Friday Facts #429 - Vulcanus Demolisher Enemies

[Sliverious]

Dune enemies for the Dune planet, seems fitting. Are these worms aggro'd by artillery fire? Seems like a battery of cannons with some radars to help them might clear them quickly enough to remove the challenge.

Kinda reminds me of the TF2 Engineer intro: "use a gun. If that don't work, use more gun".

[jamezhall]

What happens if we turn of enemies? Does that setting affect the new planets?
Can you set the setting so that enemies dont attack you and that is still the case with the snake?

[varundevan]

new and bigger enemies, looks cool..
now what new cool arsenal i got to fight them .. ?
same old uranium bullets, rockets and 66% underpowered lasers ?

i need more fire powahhhhhhh...

[Hiekie]

If this comes to the game this would be an immediatly loose of interest in the game for me.
I am not good at combatting at all en it removes the fun completely in my eyes..

[hojava]

My comment on the creature... pretty much like for Dune movie, it doesn't make sense for a worm to move like a straight train on the surface. It cannot phisically work like that.
Snakes to move crawl, so they are not straight line but with lateral undulation... the S like thing.
Worms instead extend a part of their body (front or back, they can move both directions) to the direction they want to go, firmly connect to the ground and then move the rest of the body there, sort of like a spring.

One can just youtube and find multiple videos to see those movements. To move like a train the creatue should have legs, which is not the case it seems.

So if I have a critique to be made to the creature is that its movement, by sticking to the visual sci fi tropes, it's non realistic.

Surprisingly, it is not so. Snakes have multiple modes of motion and one of them is rectilinear locomotion, which is exactly what the demolisher does. And unlike the Dune worms, demolisher is slow enough to make it believable.

[CPU_BlackHeart]

The freezing planet had flying enemies and among them were the jelly-like enemy from FFF-367, however since then these enemies have been dropped from the game. The last planet has a delicate mix of challenges and although we found a way to add enemies to the mix in an interesting way, it would make progression much slower. It might be better as a mod.

So this in particular caught my attention, any chance we can reenable the original enemies you had prepared via the mod menu; or did they not make it past prototyping phase?

Putting this bit aside, really happy to see the Vulcanus enemies, these things look massive and just overall quite the creature. Very much reminds me of tremors and they look like such an unstoppable force! I can imagine Tesla Turrets going a long way to stopping these guys or just the rocket turret. Expected a segmented enemy, but I more expected something like fast centipedes that act similar to the mechapede from Kane's Wrath. Runs in, shoots lava rocks and runs away coming back for more later; but this is just something else. Certainly isn't a fight you want to pick unprepared and as an enemy lover, I'm all over this.

[GreatWyrmGold]

does make me wonder where

this

fella is going to show up...

Nowhere.

The freezing planet had flying enemies and among them were the jelly-like enemy from FFF-367, however since then these enemies have been dropped from the game. The last planet has a delicate mix of challenges and although we found a way to add enemies to the mix in an interesting way, it would make progression much slower. It might be better as a mod.

Unless you want them to

I'm a bit disappointed that they won't show up in the base game. They look so cool!

Am I understanding thing correctly and there are enemies on Fulgora but not on the last planet?

I think so. They obviously considered strong enemies for Fulgora at some point, I think it's reasonable to expect some. And as it was stated it's a lifeless place, everyone expects old robots...

A while back, I guessed (either privately or on Tumblr, I don't remember which) that Fulgora would have flying hostile bots that hovered past your defenses to harvest parts from (damage) some kind of key factory buildings. That seems unlikely, since Gleba's pentapods can also walk past defenses and the last planet had some kind of flying enemies planned, but I hope the potential robot enemies are as different from Nauvis biters as the Demolisher is.


Going back to mods, I wonder how long it'll take for Nauvis Boss Mods to use the Demolisher's territory mechanic to create big monsters that coexist with the standard biters.

[nimeroni]

Currently Destructor is near invulnerable to any defense systems.

Not entirely invulnerable, but yes, you'll need a lot of turret creep to win.

And it's better that way.

It will force us to think other strategies. I quite like that you need high firepower to overwhelm the destructors HP regen, it make tools like robots, poison capsule and mine useful. Those are tools that I don't usually use because they are pointless on Nauvis.

That seems unlikely, since Gleba's pentapods can also walk past defenses and the last planet had some kind of flying enemies planned

The enemies where dropped from Aquilo (the last, icy planet). That was explicitly mentioned in this FFF.

I think you are correct about robotic enemies on Fulgora through. You don't unlock a turret on a planet for no reason.

[EustaceCS]

Fight fire with fire.
Fight heavily armored train on legs with a literal train.
If I remember correctly, direct smack with a train deals 600+ damage.
Now, if only we had a way to make them collide at full speed...

[XT-248]

The comparison to Dune's worm is inevitable, even without the "worms traveling across the sand" theme.


As for clearing out demolishers, hmm. Before deciding on a preferred combat method, I need to know more about the various resistances and other relative combat info.

In an ideal world, I would avoid unnecessarily setting up a small ammunition factory for one thing only: an ammunition production line for killing demolishers. I have to think about interplanetary logistics capacity and speed for shipping ammunition.

