Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

[thereaverofdarkness]

It is a fact that changing the biter settings does not change the amount of spawners. This has been thoroughly tested. In fact, changing the size setting does nothing at all to spawner generation. Deathworld has the same number of spawners in a given area outside the starting area as any other world has. It also has the same setting for biter expansion as vanilla, and the only difference in evolution factor is by time, in which the value is higher than default but still low. The only actual increase in difficulty in a death world comes from reducing the starting area from medium to small. I played on a death world, and I thought it was pretty easy. The hardest part was actually dealing with the biter expansions, which need I remind you is default setting. It actually reminded me why I turned that setting down in my games. Given the pressure you get from these expansions, you've got to advance fast enough to never notice the time-based evolution factor. You'll get bigger threats because of the spawners you killed. Now the pollution factor is slightly higher than normal but really the proximity of the bases is what will actually make the difference, because of the size of the starting area.

If you think Deathworld is hard, you'd probably feel that the default settings are fairly challenging. If you think I'm wrong, then I want you to try this: start a new game, choose default settings, and then change the starting area to small. See if that isn't just as hard as Deathworld.

[MeduSalem]

Who the f*ck is bragging about that?

[BlakeMW]

Marathon Deathworld is more bragworthy, but that's more because of Marathon than Deathworld, slows down progress a lot relative to Biter evolution.

Deathworld is pretty lame at the moment, it doesn't really live up to the old school deathworld where you'd max out biters and have a good time.

[Koub]

I played on a death world, and I thought it was pretty easy.

Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

[MeduSalem]

I played on a death world, and I thought it was pretty easy.

Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

Checkmate.

[bobingabout]

I remember back in the day when setting the enemies to very rich caused the entire map outside of the starting area to be solid enemies, as in, you open the map and see solid red around you in all directions.

Death world is easy compared to that.

[Koub]

Sure Bob. However, even current default settings are hard for me, despite way over 500 hours of gameplay. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a shitty player

For people like me, current deathworld presets deserve the "Death" prefix.
For people like me, the previous "very rich" setting on ennemies was more like "lolz you kiddin' me ?!" or "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru"

And yet, some people managed to survive and expand in these conditions (and posted let's plays on Youtube). That always amazed me

[eradicator]

And yet, some people managed to survive and expand in these conditions (and posted let's plays on Youtube).

I consider it a solved problem. So i don't even bother playing with biters. Gives me more time building factories! (Also why hasn't this been moved to General Discussion yet?)

Death world is easy compared to that.

Back in the old days :D.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Sure Bob. However, even current default settings are hard for me, despite way over 500 hours of gameplay. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a shitty player

This is why it is important to be able to change the difficulty. I want it harder, you want it easier.

Actually the biggest problem I have with the difficulty is that in the starting area you can play out the whole game without getting attacked or running out of resources, but out past the starting area the very largest possible clearings don't hardly give you room for an outpost. I want to go out into the wild and be able to find clearings with less/no enemies.

[Klonan]

A major factor, is that the starting area is 'Small' in death world settings, which not only decreases your starting safe zone,
But due to the way the map gen logic works, makes biters much denser throughout the whole map

Default preset

Deathworld

Anyway, for 0.17 we will be adjusting some of these numbers, spawning logic, etc, so all the feedback is super useful

[thereaverofdarkness]

Anyway, for 0.17 we will be adjusting some of these numbers, spawning logic, etc, so all the feedback is super useful

I can't wait! I assume you've seen the feedback I've given on a few other posts on the forum. If you would like more details, let me know where to put them.

[BlakeMW]

Anyway, for 0.17 we will be adjusting some of these numbers, spawning logic, etc, so all the feedback is super useful

Personally, I think a Deathworld should have a "Oh sh*t, how am I going to survive this" feel, like not just biters a bit more frequent and evolving a bit faster, but giant, frequent nests. At the moment the nests are way too small at the start and just don't have any intimidation value at all.

[eradicator]

Anyway, for 0.17 we will be adjusting some of these numbers, spawning logic, etc, so all the feedback is super useful

Personally, I think a Deathworld should have a "Oh sh*t, how am I going to survive this" feel, like not just biters a bit more frequent and evolving a bit faster, but giant, frequent nests. At the moment the nests are way too small at the start and just don't have any intimidation value at all.

Imho the main problem with current biters is that they respawn almost instantly. You can't for example use tactics like luring the biters away into a trap and then strike the undefended nests (or in multiplayer have someone else hit the base while you distract the inhabitants). This limits the tactical variety pretty much to "overwhelming force" and nothing else, making the whole combat experience relatively repetitive (until you either get a differnet weapon or the biters evolve to stronger units). I know factorio isn't a combat focused game. But i think some ...less annoying behavior than instant respawn wouldn't hurt. Maybe either make respawning slower or significantly increase the radius in which biters still count as "being at home". (Btw, this is not about "difficulty" it's about the basic combat pattern. Difficulty could also be scaled by introducing a force-wide damage reduction that can be scaled dynamically. This would also be a neat "handicap" mechanism for PvP.)

