Evolution Settings help please

[Cronie]

Hi

I am looking to increase the difficulty of mobs in the game. Ideally, the mobs would give me a few hours (about 6) to get my base and walls going. Then from 6-48 hours play time they would get gradually more difficult till after 2 days, they start breaking through the walls and annihilate me. (Sorry, but I like stories with endings

Could someone advise me on how to tweak my settings to get something approximating this? I won't hold you to an exact time-table, I just need a bit in the beginning to get up and running.

Thanks a bunch!

[Cronie]

also, if this is not the right place to ask this kind of question, please let me know

[DaveMcW]

after 2 days, they start breaking through the walls and annihilate me. (Sorry, but I like stories with endings

The base game enemies are too weak to do this, even on max settings. You will have to make stronger enemies, see Modding help forum.

[Ackos]

You could try a mod such as Rampant.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Rampant

[4xel]

A common motif among every vanillia difficulty settings is that mobs only get weaker as time goes. This is to be expected as this is a game about automation and mob is just another part of the game to automate.

Some ways to delay the attacks in the base game :

• Make the starting area bigger (it can make the difference between first contact 30 minutes in to 2-3 hours I think)
• Set the ennemy base frequency lower. Due to ennemy expansion, I don't think it affects the assymptotic nest density, but I might be wrong. The fewer base should also be bigger though, making it harder to claim too much extra space, which can be seen as a good thing.
• tweak ennemy expansion (cooldowns)

Some ways to increase midgame and assymptotic attack intensity :

• increase time as an evolution factor. Usually, the main evolution factor is nest destruction or ewtreme pollution. If you want a relatively peacefull 6 hours start, time will be the only thing which make biters evolved, and it won't do much. So be generous. 4 times the default should make you face medium biters by six hours, which should still be easy. You can easily raise the time evolution factor by a factor of 20 I think. Also, high time evolution factor forces you to developp quickely, which encourages you to pollute, which enables biters attack.
• decrease pollution absorbtion (dissipation rate). Biters attack are directly related to pollution, so the less pollution freely absorbed by your safe perimeter the more biters attack you.
• decrease max cooldown of expansion. It increases the frequency of non pollution related harassement, but also make the first wave happen sooner. It also makes them more resilient when you try to conquer them, and more invasive when they get to breach you.
• Increase minimum and maximum expansion group size, it should increase the intensity of aforementionned harassement. Raising Minimum Might slow expansion, probably better used along high richness bases

Now keep in mind, biters waves are proportional to the pollution that reaches them. The same difficulty setting may feel anywhere from peaceful to hardcore depending on your pollution management. So you probably should not use solar pannels and efficiency modules, or if you plan to do so, you should adjust difficulty accordingly.

disclamier

World generation uses Perlin noise generation with parameters that are given a simple name that are easy to misinterpret. For this reason, there are probably a couple things wrong or innacurate in what I said.

In any case, even if the ennemy can be made somewhat stronger, they still are as dumb. That and the strong link between pollution and ennemies make me think that you might prefer using mods, like

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Rampant

• make AI much smarter, able to exploit weak point, breach, counter attack, reinforce, raids ...
• Partially decorellate attacks from pollution (eg rocket trigger waves), maybe entirely with difficulty settings.

Fiddling with the settings is probably much less of a necessity, and easier, but I don't know the mod, so you'll have to find out by yourself or ask other in the modding subforums.

[Jap2.0]

My advice would be just to play around with the advanced settings some. What exactly you want depends on your skill, playstyle, how long you want the game to last, etc. It's fairly obvious what most of them do. You'll want a very big starting area to give you time to build up defenses, because getting them to ramp up enough to kill you will involve turning up the settings quite a bit, and 6 hours can be quite a while to go without encountering the biters in normal gameplay. You'll probably want recipes and technology costs at the default, because increasing them would slow you down quite a bit early game (albeit late game as well), but you can make that more difficult if you want. Turning down the size/richness of resources might make survival more difficult after you use up your initial resource patches. You can play with pollution a little bit - it will affect evolution and attacks, but you'll probably want to make that quite a bit harder so you get frequent strong attacks. You'll probably want to increase expansion, but you don't want them aggressively expanding into the starting area early-game. Evolution is also something you'll want to play with a lot, because it will affect the game in a lot of ways. The time factor will make evolution increase steadily throughout the game. The destroy factor will increase evolution after destroying enemy bases, so if you turn that up a lot it can punish you severely when you try to push the biters back. Pollution increases evolution based on pollution, so it can increase difficult as your infrastructure increases exponentially in the mid game, causing either rapid evolution growth or the need to divert significant resources into efficiency 1 modules.

Let me know if you need clarification on anything, and please update us on how this goes.