beyond our Radar's Line of Sight.
2. Destroying nests seems to immediately spike the Evolution Rate to an unbearable level before we can even get 400 Alien Artifacts. We used RobotArmy to automate the hunting process (And Misanthrope did such a good job of dealing with them we must've deployed about 20 squads of 7 Battle Droids just to get that much).
3. Hordes of Large Biters/Spitters during the Green/Blue Science Phase (6-10 hours) makes the game pretty unbeatable, and their composition means even a peninsula build would be overwhelmed with enough time. We had to research up to blue Bullet Damage & Turret Damage, build a dedicated belt-fed line of turrets around our base AND automate production of RobotArmy's Battle Droids and even they were barely allowing us to hold our ground, we didn't even have the research for rocketry yet! We ended up losing an entire save due to it. Our factory wasn't particularly productive, just the necessary power generation and resource mining to run one of these Automated Blue Science setups (~20 Steam Engines, ~20 Drills, ~30 Furnaces). For reference; we barely reached Laser Turrets and started producing a handfull of them before the literal 80-strong horde of Big Biters/Spitters overwhelmed our dedicated belted turret line.
4. With attacks coming from beyond visible radar range, I'd like to propose a suggestion of an upgraded radar (comes in around Military 2/3) that can see two or three times the range of the vanilla one.

But, goddamn... Now we're doing a 'toxic island' playthrough with these settings, to see what it'd be like, having only one direction, because this mod has us hooked, but if you could find a way to limit biter/spitter evolution in the first 15 hours to small, mediums and maybe one or two big ones? That'd be reaaaally nice.

Edit: Okay, so the Evolution Factor wasn't that high... They were only Bigs, but god damn, there was a lot of them for that early in the game.

[Afforess]

I made the mod Dynamic Expansion back in the day, at the time I had entertained the idea of eventually making something like this, but I got distracted by other things. I don't think I could ever have accomplished anything as cool as this though

Damn, it's you! I started this mod because of yours, so you deserve props for the inspiration. Many early versions were based off the expansion mechanics you pioneered.

How is it intended to play with Misanthrope + Marathon? I like the idea but 18 minutes in* I am getting swarmed and am just approaching the ability to build a steam engine Hence no research and the pistol can't shoot enemies fast enough even if that's all I do...

*I started a new game after trying to add Misanthrope mid-game to an existing Marathon save. nom-nom-nom, heh.

I kept getting mauled early on so I made two changes - seems the main issue (in early game at least) is pollution spreading too far and triggering biter nests.
1) Removed the emissions boost - you have a lot more equipment when playing Marathon so that probably balances out
2) Removed the reduction in pollution absorption. Maybe not necessary but we'll see how it goes. Not sure if that just affects absorption or if it also affects how many biters are produced due to increased absorption. If the latter I might put it back.

I also changed to research turrets, military and armor before automation And didn't scale production quite as much as I normally would. Probably a good thing; I have turrets up and the pollution cloud is just about to reach the first biter base... stay tuned

Ian

Good thoughts on the Marathon balance. I know I can detect if Marathon is installed and tweak the difficulty, which makes sense. I'll probably tone things down in the next release.

So... I've been playing with Misanthrope with a friend for the past twenty or so hours, and a few observations;

1. I'm not sure if its our settings (which are on normal by the way) but Biter/Spitter bases seem to be much, MUCH smaller and spaced out. A lot of the time we find attacks coming from beyond our Radar's Line of Sight.
2. Destroying nests seems to immediately spike the Evolution Rate to an unbearable level before we can even get 400 Alien Artifacts. We used RobotArmy to automate the hunting process (And Misanthrope did such a good job of dealing with them we must've deployed about 20 squads of 7 Battle Droids just to get that much).
3. Hordes of Large Biters/Spitters during the Green/Blue Science Phase (6-10 hours) makes the game pretty unbeatable, and their composition means even a peninsula build would be overwhelmed with enough time. We had to research up to blue Bullet Damage & Turret Damage, build a dedicated belt-fed line of turrets around our base AND automate production of RobotArmy's Battle Droids and even they were barely allowing us to hold our ground, we didn't even have the research for rocketry yet! We ended up losing an entire save due to it. Our factory wasn't particularly productive, just the necessary power generation and resource mining to run one of these Automated Blue Science setups (~20 Steam Engines, ~20 Drills, ~30 Furnaces). For reference; we barely reached Laser Turrets and started producing a handfull of them before the literal 80-strong horde of Big Biters/Spitters overwhelmed our dedicated belted turret line.
4. With attacks coming from beyond visible radar range, I'd like to propose a suggestion of an upgraded radar (comes in around Military 2/3) that can see two or three times the range of the vanilla one.

But, goddamn... Now we're doing a 'toxic island' playthrough with these settings, to see what it'd be like, having only one direction, because this mod has us hooked, but if you could find a way to limit biter/spitter evolution in the first 15 hours to small, mediums and maybe one or two big ones? That'd be reaaaally nice.

