Playing with biters

[Bauer]

I never played with biters before this. IMHO, they're a distraction from what I do with this sandbox.
However, after more than 7000 hrs of Factorio including finishing SpaceX with the Seablock Pack (phew), I decided to do a Deathworld run on standard settings.

After finishing the game, i.e. shooting a satelite into space, I watched the replay. What I observed was even worse than I expected:
I spend about 1/4 of the time setting up defences and an additional 1/2 of the time fighting aliens for more resources/land. (Even though I was lucky enough to have favourable water around my base.)

Before you think, that I'm an old fart who doesn't know how to figth... let me tell you that I'm an old fart who also plays Starcraft 2 in master league. Of course, there is still room for improvement... But I also wasn't too much embarrassed when watching the replay. My "technology" was always way ahead of the aliens, they never had a chance.
- When the first massiv attacks came, I had flame thrower turrets + piercing bullets.
- When I had to clear larger areas for the first time, I had laser turrets for the critters and was fighting the worms with my machine gun.
- When I had to clear larger areas for the second time, I used a tank (with red shells) and laser turrets.
- When I had to clear larger areas for the third time, I had 4 personal laser defenses and just circled their bases (by the end of this, the first green critters spawned).
I also experimented with artillery but I had the impression that it was easier to walk to their outposts and just shoot them.
About 270 fish died for the greater good.

Please let me know: Is this because I choose to use deathworld settings? Is it really wanted that the aliens distract the player 3/4 of the time? Did I do something wrong? Would it have made a big difference to use the shot gun and/or the rocket launcher?

[Hannu]

Please let me know: Is this because I choose to use deathworld settings? Is it really wanted that the aliens distract the player 3/4 of the time? Did I do something wrong? Would it have made a big difference to use the shot gun and/or the rocket launcher?

Deathworld is very extreme setting. If you choose default biter and ore settings and largest starting area and make moderate sized base (about 2 red belts of iron in) you have first contact maybe when you have blue science and larger attacks and behemoth biters do not begin before you have rocket launches running and infinite research in progress. At that phase you can easily build automatized defense lines with your favorite turrers by using construction bots. I like this setting because I hate actual fighting but want to have additional resource sink and logistic and building operations. By adjusting settings you can vary time and resources needed for warfare over very large range from nothing to extreme grinding.

[Koub]

Yeah Deathworld is supposed to put hard attacking biters pressure on the engineer. That's probably why it's not called Kindergardenworld . Biters are more numerous from the start, and for a given pollution absorbed by spawners, you get twice as many biters produced.

[BlueTemplar]

3/4 of the time sounds a lot.

But coming at it from the other direction :

Did you use blueprints from previous games ?
How many of the vanilla ratios do you know by heart ?
Did you try something new in this game not biter-related that you never did before ?

[Bauer]

The number of biters that spawned during the clearing of their base was huge. The whole screen was paved with dead bodies. The moment to you approach the enemy base swarms of biters/spitters attack. It didn't appear to be the normal "pollution turns into biter" thing. You lure them out of the base (towards the turrets for a little BBQ) and immediately new ones spawn next to the nest. Is that normal??

I will repeat the experience with standard settings.

[Stakhanov]

If you're playing solo then it's expected that deathworld biters take a lot of your time. There are custom deathworlds I played that are only possible in coop thanks to biter swarms quickly eroding even very heavy defenses , making base maintenance a full time job until drones. If the biters have a chance to beat you then they'll take all your attention to contain. But if you play default they're only here as speedbumps.

[Bauer]

3/4 of the time sounds a lot.

But coming at it from the other direction :

Did you use blueprints from previous games ?
How many of the vanilla ratios do you know by heart ?
Did you try something new in this game not biter-related that you never did before ?

I have standard blue prints but use copy & paste more and more.
I know almost all vanilla ratios by heart.
No, the only "new" thing was to add biters.

[BlueTemplar]

What do you mean by "standard" blue prints ? (I don't re-use blueprints from game to game, since they're usually too different. Ditto for knowing ratios - I hardly know any of them.)

Yeah, think about it : if you could simply "exhaust" biter defenses by killing all the defenders present at the time, then it would make nests very easy to take out with Factorio's automated supply lines !

Last but not least :
How much time did you spend with the game paused, planning ?
How much time did you spend on reloads ?

[Potenzo]

Deathworld is a bit extreme for me, but I always play with biters on (and "peaceful" off).

Of course, it's up to you how you enjoy factorio best, but my reasoning is that biters make Factorio a better engineering sim by introducing external pressure. In the real world, if you're doing a project you don't get the luxury of trying to design it "perfectly", even with available resources. Customers change their minds and respec, team members quit for jobs elsewhere, management implement budget cuts without reducing the deliverable, competitors launch products that force you to move the intended release date up to stay relevant, and so forth.

