Biters seem MUCH easier in 0.15?

[AndrewIRL]

I read a couple of topics talking about waltzing in with personal lasers. Are those worthwhile now? I remember they used to handle maybe 1-2 biters in a wave of 20, so I abandoned them entirely long ago.

I'm waiting for the non-experimental release so I haven't played it yet but:

Greatly increased the damage of Personal Laser Defense Equipment.
...
Increased the damage, range and health of biters worms.

Friday Facts #169 - Combat revisit 2

See also this power curve image:

which shows that the devs (or at least Twinsen) are well aware of the magnitude of personal laser defense problem (see the little horizontal line way below the power curve).

Friday Facts #166 - Combat Revisit

[Nich]

And clearly grenades are not a weapon lol

Just there for clearing trees

[orzelek]

Get 2 personal lasers, 2 shields and you can go into any base that doesnt have heavy worms and just walk.
With heavy worms few more shields and you might need to start shooting. If you have uranium ammo on hand you won't need to shoot a lot unless behemots are around.. haven't tested on them yet.

Base personal defence stats are 75 damage at 3 shots per second - and then it gets upgrades from laser turret rof/damage research. Even one can handle quite a few biters.

[BlakeMW]

Early biter difficulty is heavily dependent on whether the terrain is heavily forested or desert. With heavy forest you wont encounter biters for a long, long time. With pure desert they'll come knocking pretty quickly.

It may be the case that 0.15 is less inclined to create desert starts. It certainly has felt with rerolling that starts are greener on average than they used to be. Could be random bias though.

The other thing about early easiness is that bullets are more effective. Pistol and SMG now deal 5 damage/bullet and 3-shot small biters, compared with 8 shots previously. The turret used to deal 4 damage/bullet and would 4-shot small biters, it now also deals 5 damage/bullet and also 3 shots small-biters. So the small biters are much more easily dealt with by handguns, and even gun turrets have an easier time.

[mathturtle]

The biters seem much easier in 0.15 than in 0.14. Playing 0.14, I would typically see at least small biter attacks almost immediately. But playing 0.15 for 2-3 hours, I finally stopped what I was doing and went looking for them just to make sure I hadn't turned them off.

Even in 0.14 you could get this to happen. If you had a big enough starting area then the initial chunks the game generated (even the ones in the unexplored area) would not contain any biters. If you got a start like this and didn't place a radar or go exploring, you could play for hours without seeing a biter.

It may be the case that 0.15 is less inclined to create desert starts.

My first 0.15 map started in a huge desert, but that's only a sample of 1.

As to the biters being easier, from what I've seen it is mostly about the player having better weapons. The tank is now usable against bases with big biters (just have explosive tank shells, the spawners die in one hit). I haven't tested behemoths yet since evolution is not that high.

The attack waves, in early game at least, are much smaller (1-2 biters, it was never this small in RSO, ever) and take longer for the first wave after the game starts.

Attack sizes are dependent on pollution absorbed, and I've seen some huge attacks on my walls (easily 50-60 biters/spitters). But that was when I was being lazy and not clearing my pollution cloud like I should. If the biters are only on the edge of the cloud then they won't send huge attacks since they aren't getting much pollution. But let a base get 5 chunks from your smelter and see what the biters can do with that pollution.

[Permittivity]

My experience with my 0.15 start is that biters are far harder than in my last game. A big part of that is that, as already mentioned, a desert start means no trees stopping pollution from spreading.

The biggest factor, however, is the same for me as for Aeternus. On the rail preset the biters do not form new bases, but the bases that exist mostly have absurd numbers of spawners. Because of that, I wasn't really able to do anything about them until I reached modular armor and the assault shotgun.

That brings me to the last thing; the research changes means that it takes much longer to get to later military technologies so when you are surrounded by those 30 spawner bases, you are going to have a bad time of it for quite a while.

Full disclosure: I made this start prior to the minor patch that made some changes to biter settings for the rail preset. I don't know what changed, but it might already have addressed the problem I have.