Friday Facts #445 - The Biters Bite Back

[kizezik]

I would like to be able to disable extension notifications in the game settings.

[sarge945]

Now that we have radar alerts for biter spawns, it would be awesome if we could get radars to output "biters detected" to the circuit network

[DerDropps]

First time writing a Forum post. But these Friday Fact about the Biter changes got me another idea, maybe as a default enabled setting for deathworld scenarios. Hereby my suggestion would be to allow biters to expand their existing bases on a slow pace to basically cover the entire map or grow to a maximum nest size based on the settings?

[garrotte]

Deathworld was very boring after mid game and only mods like original Rampant made Factorio playable. In 2.0 I have to set up 20..50 size expansions every 3-6 minutes in map settings after changed API killed most epic mods. Hope you've finally made it a d-e-a-t-h mode. Who don't like it should enjoy standard settings without pain, but deathworld was really completely broken since ver0.16 at least.

[SerhiiS]

First time writing a Forum post. But these Friday Fact about the Biter changes got me another idea, maybe as a default enabled setting for deathworld scenarios. Hereby my suggestion would be to allow biters to expand their existing bases on a slow pace to basically cover the entire map or grow to a maximum nest size based on the settings?

The size of bases during map generation can be adjusted in the settings using a slider from 100% to 600%. There's also a base frequency setting, which, when combined with base size, makes almost the entire map covered in nests. Increasing these settings doesn't disable achievements; these settings have always been in the game.

As for nests growing through expansion or a time factor, that was already the case in Factorio versions 0.13-0.16. Back then, in 100 hours, bases grew so large that they were gigantic, and it was unclear whether it was one large base or three bases built nearby. In 500 hours, the entire map was covered in bases. This irritated many players, and many disliked this expansion. In 0.17, the developers introduced a mode where hives spawn far apart and cannot spawn next to an already built hive. This was done based on numerous player feedback and complaints. And they won't be bringing it back. You can install the game 0.15, and even on standard settings, it's very difficult to play against the Biters. I'd say standard settings there are like 300% now. And there, expansion units evolve to 90%+ every minute. So, the map is populated in real time at high evolution.
Players didn't like that balance, and starting with version 0.16, Biters began to be nerfed. And in version 0.17, they were nerfed by a factor of 10-20 and military technology research was greatly simplified.

[Gearfoot]

Less automatic alerts please! Let us be able to use sirens+circuits to send local and global alerts for things we care about - like biter expansions near our bases.

[thindu]

Yay! this will be a yummy update (especially for the biters)! i pretty much like the fact, that biters get finally some attention. Adding a notification for expansions will be really nice. And also, how they are spreading and their behaviour, will be a really nice improvement.

But please consider some things, when you start implementing these changes. Mainly for Nauvis, because Gleba is (usually) not a problem to defend with the use of spidertrons, electric turrets, artillery,...
For beginners and average/experienced players, it is at the moment a really bigger challenge, to keep up with the biters evolution and expansion. Of course, it is always an argument to say "then they shall check their settings before starting a map". But since most people do not know, how certain values affect the game for the next ~100 hours, standard settings should be reduced to a minimum frustration level, e.g. to be also able to get achievements done, don't have to start from scratch again,... Reducing the expansion or evolution level by console at a point, where a map was already played about 50+ hours, can be very annoying/sad, because then you do not get any achievements any more or the factory gets really hard overrun. This is at the moment often the case, when I get asked for help on other players maps/servers, that they suddenly get overrun, since evolution of biters is not really mentioned ingame (e.g. with a message). This happens mainly, because players could not keep up with the pace of biter evolution after ~0.5%. So building a factory until the research level of blue science is usually not a topic, but after that, mostly green biters evolution is much faster than setting up yellow or white science. Mostly the players are far away from an appropriate Vulcanus base to support Nauvis factory with artillery, so its not an option for defending. With the new implementation, it feels like, you have to rush for a Vulcanus expansion much more to cope with the Nauvis biter evolution.
Since they also struggle with the clearing of biter bases, it is another factor for rushing to Vulcanus. Clearing bigger bases with car or tank gets very fast to a point where it is either impossible (mostly because of land shape) or it takes way too much time. The only option left is artillery.
For more experienced players or "pro"-players (like me), the changes will not really affect the gameplay-style, since there is already enough experience and usually no defense problems. And they already know, how to deal with it and what to expect, when biter evolution reaches ~0.8.