So, the ideal solution is one of the following possibilities:

• not to use expensive ammunition to mass-produce locally on Vulcanis. Ideally, something with high-alpha damage.
• use high-alpha-damage-to-low-weight-ratio ammunition shipped to Vulcanis.
• electric-based weaponry in the players'/spidertrons' equipment grid between each demolisher fight.

A factor to consider is what can be unlocked before reaching Vulcanis, which influences the selection of weapons that can be used to clear out the first Deomlisher.

A possibility exists that players don't go to Vulcanis first and bring in exotic weaponry from other worlds.


Hmm, food for thought.

[MonkeyWagon]

I love this, and while you put great work into the face and front of the worm.. i feel its a missed chance not to add the mouth of the worms from Vally of the wind. Just something about that movement and animation that makes it feel all consuming of anything in front of it.

[solarer]

One way to visualize the effect of the poison capsule would be to display the recovery attribute of enemies at all times. Or display a DPS number that is negative while recovery is active and turns positive as the damage exceeds the recovery rate.

Or make the worm immune to poison DMG overall but apply a strong percentage debuff to recovery. Maybe that can be communicated in an easier way via coloration or some particles.

[Terrahertz]

Fight fire with fire.
Fight heavily armored train on legs with a literal train.
If I remember correctly, direct smack with a train deals 600+ damage.
Now, if only we had a way to make them collide at full speed...

You can see the worm destroying rails in the videos, so no chance a train can reach it.

[linktothepast83]

Giant worms that are attracted by movement? This is as Dune as it gets! My first impression is that i like them and their mechanics so far but i will withheld my judgement until i will face them in battle. Hopefully devs are willing to make further changes even after the expansion release, for better balance and to patch cheap exploits since they will feel underwhelming if a cheap exploit is possible.

Finally i don't know how to feel about the last planet lacking enemies since i don't know what it is that made it hard that even without them it is fine. All i know right now is that some from the lan party didn't like much the last planet, now how much is it due to the lack of enemies or the unknown difficulty mechanic, is the great question. Is it a barren planet with scarce resources that if you add enemies to the mix it becomes unbearable? Questions and more questions...

[EustaceCS]

Now, if only we had a way to make them collide at full speed...

You can see the worm destroying rails in the videos, so no chance a train can reach it.

Oh. THAT's why that comic book cover was posted for in this thread. That person is a farseer of sorts...

On a second thought...
It may or may not be safe to assume that construction bots can at the very least try to rebuild destroyed rails.
Due to

It didn't have any weapons except for the face hitting you.

it's safe to assume that both bots and rebuilt rails would survive the process of rebuilding under worm's body. Now, at the very least.
As trains ignore everything walking on rails, the moment the route from current train position to its destination becomes rebuilt and if destructor worm's body is still crossing freshly-rebuilt rails...
CHOO! CHOO! WHAM! CHOO! CHOO!

[Phauxstus]

By the way, the Nauvis Worms really need a better name, they are the only Enemy that does not follow the Factorio naming convention.

Wormers? Spewers?

[GregoriusT]

I love this, and while you put great work into the face and front of the worm.. i feel its a missed chance not to add the mouth of the worms from Vally of the wind. Just something about that movement and animation that makes it feel all consuming of anything in front of it.

Hey um, your attachment is 50 megabytes in size, I needed to use an ad blocker to block all images on the factorio forums to be able to load this page at all whatsoever. Just mentioning this as to be careful how huge your attachments are.

[Nova]

Very nice, I like the new enemy.

Some small point of criticism: it looks a bit weird how the demolisher can make buildings explode just with the faintest touch. Maybe change the hitbox to make it a bit smaller, so the worm has to crawl a bit deeper into a building before it explodes.
If you want to see what I'm talking about: watch the first video in the FFF again, right at 0:15 - the destroyer crawls to the mining drill, turns to the right, doesn't touch the drill... and then the drill explodes, because the hitboxes did indeed touch for 1 pixel or something like that.

[MrBuisson]

Let the Demolisher respawn ! Evolution based, time, meeting of their soul partner during a patrol and impromptu kid. You know how it happens ! Big demolisher makes big babies, small one makes small babies. All for the player to ihnerit said kid.

Getting one of those big guy trying to reclaim a territory after few hours would be a nice chalenge !


that being said, Iike it quite a lot. it's getting harder to wait for the release, d*mn it.

[Tertius]

I'm sorry to get somewhat salty, but I don't want to have real fights in Factorio. I didn't buy Factorio because of the fights. And now even a planet full of bosses. I hate boss fights, everywhere, in all games. I abandon games that contain them. An enemy with big texture and 10x more health that takes minutes to take down. This enemy is way worse than I ever imagined enemies would get in Factorio. Graphics are nice, but I simply don't want to fight. I guess the best solution would probably be to write a mod to adjust the health of all the non-trivial creatures to 10% or 5% to not completely waste 1/4 of the tech tree by completely disabling them.

What will await us at the final planet? A final uber huge boss? Please not.