Gleba's evolution doesn't serve any purpose currently

[fencingsquirrel]

So in the base game and in Space age on Nauvis, the evolution factor pushes you to tech up in military and make a better, more efficient factory. The better your factory, the easier of a time you'll have fighting biters.

On gleba, your ability to grow your factory and make it run efficiently has virtually no bearing whatsoever on gleba's evolution, because it is almost exclusively dictated by how early you arrive.

Take two scenarios:

A) A player plays excellently, builds the most perfect base ever, and goes to gleba as soon as possible.
B) A player plays absolutely abysmally, barely scrapes together a working base on Nauvis, but goes to gleba last, and only after making a giant fleet with several levels of infinite research after playing for like a month.

In case A), the player will probably be completely overrun by medium stompers because he doesn't have artillery, and in case B) the player will just be laughing off the enemies as they splatter instantly to even machine gun fire.

Because of this, Gleba's evolution kinda doesn't serve any meaningful purpose, or am I missing something?

The obvious solution to me would be to massively reduce the evolution rate (~10x) and have it start at the beginning of the game. Or, to be frank, possibly just get rid of it entirely. Because one can always just land on gleba when one is ready to handle EV factor 1 anyways.

[BlakeMW]

Artillery is not a requirement for Gleba.

The minimum requirement to have a good time on Gleba is actually the Tank, with normal cannon shells. It will take medium and even big stompers with relative ease. It is adequate for destroying their nests. It's really helpful for the Tank to have some equipment in its grid, especially exoskeletons.

A player can kind of put themselves in a difficult situation if they arrive at Gleba before unlocking the Tank, and don't bring any coal or explosives. Gleba only has coal and thus explosives available after researching rocket turrets, which requires coal for the military science. If the player lost their Nauvis base to incompetence, that means the only way they can progress is to build a rocket silo on Gleba and return to Nauvis, and rebuild on Nauvis. They have to launch that rocket, and possibly rebuild their space platform, without military technology other than gun turrets, which is doable but tedious, as even big stompers only have 2 flat physical resist so enough gun turrets will bring them down.

If they did have the foresight to get some basic advanced military tech, then coal is still a requirement for many useful military tools: grenades, poison capsules, slowdown capsules, landmines, cannon shells, rockets and flamethrower fuel.

Without coal, you have gun turrets, laser turrets, personal laser defense, discharge defense and tank with machine gun as your options. The Tank with machine gun and discharge defense, and ideally exoskeletons in its grid, is perfectly adequate for sniping egg rafts, stunning the stompers, and driving away leaving the stompers to despawn. DIscharge defenses generally shouldn't be underestimated, put a bunch in your grid, drive a Tank, zap stuff.

The worst scenario is no Tank and no ability to research Tank without going back to Nauvis. But there comes a point of being so chronically unprepared it's a kind of "how'd you expect this to go well" kind of scenario. And incidentally, a sufficiently knowledgeable player wouldn't have a serious problem landing on Gleba butt naked with no military tech and a dead Nauvis, would be successful. It'd be far more tedious than it would be with some prep, but it's not undoable.

In both cases you describe, someone with a perfect base on Nauvis (e.g. they can continue doing research) and arriving at Gleba early, shouldn't be a problem, as they either have or can get the Tank, and can also send supplies. Everything gets much easier with coal/explosives.

[NineNine]

That happened to me. I got my base crushed by medium stompers. So I left, and I came back with Tesla turrets. It was a lot of fun having to flee. Luckily, the ghosts were still there, so when I came back, my base rebuilt itself automatically. I slapped down the tesla turrets and a few artillery, and I was fine (that time).

So yes, evolution did quite a bit on Gleba. If I was able to figure it out quicker, maybe I wouldn't have had to flee the medium stompers. But, I wasn't quick enough, so I had to flee and come back instead to rebuild. Again, it was all super fun.

[angramania]

In case A), the player will probably be completely overrun by medium stompers because he doesn't have artillery, and in case B) the player will just be laughing off the enemies as they splatter instantly to even machine gun fire.

Because of this, Gleba's evolution kinda doesn't serve any meaningful purpose, or am I missing something?

You have missed everything between two extreme cases. Also you have missed one more extreme case - player starts on Gleba. And of course you have missed cases when player use not dumb burn-everything but more clever design for factory on Gleba and will not be overrun by stompers no matter when they landed or even started on Gleba.

[adam_bise]

IDK I dropped to Gleba empty handed for the first time not knowing anything about it whatsoever and spent at least 4 or 5 days just figuring it out. I never got attacked until I wandered off to see what the enemies looked like. I never saw a stomper until I have a full blown base with mall / science / silos / and full perimeter of defenses. No mods, vanilla settings except time factor disabled, and zero assistance from my platform.

If you land on gleba and immediately hook an ag tower to a heating tower then you're gonna make too much pollution too early. And it should have been obvious just looking at the map.