Another topic could be the rework of the map creation tabulator "enemies" (attached picture). From my experience over the years, most people do not know what certain values mean (I also do not know, what some values really do or how they really influence the map or make it harder or easier to cope with biters). I added some numbers to the following picture. I know that is in german, but I think the listing is the same like in other languages.
1. Range of the start area could be marked on the preview map. And more tooltip information, what it means for biter expansion, like does it only affect the initial spawn area and do biters expand in that area at a certain play time, when there is no other room left for biter expansion.
2. For min. and max. expansion values I understand, that higher values let them spread further away from the biters spawn base. but the factor 1-20 is pretty confusing. maybe it would be easier to show information as "tiles" value, like value 1 = 10 tiles, value 2 = 20 tiles,... or a percentage value.
3. Factor for time, more or less the same topic as 2., some value for a multiplier factor, which multiplies something. Some more tooltip information would be helpful.

grafik.png (124.27 KiB) Viewed 1885 times

In addition, a new value could also be helpful for beginners or experienced players, like evolution is blocked by research as a standard active value (turn on and off would be enough). So as long as a certain science is not researched, the evolution should stop. As mentioned, reaching 0.6 of evolution is for a lot of players like a death sentence for getting soon overrun. And the only way to avoid it, is to rush for artillery/spidertron (depending on playing with our without SA).

To sum it up, some things would be great, to be also considered.
- A notification for the biter evolution
- A new medium range tower using tank shells for defense to keep biter bases at least a bit away from the factory (maybe with 1/3 of an artillery range). It could have a high shoot cooldown and only attack worms and biter nests (like artillery). Would be very helpful for supporting beginners / experienced players.
- Overhaul of the enemy settings on map generation to provide more information to the players about the available values.


All in all thank you very much for still improving the game experience!

[Darthlawsuit]

First time writing a Forum post. But these Friday Fact about the Biter changes got me another idea, maybe as a default enabled setting for deathworld scenarios. Hereby my suggestion would be to allow biters to expand their existing bases on a slow pace to basically cover the entire map or grow to a maximum nest size based on the settings?

I literally built my base around that assumption. I've been through many deathworld versions.

[Omnifarious]

Also, the "biter-cleanup" mod should be made obsolete by the base game.Expansion bases result in the landscape being permanently marred practically everywhere. There should be some kind of decay mechanism.

[Somdudewillson]

I hope the new expansion planner does not mean that the old "victory poling" is back to manipulate it.
I mean the "trying to ensure that areas explored but otherwise untouched by the player" sounds like you could manipulate it easily but hopefully I'm just reading too much into it.

"Victory poling" Still exists though? If anything this sounds like it might mitigate it with biters ignoring places far away from the player forcing them to expand toward the player even if there are buildings lowering the likelihood of those chunks being selected.

The classic victory poling does not work anymore and hasn't for quite some time. It was that you went out, killed a nest and left behind the victory pole (I used wooden crates but others the wooden power poles, hence the name). This marked the whole chunk as "player built something here, so the entire chunk this is in is now marked ineligible for expansion". This is gone long now.

However, the wording for the new expansion planner being "trying to ensure that areas explored but otherwise untouched by the player" strongly imply that there is some rule after which an area is not just explored but also "touched" by the player and thus becomes ineligible for expansion. Whatever that rule is, this might open up a new victory poling strategy in which you do/build something that prevents biters to come nearer to your base. Once the distances of an area ineligible for expansion is too large, biters can never come to you as there is a max distance for expansion building.

So it wasn't meant as if the old victory poling could come back but a new tactic with similar intent and effect. Just for example, if the rule were that we need a powered structure to prevent the expansion planner from having eligible spots nearby. Then we could just put down a solar panel and an accumulator and now we would have biter free zones... hopefully this is not the case.

I'm fairly certain the new mechanic is, in fact, the exact opposite of that. The idea is that spots that are far from the player's base become ineligible for expansion, so that generating chunks without expanding into them has minimal effect on expansion behavior.

[DevAudio]

I landed on Gleba first and fought long and hard to press the pentapods back. I studied their expansion patterns, and devised a strategy where I used the terrain against mindless beasts. I didn't code dive or use an obvious exploit. It was an easily observable, consistent, and repeatable behavior. Nothing in what I did read as a bug or misfeature. It was the system working as designed, with no signal that it was not working as intended.

Thus having that legitimate victory stripped away, and the most annoying, hateful fight and hardest victory undone feels awful as a player experience. This change in pentapod spread behavior should have been a toggle at this point, not a forced change. What I was doing wasn't like 'victory poling' - which was obviously exploiting an unintended behavior. This was observing the system as designed and coming up with a clever and successfully executed strategy to remove a threat on the game's own terms, using its own systems. Nothing at all in the game made it seem like I wasn't doing a valid and legitimate strategy.

This is why disabling expansion is not a fix. If I want to claim more territory, I still would have had to fight for it as per the norm. Hopefully you can see the distinction, and why this change (at least for Gleba) rankles.

It would be like someone unearthing correspondence from Ebenezer Cobb Morley that indicate that the soccer/football pitch should have always been 10 meters longer, and insisting that all previous world cup trophies were now invalid because the game wasn't played by the regulations. Maybe it would be true in that hypothetical, but invalidating previous victories is an awful way to try to correct the problem.

Last edit: This creates a new inconsistency. On Volcanus, you fight hard, and clear elbow room, and now you have peace. Are you going to make those worms reproduce and spread now? Answer: Obviously not - except that makes the Gleba 'fix' not obviously a fix, but a game system re-write due to code only Klonan could see wasn't always supposed to be like that.

