Ideas for creeper types

[ssilk]

The images on Facebook where really inspiring for me, I thought about other types of creepers.

1. Thiefs. The live in their thief-houses and randomly a thief walks out of it to a random part of your factory. They try to steal material from the belts or steal any other item, if at the target no belt is nearby. Once he managed to bring an item back to its home, he walks back to the same place and tries it again. Also a new thief is born which does the same. Soon the horde of thief a get big and steal a significant number of items. They can be killed with simple guns.

2. Creeper bees. They need trees to live and go to any other tree in the area around to harvest creeper-honey. The honey belongs to the same category as the fish or is eventually a pre-product of creapereggs. Once they harvest enough trees in their area, a swarm (size depends on how many trees have been occupied) splits and searches for a new home. They do this also, when you came too near. The swarm is very slow and with the distance he travels (which is not far) they get weaker until they die. You cannot shoot them, need flamethrower/rocket. The automatic guns/lasers fire at them without use,
This means that if you remove the trees, you will make the bees weaker; you should have a flamethrower to go into the wood.

... To be continued and invitation for others ...

[rk84]

I also had something like thiefs in mind, but more like hitmen/saboteurs. They would only move during dark and avoid lights. During daytime they would stand still and camouflaged. Targets player or buildings like steam engines and assembly machines.

[applemachine]

I actually had creepers act as saboteurs once in a while. For some reason my pipes were being destroyed during attacks. I think it may have been caused accidentally by my flame thrower without me noticing. In any case, my power was draining away and an attack was coming so I checked my power and noticed my inserters without power, my coal supply dwindling, and my entire factory shutting down. It was a challenge to fix, but It added an element of excitement. So, I guess I like the saboteur as a possible enemy type.

[Coolthulhu]

Creepers like to attack pipes because they are often hard to path through. Use ground pipes to leave an open path for them.

I think saboteurs would be a bit too much of a hassle to deal with (finding what got destroyed), while at the same time not dangerous for a player with enough turrets. A big part of what makes factorio fun is setting up stuff that you can trust will work instead of re-checking stuff all the time to make sure it works.
They could be fun, but they'd need to be "done well" and not just simple creepers with more targets.

I like the hitmen idea. Currently day/night cycle is limited mostly to powering solars. Camouflaged assassins would make placing lamps a good idea instead of mostly an aesthetic thing. They'd need some way of avoiding the turrets without being immune to them, though. Shorter targeting range while in darkness, maybe?

My idea: coward/swarmer - creeper that avoids loaded/powered turrets and treats area within their firing range as difficult terrain (like normal creepers treat areas with buildings on them) for purposes of pathing. Could scale the effect to relative strength of own forces vs turrets, which would also cause them to swarm the weakly defended points once enough of them gather instead of going around the whole map to avoid 1 gun turret.

[ssilk]

Nice ideas.
A saboteur would be good. Something, which suddenly remove a pole, or a piece of belt. But I don't know, if this is really so good? Because you may not find, what he has done. And it could cost much time...
Need for light in the night to see camouflaged creepers better is also good. I recommend also the need for radar...

But that's always the same...

[slpwnd]

Making the enemies interesting, challenging yet not really annoying is hard.

The thing is that you are a single guy in a potentially quite a big factory. Therefore sabotages when sucessful are quite annoying. You need to stop doing what you are doing and go there and restore the order. The factories are very fragile - one thing breaks => pretty much everythin breaks sooner or later. And defending every single transport belt is not feasible.

On the other hand, the thieves sound like a neat idea. Less stuff on your belts doesn't stop your factory it just makes it slower. And you can avoid that by using trains

Anyway, for the 0.7 we plan to have standard enemies in probably 3 difficulty levels and on top of that hopefully shooting enemies (also in 3 levels). We will see how it will work out. This already brings in some issues. For instance it will most probably happen very often that parts of the fortification will be damaged (the shooters will be able to shoot before the turrets get them). Looks like we will need the repairing robots ...

[_0rbit_]

I am all for any type of variation in the enemies. I honestly do not care much, because I will kill 'em all anyways lol.

But realistically speaking, imagine you go visit another planet where there is intelligent life. Imagine it is hostile and technologically advanced. Why would they attack the way they do?