Interesting thoughts on the evolution rate. I am thinking I could make the evolution rate grow more slowly until certain techs are unlocked (blue science), then spike up the rate? Not sure, but I agree there is definitely some balancing improvements needed.

I definitely intended the nests to be more spread out and smaller. Larger nests didn't seem to help biters much, and hurt pathfinding. I highly, highly recommend my Big Brother mod for radar upgrades. Thanks for sharing your gameplay experience, it will be useful when I am balancing the mod a bit this weekend. Expect an update maybe this sunday? We'll see.

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Big_Brother

[Mattyrogue]

Interesting thoughts on the evolution rate. I am thinking I could make the evolution rate grow more slowly until certain techs are unlocked (blue science), then spike up the rate? Not sure, but I agree there is definitely some balancing improvements needed.

I definitely intended the nests to be more spread out and smaller. Larger nests didn't seem to help biters much, and hurt pathfinding. I highly, highly recommend my Big Brother mod for radar upgrades. Thanks for sharing your gameplay experience, it will be useful when I am balancing the mod a bit this weekend. Expect an update maybe this sunday? We'll see.

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Big_Brother

Well, I'll give a run-down of our little 'Toxic Island' playthrough with Misanthrope now;

• Hours 1 through 6, a nice slow build-up without any Biter problems... 'Course not, they can't even reach us.
• Hour 7 - The game starts suffering horrifically in terms of simulation performance, stuttering starts occurring, we start building the landbridge to the mainland, and place out some 'bots to go hunt for us. This alleviates most of our performance problems and the Biters even come over to have a go at the infrastructure on the incomplete landbridge.
• Hour 8 - Once again, we've hit a standstill in Artifact Gathering at 395, the 'Droids no longer hunt for some reason, just idle... By now, there are less than a handful of nests on the map, one of which cannot be reached due to being on an island of its own... We complete the bridge and set up a literal 'firebase' on it, before going out to landbridge to the island... I then begin to explore in the car, hoping to trigger the creation of more Biter nests by revealing new chunks, hoping that the 'droids will path again.
• Hour 9 - The Attacks Begin... Our 'firebase' does its namesake, a lone flamethrower turret on the eastern flank hosing down massive groups of small/medium biters... But then evolution triggers... The only thing keeping back the Big Biters/Spitters is that godlike Flamethrower Turret now. We manage to send out another hunting group of Battle Droids... But, there's a problem. Despite how small the nests are, each one acts like it's on Very High richness, immediately overwhelming any hunting parties with sheer numbers. It's, not very fun to watch a single Biter Spawner send out the goddamn Flood. We're still at artifact-production standstill.
• Hour 11 - The Battle Droids can no longer path it seems, their no better than expendable turrets at this point, Nests aren't replenishing and the handful that are there are sending wave, after wave, after wave of Big Biters/Spitters at us. The firebase goes on valiantly, The Flamethrower Turret is now at 1,000 kills alone. We continue pouring our research into damage to keep up with the ramping evolution rate and download some mods to try and figure out what's going on.
• Hour 12 - We get out EvoGUI and a few other small 'helper' mods (VehicleSnap) to help us figure out what's going on. Evolution Factor: 69%. Uhm, what? Twelve hours and we're already nearing Behemoths. For the record, we've killed just under 400 Alien Artifacts worth of Nests (That's, a really piddly amount, something like 13-14 Spawners on a good day, correct my ratios plz), and in our compact setup we're only running 35 Steam Engines, 30 Drills and 40 Furnaces, enough for a Compact Blue Science Factory and some Intermediate Production... It is by no means a Megafactory but something about Misanthrope makes it crank out a literal bubble of pollution that engulfs our entire radar scan range.
• 12 Hours, 55 Minutes - OH SWEET MERCIFUL JESUS THE BEHEMOTHS ARRIVE. The Firebase can no longer hold its own... My friend dies to a Behemoth Spitter while carrying the startings of my power armor while I desperately try to repair and hold the front... And, uh... We call it a night. We don't think our 4 Flamethrower Turret, 8 Laser, 4 Ballistic 'last line of defense' is going to cut it frankly.

Final Result: In the course of 13 Hours, somehow the Evolution Factor spiked to 79.5%, we think it may have something to do with the total enemies killed... Given that while there weren't many spawners... Each had the collective strength of a decent-sized hive cluster and Flamethrower turrets were ESSENTIAL to our survival the moment Big Biters/Spitters hit.

The fact that there wasn't enough 'smaller' clusters meant that our artifact gathering quickly came to a halt, and the early evolution of Big Spitters/Biters along with the frequency of their attacks meant that we couldn't just go out and take on the nests on our own... In fact, if I'd gone out with Poison Capsules there would've been nothing left in smog-range to attack us.

In Hindsight; I believe that lowering the frequency of nests was maybe the wrong thing to do... And right now the Evolution Factor seems to ratchet up rapidly the moment you start engaging the Biters. Instead, I would recommend you increase the frequency to normal numbers again and reduce the overall numbers spawned by each hive. Sorta have 2-3 clusters squabble together an attack force before sending it out... Instead of literally a single hive being able to send out what you saw up there.

