Defending your base is just to easy!

[sicklag]

.

[Hannu]

Ok so basicly you wanna better/harder fight with monsters, but don't wanna use mods, just play vanilla and don't care about achievements?

I personally see no problems with mods. I use mods and have also made own mods and modifications in other's mods to adjust details.
But there seems to be much players who do not want to use mods for various reasons. My point was to clarify that it would be very fast and cheap for devs to give few adjustment sliders which would affect variables which are already in the game. Like biter health and attack strength. I do not see many reasons to resist this kind of suggestion because it would not change anyone's game if they do not change their settings intentionally and it would not slow other development process significantly.
For example biter AI or automated defense robots would be totally different thing. It would need huge programming work and maybe dev team should hire some AI expert to get fun results. I think it would be great addition in this game, but do not believe that devs see it reasonable business decision in this kind of development process.

I belive most people care to make megafactory of logistical challenge and only what bitters contribute to this is UPS lost. Without bitters pollution do not matter and cant be disabled + all walls + turrets etc. Big ups gain.

I believe that very small part of million players will ever make a megabase. Probably minority launch ever a rocket. If I see my kids and other young people they play few hours most of the games and get bored. I am sure that Factorio is easy to get bored for most people. It need certain engineering thinking to be entertaining and be too slow and technical for normal people. Especially if you try to achieve megabase level.

But this kind of change would make possible to give certain pressure against player with lower number of tougher biters (if I remember correctly, it was the reason why devs implemented behemoth level enemies couple of years ago), and give also UPS benefits for megabase builders who want to keep defense as an element of the game.

The other thing you can done its download some mods, that some of them actually increase bitters ai, or add giant bitter bosses, more aliens types, more weapons or turrets type, automatic droid army. Mods add many many other thing and you can do this like in 2 minutes and start having fun immediately.

I have tried many mods and watched videos of others. It is easy to change basic properties, like health, but AI mods are quite crude and not very interesting. It is not possible to make a good AI with lua scripting interface. Even simple solutions take too much CPU to be practical in megabase scale. Such modifications should be made in C source.

Just download a lot of them and start fight for survival on alien planet like right now.

I do not like extreme survival type of gaming, but I want that defense is significant resource sink and give moderate workload. At 0.15 it is a joke and it seems than in Nilaus's 0.16 deathworld it is not even a joke. I just like very broad adjusting possibilities including ridiculously under- and overpowered extremes, which may be interesting in some special cases.

[5thHorseman]

Completely rewriting the biters would take a lot of time, which - considering this is not the game's main focus - is a misuse of resources.

What is not the game's main focus? I don't understand you. You want to say biter and or biters with better AI is not the game's main focus?

Maybe you misread the word finally="and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you. " This word "finally" means they ARE one of the game's main focus.

Okay I'm wrong. Factorio has nothing to do with optimizing an automated factory and is instead a tower defense game.

Or that's ad copy and was written to entice, not provide a spec sheet for the game.

Or "finally" means Biters are an afterthought.

But you're probably right.

[BlakeMW]

I hope they find time to fix the broken biters AI.

One of the underlying themes of the game is that it is made up of simple things which perform simple actions which are put together to make something wonderful and complex.

The biters are simple things, and the defenses are simple things. The biters run towards pollution, they bite whatever they come across, the defenses shoot whatever is closest. Simple things that perform simple actions. The Biter AI is working perfectly in the context of the game.

[Green_Baron]

I like the construction and planning part of the game, especially railworlds. There are more than enough shooting games out there for those who like it hard
Also, the settings allow for pretty thrilling setups where you're overrun before you can launch your first rocket. So, as far as i am concerned, there is not need to turn the screw tighter on the fighting aspects. Remember, after "tight" comes "off".