[thereaverofdarkness]

Imho the main problem with current biters is that they respawn almost instantly.

THIS!!!

If this were changed, it would take a lot of rebalancing from scratch, but I really dislike that we've been going down this route for so long. I just feel it would be way more fun if biters had a far slower respawn time, and all combat lasted longer.

Picture this: you've just eliminated the biters and spitters, and the base is helpless to defend itself. You are now beginning the task of tearing down its tough spawners, but as you loom close you are attacked by the worms! They are tough, and make it difficult to get in with your attack run. You can ignore a few of them, but you can't last very long against several so you have to run around the outskirts of the nest, trying to pick off spawners before you run out of time and they spawn a new wave of defenders. Your health is getting low as you kill a second spawner, and you notice the others are changing color and beginning to pulsate. They'll respawn soon! You flee home and decide to come back again later, your attack run a partial success.

[Jap2.0]

Imho the main problem with current biters is that they respawn almost instantly.

THIS!!!

If this were changed, it would take a lot of rebalancing from scratch, but I really dislike that we've been going down this route for so long. I just feel it would be way more fun if biters had a far slower respawn time, and all combat lasted longer.

Yeah, at some point you pretty much just want to kill the nests as quick as possible, then clean up the biters afterwards when you don't have to deal with them respawning.

[quyxkh]

You can't for example use tactics like luring the biters away into a trap and then strike the undefended nests (or in multiplayer have someone else hit the base while you distract the inhabitants).

Of course you can, substitute "undefended-enough" for "undefended" and that's the basic big-camp-clearing tactic.

[bobucles]

Currently there are two sources of spawning biters. One is from pollution. A fixed amount of pollution generates a fixed number of biters and that's it. This creates the scaling attack waves that, to some, are extremely minor and leave the game feeling too easy. The difficulty also dramatically changes between forest and desert biomes, since trees will absorb a huge amount of pollution and thus negate enemy attacks.

The other source of spawning is from nest aggro. When you get too close to a nest they go haywire and send wave after wave of biters to push the player territory back. When players complain of biters being "too hard", it is because of this secondary behavior.

One option is to implement something like a global spawner reserve. When nests are under attack they draw from this pool until it is depleted, then the nests are ripe for the taking. The spawner reserve might replenish slowly over time or be restored from killing nests, so that once you break the line it doesn't stay that way forever. A reserve value per nest would also work, although against big hives you'll need a high amount of firepower to break it down.

[eradicator]

You can't for example use tactics like luring the biters away into a trap and then strike the undefended nests (or in multiplayer have someone else hit the base while you distract the inhabitants).

Of course you can, substitute "undefended-enough" for "undefended" and that's the basic big-camp-clearing tactic.

Apart from that i think it's pretty difficult to even get "undefended-enough" due to things like...walking slower when shooting and the relatively small home area that you must stay in to prevent complete respawn.... you call this the "basic tactic". But what other tactics are there? Artellery/Nuke barrage isn't very tactical at all. Spitters don't friendly fire so you can't make them do the job for you either. The discharge defense is awkward to use because it has no hotkey. There's no quick way to switch to a "combat-focused quickbar" with several types of capsules for quick use (i hope the new system gets presets). Hm...but now i'm arguing for more combat variety, which factorio isn't really about. Meh. The rest of the game is just so polished that one-man-biter-nest-assaults really stick out in a bad way.

One option is to implement something like a global spawner reserve. When nests are under attack they draw from this pool until it is depleted,...

Yea. I definetly like the idea of spawners having some sort of resource to manage, even if it's just self regenerating "spawn points" (albeit biters consuming vegetation to build more spawners would be fun and create more interesting nest patterns than "dots everywhere" :P), though i'd go for the per-spawner pool to make it easier to understand. For the player there's no tangible reason why killing biters here should affect the spawn rate 1000 tiles away. Come to think of the whole spawning mechanic currently feels like 90's RTS AI-enemies, when the AI was still too weak to compete with actual players so they resorted to simply letting the AI cheat in as many units as it wanted. What about if spawners used up their own health points for spawning? This would both be easily understandable by the player and also make it easier to kill them the more biters have been killed. Then when they're down to 20%-ish they stop spawning and start regeneration, and start spawning again when back to 100%. The regenration could be farily quick (30-120s? Maybe slow it down the more nests in the same area are regenerating.) and adds a "window of opportunity" timing component to the combat.

This combined with:

Your health is getting low as you kill a second spawner, and you notice the others are changing color and beginning to pulsate.

A visual indication of what a spawner will do next would both add gameplay and visual depth to the combat system. Spawners aren'd HD graphics yet, are they? Perfect timing :P.

Conclusion: The whole combat system would benefit from fighting fewer tough enemies instead of huge masses, at least when the player does it manually. Maybe some sort of "guardian" biter that always stays near nests, but reduces the number of other biters when present? This would change the manual combat experience, while keeping the base-vs-biter-waves automatic combat.