[waterBear]

The scenario just isn't that dire. In our first playthrough I landed on Gleba with zero expectations and set up a rocket silo etc. The enemies challenged me a bit once the ag towers were up, but you just take a rocket launcher and go hunting then they leave you alone for a long time.

If Gleba encourages you to ship artillery, that'd seem to be intended design. Space Age is all about complex interplanetary logistics. Working as intended in that department, I'd say.

And if your artillery range infinite research doesn't keep up with your spore production, you'll still have to do something - move your artillery further out, research more, etc. It's not like it's totally binary (unless you stop growing your Gleba base, which is fine, too).

[fencingsquirrel]

Well, my point was less that gleba's evolution does negative things, and more that it doesn't really do positive things. On Nauvis, it's finely tuned, because everyone starts at 0 "power level" and evolution starts at 0. This is not the case with gleba. To give an analogy, it's like you show up to take a test to see how good you are at juggling. But half the test takers are randomly blindfolded. What exactly, then, is the test measuring? That's why I would think gleba's evolution should be substantially slower and start from game start. Or, since it doesn't do much to begin with, just removed.

Perhaps even gleba's evolution could be something unique to the planet and not use nauvis's sliders at all. That would be cooler tbh. If not that, a more accurate evolution for gleba would be voiding the time factor and making it entirely spore based at a much higher rate. But in that case you'd still have the problem of people showing up stupidly overpowered compared to gleba's enemies.

[angramania]

Well, my point was less that gleba's evolution does negative things, and more that it doesn't really do positive things. On Nauvis, it's finely tuned, because everyone starts at 0 "power level" and evolution starts at 0.

Sorry but I do not see any link between these two sentences. And please explain what positive things player get from evolution on Nauvis.

To give an analogy, it's like you show up to take a test to see how good you are at juggling. But half the test takers are randomly blindfolded. What exactly, then, is the test measuring? That's why I would think gleba's evolution should be substantially slower and start from game start.

Bad analogy. There is nothing random in case of Gleba, it is player choice when and how visit it.

Or, since it doesn't do much to begin with, just removed.

Repeating false statement do not make it true. Effect of evolution on Gleba can be clearly seen when medium stompers start to break traditional defenses.

But in that case you'd still have the problem of people showing up stupidly overpowered compared to gleba's enemies.

That is their choice why do you want to limit it?

[fencingsquirrel]

Eh

[FasterJump]

I visited Gleba third. I tried things out for maybe 8 hours and almost never got attacked even after 20 hours, with default settings (no mods, time evolution ON). There are plenty of time before medium stompers shows up, and they have no reason to attack you if they are not in your spore cloud.

Beginner's mistakes:

• Killing more than 15-20 egg rafts early on
• Scaling up before you have a defense perimeter bigger than your spore cloud
• Really all you need initially is 5-10 trees of each at the start... don't get a massive farm just to let everything spoil. I've beat the game and I have around 50 trees of each. My initial defenses only started to show their limits as it occasionally gets damaged by big stompers.

Gleba evolution factor is slow enough so that you have plenty of time to prepare. It doesn't add much to the game, I agree. But how would you introduce medium and big enemies, without an evolution factor? Or why would anyone want to face big stompers upon landing? I understand your feelings about the evolution factor, but let's face it: it fits its purpose, and there are no other viable alternative (or at least, nothing developed in this topic).

[fencingsquirrel]

"But how would you introduce medium and big enemies, without an evolution factor? Or why would anyone want to face big stompers upon landing?"

I think you could carefully balance this if you kept evolution but had the time factor start from game start but slower. For example:

(on default) The time factor could be ~x6 slower, and spawner kill factor could be ~2x faster.

So you wouldn't be facing medium stompers unless you got to gleba after like 120 hours.

This way, if someone abandoned gleba because they couldn't progress, it would also be unlikely that they would face big stompers when they returned, as quick kill factor and slow time factor would make it unlikely that they would show up.

----

Without an EV I guess you'd probably just have smalls only, since they're already behemoths essentially. But I guess since the assets already exist for larger enemies, may as well use em I suppose.

[waterBear]

On Nauvis, it's finely tuned, because everyone starts at 0 "power level" and evolution starts at 0. This is not the case with gleba.

Is that right, though? I thought Gleba's evolution started when you landed (on Gleba). I remember only fighting small, weak versions of the enemies for quite a while.

[fencingsquirrel]

My point is: If I start one game on nauvis, I have a pistol, no weapons science, and small biters. If I start another game, the same. If I start a game with settings I choose and expect, I use those settings.

If one person lands on gleba, they start with small enemies, smgs, and yellow bullets and a steady evolution rate based on that (well, ideally, but not really, an smg does nothing to a stomper). If another lands on gleba, they start with small enemies, nuclear warheads, artillery, spidertrons, trains, mech armor, destroyers, dozens of infinite science research, and tesla turrets, and a steady evolution that is the same as the dude with an smg.

Anyways, wasn't meaning to beat a dead horse, just clarifying. Think I've said everything I wanted here.