[GrimerX]

How is it intended to play with Misanthrope + Marathon? I like the idea but 18 minutes in* I am getting swarmed and am just approaching the ability to build a steam engine Hence no research and the pistol can't shoot enemies fast enough even if that's all I do...

*I started a new game after trying to add Misanthrope mid-game to an existing Marathon save. nom-nom-nom, heh.

I kept getting mauled early on so I made two changes - seems the main issue (in early game at least) is pollution spreading too far and triggering biter nests.
1) Removed the emissions boost - you have a lot more equipment when playing Marathon so that probably balances out
2) Removed the reduction in pollution absorption. Maybe not necessary but we'll see how it goes. Not sure if that just affects absorption or if it also affects how many biters are produced due to increased absorption. If the latter I might put it back.

I also changed to research turrets, military and armor before automation And didn't scale production quite as much as I normally would. Probably a good thing; I have turrets up and the pollution cloud is just about to reach the first biter base... stay tuned

Ian

Good thoughts on the Marathon balance. I know I can detect if Marathon is installed and tweak the difficulty, which makes sense. I'll probably tone things down in the next release.

Haven't had a lot of chance to play lately, but I've made some progress in the game. One thing I noticed is with the reduced pollution, the lower spawning density will need to be adjusted. I only have one biter base near my pollution and it's right on the edge after 2:15 of playtime. I feel I should be harassed a bit already I noticed this isn't linked to the chunk being deactivated; biters only spawn when I go near even though the biter chunk shows as active frequently enough. Once I go near a bunch will spawn and chase me.

I'll play for another hour or before making up my mind but right now I think the base density needs to be increased, at least in Marathon with normal pollution. I think I'd prefer that over just increasing pollution.

I also agree with the other poster that linking to research milestones can help with balance over different scenarios; sending in more than a very few biters before turrets are researched is just going to end the game quickly. It shouldn't be completely tied to it though so research choices are still meaningful.

[Uzume]

Hi there,

hmm, is it me, or the game? Don´t know if i´m right here.

My "problem" is, that after 1105 in game days, or 130 h real time the evolution rate still is less 40%. it is pending between 25 and 35%.
I´m using Misanthrope 0.6.0 at 0.13.9 factorio base.

[Kill3rCat]

This mod is lovely, but I've encountered certain problems. Not glitches or bugs; as far as I can see the mod works perfectly... more that it's a bit... overwhelming.

I like the spawning of huge armies consisting of hundreds of units on my doorstep, since it does indeed make the game more challenging and the aliens more threatening. I'd however like to know how to tone down the spawn rate of said armies. Is that possible?

[segundoblz]

Hey, I'd like to point out that bitters are attacking if I get close to them even on peaceful mode :A

My prototype base is getting nomnomnomnomnom

[orzelek]

Hey, I'd like to point out that bitters are attacking if I get close to them even on peaceful mode :A

My prototype base is getting nomnomnomnomnom

Why would you use this mod on paceful mode?
If you want peaceful don't install mod that has a main function of making biters more aggressive.

[RaidSoft]

Is anyone else having issues with biters not attacking at all since the last few factorio patches? They don't even attack me even with bases in pollution anymore it seems.. Not sure if it's an issue with this mod or something else so figured I'd ask and see if others have experienced the same thing or not.

[A.creature]

Two bug
1. has already been described in human beings, and not fixed. Spawn big pack of bitter with beggemoths from the void, the entire map is covered walls, the whole area inside the radar coverage.
2. In the same situation with the zone and the coating socket appear spawners
without any working or something else.
Modification is not playable, so it does not allow properly defend themselves against bugs
Pls fix it

[Jupiter]

When I approach biter nests no biters will spawn. I can safely stand next to a group of spawners or even shoot them without anything happening. It's only when I destroy a spawner that it spawns some biters (but that might be because of Swarm).

[kik4444]

I've got a question. Currently I'm 20 hours into a factory and biter evolution is only at like 15.6%, but it decreases by around 0.2 - 0.3% every time I destroy a spawner. Is this supposed to happen?

[Davidkaa]

Hello there!

So yesterday I thought the game is a bit easy after I automatized laser turret production at 0.25 biter evolution, with high frequency, high richness high size biter bases. So at around 12 hours into the game I found and started using your mod. Now I'm at 15 hours and still trying to create a sufficient power production for my defenses Man, I love it, great work, Kudos. (Maybe later I'll try to contribute a bit, but never worked with this API and lua, so there's a bit of working beforehand )

So why I'm here talking is that I may have found a little bug.

After destroying some spawners and trying to build my own stuff in their place I get this:

yellow_cross.jpg (570.12 KiB) Viewed 8771 times

(There was a spawner at the location of the yellow cross. Same thing two lines above where there is only one Steam Engine.)

After disabling Misanthrope: things get right:

no_yellow_cross.jpg (571.53 KiB) Viewed 8771 times

After reenabling the mod it's the same again as on the first image.

Obligatory mod list (everything is up to date):

modlist.jpg (79.77 KiB) Viewed 8771 times