[borra]

I think this should be one of the main concerns for the devs right now... biters have always be there; why? they add (or should add) the spice to Factorio. No biters, no point having a tank to go and smash them.
And I also think biter mechanics have become dull.
Of course, this can't be a "whole game imposition", that's why difficulty settings are for (and Factorio has done great in this area, there's Marathon, Deathworld, etc.)
Maybe making a "vanilla" difficulty mode, with biters as they are,annoying buggers but eventually just a pest, make a new "survival" mode, where biters are a "normal", progressive challenge (the matter about how to make them challenging is another big topic) and then have Deathworld as a "hard/brutal" mode.

Why do I say devs should care about this biter stuff? Well, I think having a game mode in which the purpose of all your base building is to, primarily defend yourself and your base, and eventually be able to push biters back (maybe even finding and destroying something like the biter hive, or a biter queen or something, sort of a Sending Rocket to Space alternative in this mode), and this purpose of defense and later offense is challenging itself, would cater to lots of new players, and add a lot of variety and replayability to the game (same as the map improvement topic, the factorio game world has to become "alive", and biters are a crucial part of it)

All this stated, I'm not saying this game should become what it isn't, it should still be all about building and automating stuff. Defense systems can and must be autonomous, and why the hell not, I want robot tanks destroying biters while I drink my coffee.

And I'm saying this as a player that hates biters, I always end up making myself a custom scenario to surround a nice chunk of land around water and just leaving two or four entrances to pile up walls there and forget about biters forever.

[BossmanSlim]

Having played RTS games from the C&C days in there multitude of versions, I think biters are in a strange place.

• On the default settings, biters are basically in the game to tax the player resources (time and ore). If biters are turned off, several elements in the tech tree are pointless and most of the tax is removed.
• In some prior version biters were more integrated into the progression because the player had to kill biters for alien tech, which was needed to research the rocket. This made no sense as why would bugs, who show no tech, have components needed to launch a rocket. It has sense been removed and I think the game is better for it, if the biters are going to remain bigger and bigger bugs.
• Biters don't have any purpose other than being an annoyance currently. I agree this needs to be fixed, but where to go based on current mechanics is the challenge. All biters do now is evolve quickly and spread over the map, delaying the players progression by sapping resources. Once the player has teched up, the annoyance is real and at least we now have artillery to lower this annoyance factor. I'd like to see biters brought into the game more, maybe some kind of bio tech based off their rapid evolution.

Now how should the RTS combat side of this game be designed? A lot this comes down to what the player views Factorio as; RTS, simulation or puzzle game. I see it mainly as a simulation game similar to City Skylines because the main focus is on building a factory and progressing up increasing complexity of adding new stuff to the system. The combat side of the game right now I think is an annoyance for most once they have a their base up. I think the thing that is being missed about the RTS side is that most RTS games have a break over point where the player is going from a defender to attacker and after playing a while vs the AI, the victory is assured and it is purely about execution and mopping up the AI. Factorio is the same, though on default settings I think most would say it is fairly early in the game. Thankfully, this is not a huge problem because most people are playing Factorio for the base building/puzzle aspect and not the RTS. Even if Factorio was made into a more fleshed out RTS, it would need more than 2 enemy types (size doesn't count) and the player would need more options as well.

[voddan]

I totally agree with DustFireSky and others that we have this problem with the game.
Factorio's aliens are unbalanced as they are now.
They literally disappear from the equation of the late game when proper factory defences are built and fixing bots are in place.

I would suggest looking into 2 things:

1) Infinity research for weapons is damaging to the game

As it works now, I complete a research and suddenly all my guns are more effective.
How come I need no new items or no new buildings?
I can understand replacing one type of amo with the other type, or replacing one type of gun with another, or adding speed modules to guns.
But getting an upgrade without moving a finger, instantly, just goes agains everything else in Factorio.

IMO weapon damage & speed research should require actual items to be manufactured/added/replaced, so that the upgrade process is tedious and takes time and effort.
That will greatly increase involvement of the player into planing out the defence system in the late game.