[thereaverofdarkness]

You can't for example use tactics like luring the biters away into a trap and then strike the undefended nests (or in multiplayer have someone else hit the base while you distract the inhabitants).

Of course you can, substitute "undefended-enough" for "undefended" and that's the basic big-camp-clearing tactic.

That tactic doesn't even work on big camps. They begin respawning before the current biters have left the nest perimeter. It is literally a constant stream of enemies.

Playing on very low frequency bases, I have fought very large spawner clusters lots of times. I pretty much exclusively do it with a tank. You drive around the perimeter ignoring the enemies and shooting into the spawners every time you have a clear shot and there's no enemies in your path. The piercing shells don't really pierce big biters, which you get almost immediately after (if not before) getting your tank, so the piercing effect is next to useless and only the high damage is meaningful. But the spawners go down in one hit from tank shells, rockets, and cluster grenades--though some you need a few upgrades to get that much damage. Killing spawners quickly is easy, and the only way to do it effectively is to ignore the enemies while you do it, and clean them up afterward. Killing worms can be harder, but the hardest part is that a cluster of them can kill your tank faster than you can drive up and start shooting. They're tough but mostly have a long range and high rate of damage.

It's stupid and frustrating being forced to cheese the enemies by out-driving them, having to re-load every time I crash into a pile of rocks (which happens way too often for fun) because I get instantly swarmed by biters, and basically having a narrow sliver of un-fun gameplay options for dealing with the spawners that cover so much of the map that I can't possibly not kill them and expect to advance out past the starting area.

Yea. I definetly like the idea of spawners having some sort of resource to manage, even if it's just self regenerating "spawn points" (albeit biters consuming vegetation to build more spawners would be fun and create more interesting nest patterns than "dots everywhere" ),

I like this also. One group of spawners could be connected together as one "colony" and share a resource. In addition to spawners which spend the resource, they could have other types of buildings:
1.) resource collectors: cause colony to regenerate resource at a given rate
2.) resource storage: increase max resource amount that can be maintained
3.) defense structures: perhaps worms would spend resource to fire
4.) maintenance hubs: increase armor of structures and also increase their regeneration rate; structures spend resource to regenerate
5.) resource efficiency hubs: reduce resource cost of all colony actions
6.) speed hubs: increase speed of all other structures, including resource collection rate
7.) hive nexus: a large and sturdy building which spawns worker units which can respawn lost structures and also provides multiple other functions

With all of these building types, a bigger colony would be better defended. You could seek out the weaker colonies and that would be easier to manage. Or if you really want to take out a big one, you can make attack runs to get rid of important structures so that they'll be weaker next time you come by. If you just keep killing their defenses, you can drain their resources until they stop fighting back. If the colony is large enough to contain one or more hive nexuses, then you may find all your work undone by the time you get back. However the respawning of lost structures costs a lot of resource so you could use it as a tactic to drain them faster, for example if you raid their storage units. The hive nexus itself will have resource storage though, so while it can be an effective strategy it won't gimp them in one smooth move. Also random chance can dictate what a colony's weak point will be. If you get one with a lot of resource production and comparatively few spawners, but it's well-defended by worms, then taking out the worms will make it easy to conquer. If you get one with many spawners and worms but very little resource production, you can just steadily drain them by repeatedly strafing the colony.

Maybe some sort of "guardian" biter that always stays near nests, but reduces the number of other biters when present?

I was thinking of this earlier. How about a nest defender type which is slower-moving and doesn't chase very far before returning, but which is tough and can make nest assaulting more difficult. The biters and spitters could be relegated to attack waves, and no longer spawn as nest defense.

[quyxkh]

Where is it hard to wipe camps and the obvious solution (research military until it's not hard) is unreasonable? Nades and such can speed things up early but when the mk2 armor/shields show up gunfire alone, shotgun+smg+turrets, can keep you in roflstomp territory until arty ends it. If you've got better things to do than research green bullets, just red bullets and blue shells can carry you through to evo .90 just fine (edit: nah, at the high end of that, without green bullets you do want nades or poison or something to help with the worms (edit 2: heh. A little loadout refinement, some oohh, maybejustalittle more careful tactics, I just averaged 900+/hr spawner kills over an entire hour, ending at evo .8827, with red bullets and blue shells. It did take more than half my ammo, up here the uranium bullets really help)). It took me a (not-so-)good long while to figure out how to do it, a flat-out embarrassingly long time, really, but when I did finally get there I realized capsules and bots and tanks and lasers and all are fun, but if you want to clear territory stick with the basics.

If they're going to give pve some loving I'd say late camps need to get harder, not easier. Maybe work up some mechanic where resistances have slight random inherited variations and let the fun begin as mutation leads to the bugs slowly evolving defenses against your favorite weapons. Per-camp resistance variations, bugs have a (also inherited?) chance of retreating to another camp when their spawners are getting killed, nudging the variations in their new camp, something along those lines.

That tactic doesn't even work on big camps.

You sure you don't want to inject a dose of uncertainty into that claim?