I think any such society would be organized. There would be a response to an invasion (by the player) which is more organized and seeks a more long term solution. Perhaps it would even start a diplomacy. Perhaps there should even be multiple creeper factions like in Civilization/Colonization. You can be friendly with one, hostile to another, until eventually you turn hostile to all of them?

[ssilk]

That was the idea with the thiefs: they are much more organized, because no enemy is that dumb.

one idea of this thread was to find such types of enemies, which are more or less organized, challenging, but not really annoying hard.

And to suggest another:
They could have something like a radar, which scans for targets and for weak points in our factory. For example the point, with the lowest defense (the overlapping radius of all the weapons, and where is the lowest overlap). And this way it marks for the creepers in radius: it sets the waypoints for them through the hell. I mean this will make them much more organized, especially, when there is also a starting point short before the defense line, at which they gather and start the fight, when they are enough. And when you begin to make the defense bigger they just will use another weak point. The only way to go against them is to destroy the radar, which is of course highly defended.

And because it is such a hard thing you get a warning, if your radar stations find another, which means, that you really need to built them.

[_0rbit_]

I think it would be pretty easy to keep an up to date map of "defense strength" that is used by the AI to coordinate its attack.

What the enemies lack is an army

[slpwnd]

Uptil now (0.6) the logic for the enemies attack has been driven by the script. Basically every now and then (cca 5-10 minutes) there was a global signal and a certain (ever increasing) amount of enemies went to attack the player whenever he was. If the enemies encountered turrets / labs / trains or bots along the way they would try to destroy them first. The enemies would attack "in lines" (long line of enemies coming and being destroyed one after. This has changed.

In the 0.7 there will be a concept of "the pollution". The pollution is produced by the factory (certain things produce more pollution than others - all accessible through the data files). Pollution partially spreads to the vicinity of the factory. The enemies are triggered by the pollution that has arrived to their position. Their goal is not the player itself anymore, rather they follow the pollution gradient and try to find the local source of the pollution and attack that one. Also they move and attack in groups. At the moment the most pollution is produced by the mining drills and things that run on coal (furnaces, boilers, etc.).

This changes the gameplay quite significantly and imho makes it more interesting. It is not enough to fortify couple of labs anymore. Instead the player needs to protect his factory on a larger scale. Making a large mining facility requires defending it. In the future there will be possibilities how to deal with the pollution (things like pollution cleaners or maybe making agreement for allowed pollution levels with the enemies in exchange for providing them with certain goods). We took quite some inspiration from the threads here on the forum.

[ssilk]

This sound ultimatively interesting! Mines must be defended. This changes the gameplay radically, but I mean much more interesting. I'm so sorry, that I'll fly tomorrow to Carpathos for 3 weeks. Those holidays are really annoying...

[ssilk]

Off topic: Huh, I just reread the description of the bungalow: ...free internet ... Cool. Now you can post 2 suggestions per day: one from the breakfast balcony and one from the beach...

[_0rbit_]

This changes the gameplay quite significantly and imho makes it more interesting. It is not enough to fortify couple of labs anymore. Instead the player needs to protect his factory on a larger scale. Making a large mining facility requires defending it. In the future there will be possibilities how to deal with the pollution (things like pollution cleaners or maybe making agreement for allowed pollution levels with the enemies in exchange for providing them with certain goods). We took quite some inspiration from the threads here on the forum.

This is a really good idea and good implementation. But if I understand correctly, the pollution is a real thing in the game, not just an AI-map used to determine where to attack? Because, if this is the case, I think it would be wise to determine the use a weighted (pollution - defense strength) map.

Anyways, kudos for the ongoing efforts. I read about the team today and the inspiration for development. Reading that the ultimate goal is to have self-replicating factories made my mouth water

[ssilk]

Traps: the creepers use traps to catch animals. But sometimes you can fall into them. They can't be seen and if you fall into one some creepers are triggered. The sense is a kind of story-element, because everything can happen here. For example if you don't fight they won't kill you and bring you instead to the boss of the next village.

Animals: some hordes of more or less big animals are walking around, some prefer different landscapes. Some are dangerous, some are delicious, some are really big and eat lot of trees. If you research animal riding or animal traps you can move them to a place to free it from trees.

