Alien diplomacy

[Mugen]

I think an Alien diplomacy feature could be interesting. Who said the aliens should be bad? Or you be the bad boy?
For example:

at the beginning of the game you receive an embassy of aliens who saw your shipwreck and give you a piece of territory to live in, in change of a tribute.

If you pay the tribute (that increase with the time in complexity, like first iron plates, then circuits and so on) regularly, putting the resources in a special chest in time, the aliens won't attack you and eventually will give you more land, helping you with the work (like cutting trees) and giving you special items.

If not, you'll keep the resources, you'll build where you want, but you'll being in danger. And if you feel overwhelmed and want to return to peace, you'll have to pay a much larger tribute to gain back their friendship.

[MatLaPatate]

This is kind of already suggested (^^). However, I'd rather something based on Pollution. The more you pollute, the more you'll be attacked. And what about technologies to learn Alien Language, then trade with them ? And even more, ally
That would be epic to me, in a PvP match to see one expanding very fast but being attacked by aliens, while another player would ally with aliens, trade with them, but wouldn't be as wlel equiped than the first one because he wouldn't pollute ...

Also, this would mean way to play without polluting. Mining without Coal ? ^^ Or maybe you could jsut be allowed to pollute a little bit, but in exchange to make aliens friendlier you should give them some stuff, or make some quests-like.

[Blackence]

I want to bring this up again.

I'd love to have some way to avoid biter base raids.

Right now we are forced to raid bases for artifacts, because we can't progress without them. I'd prefer some way to trade with aliens, so humans and biters can live on the planet in peace.

Sure, make it expensive and difficult. Let biters ask for large amounts of material, threatening to attack if we don't supply those in time. If we survive the attack, that weakens their bargaining position of course. Paying in time = peace. To get alien artifacts, it should be possible to trade with aliens by visiting their bases (possibly using logistics bots… e.g. insert x level 3 modules into biter base => obtain 1 artifact from biter base). That's only possible during peace time, i.e. if all the requested materials have been delivered in time. If we fail to deliver it's war time, then we can raid their bases for artifacts.

Edit: I guess this can't be implemented in a mod right now, because biters can't be set to peaceful? Haven't looked at the mod API at all. If biters can be made to be normal non-attacking entities (and even better, move them around in lua so we can invite an ambassador into our base ), and biter bases changed to something that looks like a biter base but works like an assembly machine for artifacts, then maybe this is already possible as a mod.

[Hardison]

Well, To me i don't think this really makes sense. Because lets think of the biters as a species or even as a community. They don't seem to have any form of a government, they don't migrate, they don't fight each other, No moral or Spiritual beliefs, for all we know they could of just been mindless zombies endlessly reproducing and co-existing with their environment before we got there. Then you have to look at our own history, Spanish and the Aztecs, Americans and Indians, even foreign plants/animals to native ones, It is simply a law of nature(For the time being in our world) that new species to an area will always be aggressive towards one another ESPECIALLY if one is more advanced in some way.

Diplomacy may be a cool feature to add, but i think in the broad scope of things it will be irrelevant because of just how nature works and especially if Human beings are the ones exploring and colonizing. We are not a peaceful and diplomatic species, we much prefer taking advantage or the complete destruction of a species or plant, even different types of humans(Neanderthals, Romans, Byzantines, Babylonians, Hittites).

But, to each their own, i am sure you could mod that into your own personal game with some research and effort.

[TheMrAndyn0]

These aliens don't seem to be "intelligent life forms". They seem to be more like basic life forms who are just sensitive the pollution. The only sensible of feasible method of automating the output of alien artefact which honestly, is a stupid name as it makes it seem as if they are something from the long past, would be if you could maybe capture and "egg" of sort. This "egg" could be used to grow a biter spawner in a contained cell and by connecting this to a certain machine or directly to the labs, you could extract alien technology directly by doing research on these biters.

The only other method I can think of besides by a certain, boring method I'll mention later, is if the player could set up devices to "observe" the biters. By setting up camera's, bio scanners etc. etc. within a certain distance from a biter base the player will periodically get alien technology, and killing biters will drop biter limps or biter artefacts or objects which can be scanned and researched to produce alien technology.

The final method I can think of is if biters just uncommonly drop alien artefacts themselves. With this, you could isolate a single biter spawn and then place turrets just out of their aggro range. Next, you place long-armed inserters face away from the biters and place a wall within their aggro. Now, the biters will continually run for the wall, turrets, get killed then the tech will be picked up by the inserters

[Turtle]

If you want to discuss this topic, you should do it here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=9&t=3762 The idea was already proposed by the devs themselves, so once they're ready to expand on this side of the game, I'm sure this is where they'll look.

[Blackence]

Oh, thanks Turtle. I didn't know about that thread and have never used that subforum before. I used the forum search just for this subforum and assumed that this is the only thread.

I agree, the aliens do not appear to be very intelligent, since they could easily kill most bases if they simply attacked in groups of hundreds or even thousands of biters. Instead they send wave after wave and most of them are killed before they can even touch the base walls.

But still, imagine we discover those biters on some planet, and even though they behave just like rather stupid animals or some (not very efficient at killing the enemy) artificial intelligence, we go on and kill all of them on sight.. That's not what I would feel comfortable with, even if they attacked us first!

So yeah. I also had that idea about keeping them at the base for "eggs", which is pretty nice as well. Anything that's 100% automated (since it should be possible to automate anything in factorio that is repetitive) and not a massive automated slaughtering machine. Since devs already have some ideas, I will patiently wait and see what they come up with. Until then, I'm going to do some manual slaughtering. Give me artifacts!