2) Small biters should NOT disappear as game progreces

Currently the bigger the evolution, the bigger the biters.
In numbers it works by increasing the number of higher level biters and reducing the number of low level biters.
That strategy keeps the total number of biters around a constant level.
As a result the average number of biters in an attack wave stays about the same, and the gun/biter balance does not change much: biters are upgraded through evolution and guns are upgraded through better amo.

IMO this stand-still could be moved if next-gen biters appeared IN ADDITION to previous biters, NOT INSTEAD of them.
In other words, I propose keep generating the small biters even on high levels of pollution.
That would result in late-game attacks that would look like big biters surrounded by herds of small biters.
This change would shift the bottleneck from fire power (arguably unlimited) to an amo and time constraint (naturally limited), which would pose a significant threat to bases and require major defence redesigns in the late game.

Here is how it would work based on 3 simple premises:
- even a small biter requires at least a bullet (or a laser beam) to be killed
- it takes time for a turret to switch targets
- a turret is not smart enough to prioritize big biters over small biters
Those 3 combined would result in a situation when automatic turrets spend too much amo & time on small biters, while some big biters destroy them.
A solution would be to increase the number of turrets, which would require advanced layouts and would still be limited by space constraints.
All in all, late game defence would require significantly more design effort than it does now.

[imcute]

I love the game, but i have some problems with it or some things are totally wrong in this game.

My personal opinion:

In my ~200 hour factory at the moment, I have a Biter evolution of 99,99%.
66% through pollution and time and 33% through killing nests. The most of the biters are green.

I think, at the ~100 hours the Behemoth Biter will appear. It is sometimes different. If u build big , they came earlier through the pollution of your factory.

I personally think, that the game is just to easy to defeat the crabby aliens. The Behemoth Biter is the only one with 3000HP. That's nothing. In the lategame u have updated all your weapons and the defense, they aren't a threat for u or your base. Also if u play only with gun turrets only (For the achievement). No problem too.

I read in some patchnotes, that the HP of the behemoth biter was decreased...I think from 5000 to 3000HP. Why the hell they did that ? 50 Biters can attack u and nothing special will happen. Ok, they die, but this is nothing special. I hope u understand. The difficult of the biters must be increased, not be decreased loved developer. Just to easy to deal with it.

All aliens must be attacking simultaneous or the groups must be bigger AND they must attack like a WALL. They came to the turrets row by row. Not efficient for them. For u, okay, not for the enemy! That were a real power problem, if u build only laser turrets. Personally, I hate the laser turrets. 2 of them upgraded behind a 2 width wall killing all of the 50 Biters ALONE (row by row). They take damage, but who cares ? When u can hold up 50 Biters with TWO Turrets, the balance is the real problem of the game. Laser turrets are to strong. Flamethrower too. And just another fact. A laser turret need for ALL biter types just ONE shot to kill them, except the greens!

We have 2 options:

1. The biters must be evolving more over the time and upgrade themself and this never stops! We have a unlimited research damage tree... Biters need it too! Also the groups of the attacking biters must be more efficient! Row by row attacking isn't the answer for the biters to win a battle. They win the battle if all of them attack at once! And so should it be. The biters in the lategame are at the moment just props, not a threat!
2. The unlimited damage research must be removed and the damage must be decreased, especially the flamethrower and the laser turrets. And the power consumption of the laser turrets must be * 3. Flamethrowers need a special oil (high costs!). We have enough space to build large power sources (nuclear power), therefore increase the power consumption of the laser turrets! Laser turret spam must have consequences.

Generally:

The AI need an update. The Biters should immediately attack u, if the power is down! Player must be punished for building fails or not enough power. Also, we need more alien types. Maybe air units and maybe a special biter type (A queen or something similar) that attacks if u kill enough nests and the queen is HARDLY to kill (20000HP or more). U need some nuke's for it or tons of ammo! We have so much weapons, but the lategame is just the same shit. Sorry for that. U ran through the enemy lines and nuking all away. U can use artillery too, but u are quicker with the nukes. And nukes are just to cheap! The tank is useless in lategame play and the buggy... The best way is just running and bombing with nukes. If u do that 30 minutes, the whole map is clear. U need 300 Nukes, but is that a problem in lategames ? I think not. We need aliens that survive a nuke! Maybe the radiation (Why we havn't this in the game ?) make some types of biters strong and will be dangerous for u. ALL vehicles need a special ability. If they had that, in lategame they have their utilize. Mabye an auto marker for the artillery in the tanks range.

