I want a specific kind of game

[Samlish]

Hey guys, I've played around with the map generation settings to try and create a specific kind of scenario but I'm really struggling to get the balance just right, I'm hoping you'll be able to help:

I want to create a map with these conditions:

-Large patches of resources, but widely and sparesly spread. (bit like in RSO)
-Small but tough enemy bases, sparsely enough spread you can weave between them with train lines etc, but close enough together that they still present some barrier
-Slow enemy evolution
-Frequent attacks, starting early on
-(this is the tricky bit) Over time I want the enemy attacks to get larger and larger, and more and more frequent, so that ultimately I'm fighting off endless hordes of non-stop enemies. In an ideal world, this would be all or at least mostly biters, with the vast majority being small ones.

A friend and I want to play on a map a bit like this, with the last part being the most crucial. We've had trouble getting such a map to generate, and don't really understand the sliders and how they work. Can anyone offer some advice?

[Frightning]

Hey guys, I've played around with the map generation settings to try and create a specific kind of scenario but I'm really struggling to get the balance just right, I'm hoping you'll be able to help:

I want to create a map with these conditions:

-Large patches of resources, but widely and sparesly spread. (bit like in RSO)
-Small but tough enemy bases, sparsely enough spread you can weave between them with train lines etc, but close enough together that they still present some barrier
-Slow enemy evolution
-Frequent attacks, starting early on
-(this is the tricky bit) Over time I want the enemy attacks to get larger and larger, and more and more frequent, so that ultimately I'm fighting off endless hordes of non-stop enemies. In an ideal world, this would be all or at least mostly biters, with the vast majority being small ones.

A friend and I want to play on a map a bit like this, with the last part being the most crucial. We've had trouble getting such a map to generate, and don't really understand the sliders and how they work. Can anyone offer some advice?

Getting the first point is fairly easy: Just set resources to very low frequency and very large size and you should get large, sparse patches of resources.

Similarly for the 2nd point, low frequency small size (or very low/small) should give you biter bases that are small and sparse. You could also go for really large bases (which will naturally lead to large spaces between them with large size.

You can adjust enemy evolution in game setup, by default, pollution is the slowest but most omnipresent source of biter evolution, killing their nests gives a larger hit per spawner by that's dependent on what you do as a player, the other settings control how frequently they make new expansions if that's been enabled, as well as the size of those expansions.

In order to be attacked early and often, I find it best to set the starting area size to very small so that biter bases can be found quite close to where you begin the game, this usually results in your pollution finding their bases very early and starting to regularly trigger attacks.

In order to get the attacks to be large and frequent, you may want to play with pollution settings because the attack-force biters are produced per amount of pollution absorbed by spawners (e.g. iirc, a Big biter=1000 absorbed pollution, for instance). Tweaking pollution absorption by terrain lower might mean that pollution spreads farther and hits more bases causing overall rate of attack to increase. At the same time, you will likely want to lower evolution settings related to pollution because otherwise this will spur on biter evolution pollution produced (regardless of what absorbed it) contributes to evolution.

[Alyssa]

As for evolution goes I usually set evolution for both time factor and pollution factor to zero, while I only leave evolution from spawners killed active, that way I can easily manipulate the level of evolution of the biters depending on "how much I'm ready for it".

[Frightning]

As for evolution goes I usually set evolution for both time factor and pollution factor to zero, while I only leave evolution from spawners killed active, that way I can easily manipulate the level of evolution of the biters depending on "how much I'm ready for it".

I forgot what the 3rd variable controlling evolution was when I was writing my above post (was trying to remember it too). It's evolution per time, which is actually the slowest contributor (but always there), pollution was the next most impactful (dependent only on how large and pollutive of a base you build), with spawner kills typically contributing the least overall, but also being the most 'dynamic' factor (it's easy to make medium biters show up far earlier than normal by aggressively removing all nearby spawners for instance).

[Samlish]

Thanks for the tips guys! We've followed your suggestions and got a game exasctly the sort we were after. The sliders are neat but could do sith something less abstract than numbers I think. rather than have 123.23581305 as the biter evolution rate by pollution, maybe a 'fast' or 'slow' evolution rate would be more useful to noobkins like me! You could still have the numbers, but give me a guideline