Experimental Biter expansion too strong

[guardog]

Would it make sense to run some tests in 2.0 compared to 2.1 to see how close biters are getting to the player in 5 hours of idle or something? I don't know if the Factorio team makes it easier to set up this sort of automated harness, but I could probably do a headless one. Maybe just create a new world and measure how long it takes for biters to kill the engineer due to expansion?

I have done it in my reply in this topic which was split into another issue.

[gaucho]

I agree that the expansions look humungous and out of place in the very early game. What makes the most sense to me is to scale the biter expansion size based on how far the expansion is from origin. Basically, approximately replicate the map generation biter nest size so that expansions appear approximately the same size as the generated nests. This could be evolution-independent just like the base map generation does not depend on evolution. This could scale with the enemy base size setting.

07-01-2026, 11-11-14.png (890.87 KiB) Viewed 144 times

[Rauschkind]

i dont mind expansion size. i DO mind VERY much that expansions now apparently can happen in areas biters should not be able reach. i frequently have new expansions behind my turret line and this just sucks.

edit: well, i said i did not mind the size. i frequently see what i could only describe as worm-forests. large areas with dozend of worms but no spawner. this i think could use some tweaking. its nothing like anything placed on the map on game start.

[berggen]

i dont mind expansion size. i DO mind VERY much that expansions now apparently can happen in areas biters should not be able reach. i frequently have new expansions behind my turret line and this just sucks.

edit: well, i said i did not mind the size. i frequently see what i could only describe as worm-forests. large areas with dozend of worms but no spawner. this i think could use some tweaking. its nothing like anything placed on the map on game start.

Do you have any pictures of that? They're probably coming around your walls somehow...

[Jap2.0]

i dont mind expansion size. i DO mind VERY much that expansions now apparently can happen in areas biters should not be able reach. i frequently have new expansions behind my turret line and this just sucks.

I'm fairly certain that biters have always tried expanding past walls, the expansion party just gets killed. I'd also be interested in a screenshot of your map.

[Tertius]

I'm fairly certain that biters have always tried expanding past walls, the expansion party just gets killed. I'd also be interested in a screenshot of your map.

Yes, expansion parties choose their destination regardless of the location being within a walled area or not. However, they don't simply spawn there but walk there and build the nests after they arrived. In case they hit some armored defense wall while walking, the party gets destroyed and will not create any nests. In case the wall it is not armored, they will bite through the wall and continue walking.

If there are suddenly nests inside a walled area biters were inside to begin with (without being noticed) and expanded from there, or there is a hole in the wall where the expansion party was able to sneak through.

But biters will definitely never suddenly "spawn" somewhere.