Maybe radiation zones in the world. U need special equipment to cross it.

I have wrote a wall of text. Sorry for that and my english.

I hope the "aliens (bugs)" will be stronger. Just another fact: "Normally, we are the ALIENS in Factorio and it seems that the developer misunderstand the word if someone tell them, the aliens must be stronger. They think, ah, aliens, the player must be stronger ! NOOOOOOOOOOO!

This is not a tower defense game
You would like to try Mindustry,where a rack of Scathes beat Collarises,and a rack of Maligns or Foreshadows beat Oct bombing.
So if you make base have a rack of scathe and malign it would be hardly attackable.
But the problem is,a defense line like that would often have unpredictable errors(e.g:repair+shielded wall+bunch of pulsars+bunch of octs+foreshadow can eat the damage by a scathe rack and shoot down the maligns and scathes or just going to the back side of base by foo teleporting/flying and eat the supply lines)
That can be solved by build towers,pollies(silent gets angry,he thinks that it should be polys),and megas
But eventuallly you will find out that build towers get sniped down,and pollies and megas get shot
It's a hard game on pvp(but in survival u just need maligns,and in attack u just need to mega bomb(yeah,not even needing oct))

[Koub]

This thread is 4 years old. Most people who have posted in here have left years ago. Please give a second thought before reviving a thread.

[imcute]

This thread is 4 years old. Most people who have posted in here have left years ago. Please give a second thought before reviving a thread.

uhh okie sry

didnt bother to check the date

[blazespinnaker]

it's an ancient thread, but that's what makes it interesting. The complaint is still perfectly valid. Even deathworld marathon, once you get artillery with a decent range, it's game over. Admittedly getting to lategame is a bit of a challenge..

But even on super hard settings, things like efficiency modules make the game pretty simple.

That said, I'd like to see someone get to late game with deathworld rampart, default settings, no other mods. Now that is challenging..

[aka13]

it's an ancient thread, but that's what makes it interesting. The complaint is still perfectly valid. Even deathworld marathon, once you get artillery with a decent range, it's game over. Admittedly getting to lategame is a bit of a challenge..

But even on super hard settings, things like efficiency modules make the game pretty simple.

That said, I'd like to see someone get to late game with deathworld rampart, default settings, no other mods. Now that is challenging..

Depends what you consider "game over". You can keep bases from the vicinity of your walls, yes. But they drain tons of power/ressources constantly, you can't feel safe anywhere, except behind a walled-off perimeter, with fully provided autorepair/ammo supply. Expanding is also a major problem, even with arty, tiresome and slow. In fact, I feel like dw marathon lacks a solution for the biter problem.

I find that there is a certain point (flamer + repair bots) where you can feel safe on your claimed territory, but there is no moment where you feel "pushing biters away? Easy peasy".
I play dw marathon only since it got introduced, not sure if arty came before or after (yeah, the reg date is since when I am playing, still not bored), but tbh artillery has solved only one problem - keeping perimeters clean. Stock artillery is definately too little to be enough.

I remember there was a mod, where you launch orbital ion cannons instead of sattellites into orbit, now that felt more empowering. If you had enough cannons in orbit to constantly fire and still manage to reload on autofire mode, you could have nice and clean borders, not constantly under attack.

Right now (or, well, since a long time) for me the fun-limiting factor in dw games is where I gen big enough, that my walls are constantly attacked, and I get a non-stop "something has been destroyed" alert. There just is no way to deal with the biter menace in a satisfying way.