[Presoak3727]

I think it would be cooler if biters dispersed more radially than staying totally concentrated in a small area when they park right before they establish a new nest. Would make it for a more interesting encounter since you're more likely to discover them in the middle of a nest build while exploring

[Dragon_VV]

I usually play by destroying all nests within my pollution radius and slightly beyond it. However, after I started building a mall, my pollution spread quite far; consequently, I don't see any nests on the map within the pollution zone, yet I still see biters coming my way. When I head in the direction they came from, a nest appears right under my feet - and only then does it show up on the map. In other words, I don't see new nests until I rediscover them. I'm using the latest stable version on Steam.
Is this not supposed to happen, or does the revealed map not always show up-to-date information?

[Sevans7]

Expansion alerts feature is great! When I came back after a long hiatus to play Space Age, I honestly forgot for my first ~40 hours that biters expand at all. This feature would have helped me remember/rediscover that much sooner, and understand when and where it is actually happening.

Although, it is a bit annoying to get the same exact alert for first expansion base in a location and subsequent bases in that location. Basically, for the 4-5 minutes of biters building up the structures in the one location they expanded into, I'm getting a new alert that distracts me from what I was doing. I looked at the first one and already decided "yup, understood, and great to know, but also that location is very far away so I don't want to clear it out right now." But the alert style remains the same for every subsequent alert, so I keep needing to double-check "is it just the same place again, or is another expansion happening somewhere else at the same time?"

I would really appreciate a way to differentiate between these two. Expansion into a new area feels fundamentally different (and more dangerous!) than just one more structure being built in that spot. Maybe the latter alert can just be a yellow/orange version of the existing icon, with slightly different text?

[GregoriusT]

Expansion alerts feature is great! When I came back after a long hiatus to play Space Age, I honestly forgot for my first ~40 hours that biters expand at all. This feature would have helped me remember/rediscover that much sooner, and understand when and where it is actually happening.

Although, it is a bit annoying to get the same exact alert for first expansion base in a location and subsequent bases in that location. Basically, for the 4-5 minutes of biters building up the structures in the one location they expanded into, I'm getting a new alert that distracts me from what I was doing. I looked at the first one and already decided "yup, understood, and great to know, but also that location is very far away so I don't want to clear it out right now." But the alert style remains the same for every subsequent alert, so I keep needing to double-check "is it just the same place again, or is another expansion happening somewhere else at the same time?"

I would really appreciate a way to differentiate between these two. Expansion into a new area feels fundamentally different (and more dangerous!) than just one more structure being built in that spot. Maybe the latter alert can just be a yellow/orange version of the existing icon, with slightly different text?

Honestly, this behaviour sounds more like a Bug to me. It should alert you the first time you see the Chunk with the expansions, not "literally all the time"

[KeithFromCanada]

Idea: when nests absorb pollution, there is an ever-increasing chance that a 'builder' will spawn to increase the size of that nest.

That would incentivize players to A) reduce pollution and/or B) deal with biter nests within their pollution cloud before they fill their entire area and produce overwhelming attack groups.

(Bonus mechanic: worms grow in size as they absorb pollution until they eventually pull themselves out of the ground to reveal that they have become scaled-down demolishers that can shrug off most conventional attacks with ease. This would incentivize players to keep upgrading their defences and not get complacent.)

[erectile_pisfunction]

Idea: when nests absorb pollution, there is an ever-increasing chance that a 'builder' will spawn to increase the size of that nest.

That would incentivize players to A) reduce pollution and/or B) deal with biter nests within their pollution cloud before they fill their entire area and produce overwhelming attack groups.

(Bonus mechanic: worms grow in size as they absorb pollution until they eventually pull themselves out of the ground to reveal that they have become scaled-down demolishers that can shrug off most conventional attacks with ease. This would incentivize players to keep upgrading their defences and not get complacent.)

I can't imagine this being implemented in vanilla, but it is a killer idea for a mod. I like the idea of already established nests growing in size over time. When I first saw the sizes of nests far away from the crash area (think more than 2km away), I thought that at a certain distance away from the crash site, there would be nothing but biter nests everywhere and nearly no empty tiles! Of course, there are gaps between nests and the fill factor doesn't scale indefinitely, to my disappointment (but also relief).

I would still like to see this kind of behaviour as a mod though

[darketernal]

I was always wondering, why are there only just biters? The scenario is always the same, you land on a planet, there are biters, but you could also imagine different scenarios by crash landing on different planets. For instance (just to steal from metroid a bit) you land on planet zebes, and you have to fight your factory from flying metroids , or worms that crawl underground and come out in your factory, and you have to create sentinels that patrol your factory to destroy any intruders. What i'm trying to say is, that i feel there's a lot more potential here than just going with the alien biters species. And the terrains could be more diverse, like martian, or gas planet like. I feel that this game, terrain wise and enemy wise, has been stuck for too long at the same thing.