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.

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[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.

[Lightbeard]

I am thinking this is what just happened to me on 2.1.9 Experimental.

I was starting a new playthrough and within 5 minutes an insane nest appeared way too close for the level of pollution I had.

55 Minutes:

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60 Minutes:

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This was on Default everything AFAIK

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[Stargateur]

size of generated nest should scale with evolution

[PurpleTonberry]

Have the exact same experience as Lightbeard. One hour in on a new savefile on default settings, very first expansion party puts an 11 nest sized base just a few chunks away from the starter area. I agree with the sentiment of making biter expansions harder as the game goes on, but the current way of doing it ain't it. The ranges klonan mentioned are insane. Up to a 20 nest sized base? From evolution ZERO on default settings? This is already worse than what was immediately sitting at your doorstep on a deathworld in 2.0.

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[InUniverse]

An expansion of 20 spawners near the start of the game seems way too high, yeah. Given the usual size of nests near the starting area, I'd expect a range of something like 2-5 spawners.

[galacta_dm]

I also agree with the concern that biter expansions are being established too close to player-built structures.

I have been playing slowly on Nauvis for several dozen hours in version 2.1.9. I have completed most of the research available with science packs from automation science through space science, and I am currently building my first platform for travelling to Vulcanus. My evolution factor is currently somewhere around 0.7–0.8.

I have a number of defensive positions distributed around the perimeter of my factory, consisting of laser turrets, flamethrower turrets, walls, and other supporting infrastructure. They are positioned so that the firing ranges of adjacent defensive positions overlap slightly.

Recently, however, I have started seeing biter expansion bases established extremely close to these defensive positions. In several places, the result is that the defenses are effectively engaged in combat continuously.

The defenses have enough firepower that they are not in immediate danger of being completely destroyed, but I now receive damage alerts very frequently.

This is something I hardly ever experienced in earlier versions. I suspect it may be an unintended balance consequence of the change intended to prevent biter bases from becoming too densely concentrated. By reducing the priority of already infested or otherwise untouched areas, the relative priority of open areas near the player's defensive perimeter may have increased.

From the perspective of Factorio's emphasis on automation, having perimeter defenses remain in an almost permanent state of combat seems likely to become particularly stressful once the player begins developing other planets.

The natural automated solution would be artillery, which could maintain a buffer zone around the factory. However, artillery cannot be unlocked until after completing the relevant research on Vulcanus. Before that point, the remaining workaround appears to be placing large numbers of otherwise unnecessary player entities, such as power poles or pipes, outside the defensive perimeter in order to reduce the candidate scores of nearby expansion locations. This is not a particularly intuitive or satisfying solution, and it does not guarantee that the area will never be selected.

I do not think that expansion bases creating permanent, low-level combat immediately next to established defenses produces a good gameplay outcome. Some additional protection against this situation would be helpful—for example, preventing a new expansion base from being established within a certain minimum distance of armed defensive structures, or at least ensuring that newly created spawners and worms cannot immediately enter the firing range of nearby turrets.

This would still allow biters to expand toward the player's territory, while reducing cases where a single expansion turns an otherwise stable and automated defensive line into a source of constant alerts and maintenance.

[superroodude]

Another interesting result of the nests spawning so close to player walls is that I've learned to save before checking remote view because looking at certain parts of my Nauvis base while on Vulcanus would trigger the biters into overrunning the defenses. As long as I don't look, everything is fine.

[coffee-factorio]

I'm getting in some trigger time today. The general thought is that you definitely have to cook from a good seed if you're achievement hunting and be slightly less creative, I'm not doing freestyle building anymore but I'm hitting the same timing as if I go in with few blueprints and no planning pauses. Going on a desert will slow the game down under the current settings, and I'm going to go with my gut feeling that spawn sizes are not to blame there. I'm also going with my gut feeling that is desirable. tldr- the fact the biters expand more is fine, but the nest size probably needs to be tuned right now.

Every now and then I'm seeing 10 biter clusters in a 5 cluster zone, and seriously wondering if that's the spawning algorithm. This is counterbalanced by the shotgun being very, very powerful due to the enhanced rate of fire on it. Turret creep is not longer necessary depending on how you play. You can simply be aggressive, but running without armor or a back up like fish, the handgun or a turret will get you killed.

It's still a scenario where I can come in and see something that may or may not be natural spawning. The presumption appears to be that on normal settings you'll make time in 6-8 hours till a rocket launch to clear 1-5 nest clusters before or as they interact with pollution. I'm surprisingly not feeling them move in as aggressively and haven't noticed anything in the patch notes, and luck is always a factor.

As for if that's good balance or not, assume a new player takes 18 to 60 hours to at least build there first base on average. As they build up skill, they're going to lose saves to biters at that rate, and having a the average of 0-20 nests show up means they'll look up and see a size 10 nest next to something they don't know they need to actively shoot. That's probably going to be exaggerated if they have experience with minecraft, where a door is enough to keep you relatively safe. If they are running without things experienced players just use or discard to set conditions for a run (a sense of speed prefers a forest, a sense of challenge prefers a desert), well the advantages those things provide are going to be mitigated and the disadvantages exaggerated compared to balance of the last 2 years.

Overall it messes with suspension of disbelief slightly because you have to believe that the biters will send a bunch of pheromones and then, rather than attacking like a bee swarm, build a double size giant hive next to something they perceive to be is a bear. It's rough because I'm not a naturalist, I just have experience with wasps, they are persistent but they have to take an entire season to go through a hive settlement and then layers of expansion. Sometime after your first rocket launch this can change because at that point, your lake should be a healthy green and there should be uranium in the environment to mutate the alien bugs.

If you wanted the current settings to work, someone would probably need to use a triangular distribution biased low, for a minute. Or make spawning behavior be based on distance while evolution is under a certain level (relative to a rocket launch worth of pollution).