[blazespinnaker]

Well, the solution is just eff modules, but I find they're not necessary once you get artillery, even in waterless worlds. For defense, just lay down some landmines, replenished by bots. landmines are very OP, especially if you lay them out tactically.

Walls don't really do that much except be an early warning system you're about to be overrun if you don't increase your defenses.

I'll admit, early game getting to bots, oil and land mines with dw marathon is tricky, and unless you slog it (managing pollution carefully) it can be a bit of a struggle.

But as was said above, there are always mods, and rampart (DW tho, default is easy) perfectly fits the bill for anyone who thinks the game is too easy. Mechanics are quite cool, too.

[aka13]

See, this is where opinions differ.
My factory is in standby mode. It just produces for it's own needs, no meaningful research.
I still kill about 400 bugs per minute (literally!)

Screenshot 2022-09-15 103925.png (31 KiB) Viewed 3895 times

I do not find it satisfactory or fun, that I have no way to do so indefinately, or reliably without losses.
And that is of course with a perimeter fully covered by arty, and expansions going on non-stop. Would not want to think what would happen if shell deliveries stop for 1h.

[Khagan]

My factory is in standby mode.

"Don't defend your factory, defend your pollution cloud."

If you do that, the only bugs you have to kill are the occasional party of migrating settlers.
If you are not doing that, then you are not ready to go into 'stand-by mode' until you have pushed your defences further out.

[blazespinnaker]

Also with the artillery wagon you can push them outside your pollution cloud. Like Kagan said, once they're not absorbing, they tend to leave you alone.

One of the cool aspects of DW marathon is you actually have a purpose for things like barrels. Sneaking oil out of a patch that lies right beside a bunch of biters can be touch and go, but barrels help a lot. You really want to micro until you get sufficient tech to defend with.

The biggest issue I found was you really don't want to go toe to toe with the biters until you have land mines. You end up putting 70-80% of your production into magazines just to fend them off. Islands can help if you have water, if not, moving around to different patches does the trick until you have enough coal, copper and iron.

[aka13]

Man, you people really do hate listening, do you?
Let's take a look-see, if you think I am playing for 10 years, and do not grasp the basics.

Screenshot 2022-09-15 170959.png (1020.21 KiB) Viewed 3853 times

This is the base. Every inch of the perimiter is covered with artillery, and I mean that literally.
Artillery range is currently at 3, researching 4 would cost 64k science and boost the range by marginal 30%. To double my current range I would need 13 levels of the range technology.
This would mean 524 224 000 science packs, assuming I somehow magically would be able to push 2k spm the whole time through, would imply "only" 4368 hours of constant research.
Even if I did manage to wait for that absurdly long time, it still would not be near enough to escape the pollution cloud which is produced by said research.

What it would come to is this:

Screenshot 2022-09-15 170918.png (94.12 KiB) Viewed 3853 times

The ground and trees I cover right now (not a small amount, if you consider that the rail lines you see in the picture are 4 lane ways spaced 3 rail widths apart) only consumes about 8% of my pollution output.
There is no way, I would be able to expand in any humanly reasonable timeframe without some form of recursive blueprinting to escape my pollution cloud.

I could of course simply stop using pd3 in miners, and drop my pollution by miners close to 0 by switching to eff1 en masse, but I don't think that it counts as fun gameplay, when I am being punished for maximising my production with no way of fighting back.

[aka13]

And with speed modules of miners that effect would be the same btw, I got flamed to hell about pd3 in miners, but the pollution impact would be almost the same, 210% instead of 240% on pd.

[blazespinnaker]

Yes, if you're not willing to put an eff3 mod in your miners, it's going to be hard. No doubt.

There are all sorts of ways to make the game arbitrarily hard.

For example, you have a water world there though, so you should be putting all of your artillery on islands fed by logistics. In this way you can push back biters without any blowback (except evolution, of course).

You could just decide not to play with bots or logistics or even water. That'll make it hard