Biters are the one mechanic in Factorio that introduce external pressure on the engineer that isn't perfectly plannable, a diversion from what you want to be working on to deal with the troubles and inconveniences the world throws at you. To me, having some such external pressure mechanic is essential to make Factorio the engineering project sim I want it to be. Without such a mechanic, Factorio is just a CAD tool simulator, not a project simulator.

YMMV, of course: whatever you enjoy is right. But I thought I'd put this out there in case someone might think "hey, that's a good point" and finds the game more enjoyable by trying it this way.

Also, I've seen it said (including by Wube) that biters are just a resource sink, and so a production challenge. Scale up enough and that pretty much becomes true I guess. But this overlooks or obscures an important point. At least until you get artillery, they are also competing for the engineer's most precious resource: player attention.

[Bauer]

What do you mean by "standard" blue prints ? (I don't re-use blueprints from game to game, since they're usually too different. Ditto for knowing ratios - I hardly know any of them.)

The 5/6/12/7/7 science setup is always the same. That' easy enough to remember (at least after trying to get the Bob+Angel ratios in your head).
With standard blue prints I mean things like belt balancers, I can very quickly build a 4x4 by heart but nothing more complex. I also have a belt item counter, SR-latch for power, etc. in my blue print book. And, of course, a chunk aligned rail system (which I didn't use in this game).

Last but not least :
How much time did you spend with the game paused, planning ?
How much time did you spend on reloads ?

Frankly speaking, I don't know. I don't pause a lot. When planning, I have to see the map.
I had less than 10 reloads. All because I didn't evade the spitters well enough. I took out most worms by running close, shoot the worm, and retreat to the turrets (because they have more range than turrets). This is like reaper micro and can end pretty deadly if you're not quick enough.

Of course, it's up to you how you enjoy factorio best, but my reasoning is that biters make Factorio a better engineering sim by introducing external pressure. In the real world, if you're doing a project you don't get the luxury of trying to design it "perfectly", even with available resources. Customers change their minds and respec, team members quit for jobs elsewhere, management implement budget cuts without reducing the deliverable, competitors launch products that force you to move the intended release date up to stay relevant, and so forth.

lol. I think the beauty of factorio is the fact that it differs to the real world exactly in this point. No distractions, unlimited budget, maintenance-free machines that always do exactly what you tell them to do, and no dependence on anybody else. I have a lot of "real world" in my job. I really don't need a game simulating this.

But as you already wrote: Whatever makes you happy! It is a strength of factorio to allow us to configurate how much distraction we want (I also count cliffs) and how big a challenge we want (from max-everything to Seablock).

[Bauer]

Did it again yesterday and today on standard settings. That in deed is the kindergarden-world...
I unfortunately didn't save the replay (
However, since the map was relatively open, I had to clear quite a few nests to keep the biters out of the pollution cloud. This might not be the best strategy. It cost me about 2-3 hours.

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[Bauer]

Ok, I did the same map without biters for comparison:

Endscreen no biters.jpg (430.58 KiB) Viewed 4152 times

4 hours shorter. If I take into account that I had to wait about 1 hour for the 2000 research for the satellite, also on "normal" the biters "distracted" me 50% of the time.

This would be the sum of
- doing the war related research
- walking the map and clearing biter nests
- setting up defenses
- emergency tasks

My conclusion:
Since "player time" is the most valuable resource (at least for me), including biters means that I have to spend about 50% of my time taking care of them. For deathworld settings, this is much more extreme (as you would have expected). For those (like myself) who consider biters merely a distraction from the actual game, this seems to be a bit too much.

However, it was nice doing it once.

[Frightning]

I mostly play on default settings (and if it's not 100% default, the most common thing I change is starting area size down to minimum). I still manage to not spend ~50% of my time on biters (more like 20-30% maybe less if I didn't shrink the starting area). To be fair, I'm not all that quick at building my setups as I like them and don't have a library of blueprints (I usually hand build my setups, but most of the time that's cause their 1-offs for purposes at hand).

The are reasons besides player time that having biters on will lengthen the game. For one, you can't just bootstrap yourself to large scale production because then pollution will spike and you'll be inundated with biter attacks if you didn't clear all the nests from the area first. Even if you could scale up just as fast, you still end up having to do more research so that your weapon tech is keeping up with the biters not to mention needing to produce additional recipes (and perhaps automated setups for some of them) so you have weaponry and ammo a plenty to deal with the biters and their nests.

Also, there is something to be said for experience helping you know better when and how to deal with biter nests. I suspect if you played more games on those same settings you'd cut that % down a bit (and maybe gain some building speed too for having learned how to manage player time between biters and everything else better).