[Coolthulhu]

Animals sound like a bad idea - they lack the determinism that makes Factorio something more than more complex Minecraft. Unless they only completely predictable behaviors (like creepers do now), that is. Maybe ants that collect nearby plant matter and only go either orthogonally or follow a path already found by other ants?

Traps are also out of place - your dude builds huge constructions in no time. He could just make a staircase out. How can a trap stop someone with a rocket launcher and a backpack of explosives?

[ssilk]

Ok, the traps are just a trigger for some story. They are not dangerous itself, what follows might be dangerous. I thought: when there are animals, then there might be traps.

And the animals are highly deterministic: search next thing to eat, go toot, eat it. Deterministic.

I like you idea of the ants. I imagine some big anthills/buildings. The ants eat wood. So they eat the wooden electric pole.

Presumed, that forest grows - very slow of course - the ants live in desert areas and search for wood, so the have a kind of optimal circle of wood around them. The traps are used to catch ants. Or catch the queen. If you also create a trap, and catch the queen, you could use her...

... 2 or 3 hours later ...

... use her to lay the alien eggs. Yes! The creepers get the eggs from the ants!
Not the best idea, but some kind of surprising.

[Coolthulhu]

And the animals are highly deterministic: search next thing to eat, go toot, eat it. Deterministic.

The first point is not that easy to make deterministic.
If they pick a random direction, it's already not deterministic.
If they go in a spiral, they need a direction too (it's safe to make entire species/clan/whatever go clockwise or counterclockwise, though) and it would look weird, mechanical. Picking nearest vertices from results of a breadth-first pathfinding algorithm (A* is probably what creepers use to find stuff now) would do same thing as going in a spiral, except less efficiently.
If they pick the closest thing, they can pick a tree 300 tiles from them. If there's a distance limit, they need another method when stuff is too far.
If they are following a pre-programmed route, they are extremely vulnerable to change (trees chopped = animals starve) and can only be created on map generation.

Out of those, only the "pick closest thing" + "spiral when nothing is nearby" sounds like a solution. It would look weird though.

Ok, the traps are just a trigger for some story. They are not dangerous itself, what follows might be dangerous.

The only trap that does this and makes sense to me is alarm trap. It could summon an ambush.
Traps like pits, stuff that grabs legs, generally anything that immobilizes sounds silly when you consider that our dude carries a backpack full of stone walls, cars, flame throwers, rockets and trains. A rather complex and unrealistic trap could create walls around our dude that would disappear/crumble when enough creepers get near - it wouldn't have the unrealistic part of pit traps (how do you pit-trap a dude who can build 30 meters of stone wall?), leg-grab traps (he can just shoot/burn the rope or blast whatever it is attached to) and frustration of damage traps (you stumbled upon a trap! you die...).
Also, if they were not to be pre-generated, creepers would need a trap-laying algorithm and this would be either rather complicated, highly non-deterministic or highly predictable.

[ssilk]

And the animals are highly deterministic: search next thing to eat, go toot, eat it. Deterministic.

The first point is not that easy to make deterministic.
If they pick a random direction, it's already not deterministic.

Random in factorio is deterministic! There is a special random function, which creates pseudo-random and deterministic values.

If they pick the closest thing, they can pick a tree 300 tiles from them. If there's a distance limit, they need another method when stuff is too far.

Either they find a way or die.

[ssilk]

Notice: when ants need wood they should also plant the trees for it. So they are forester and woodcutter in one.

Logically the next step could be, that they produce the wood for us. Thinking of the TroZ- and treefarm-mod.

[Coolthulhu]

Random in factorio is deterministic! There is a special random function, which creates pseudo-random and deterministic values.

I meant deterministic for player, not for the engine.
That's why I compared it to Minecraft, which is not really deterministic, despite using pseudorandom functions. While simple enough non-deterministic pseudorandom systems can be treated as deterministic (RNG manipulation in older games, especially for weak platforms like Gameboy), it greatly increases the complexity of predicting the behavior of the system.
Currently one of the best things about Factorio is that most of the components are simple, don't seem to use special cases and only the emergent behavior of the complete system is complex. Randomness introduces statistics to the system and this means that without a bunch of experiments, you won't be able to make anything really efficient.

Let's say we have animals that have a use for the player - say, they eat grass, get fat, a big 2x2 inserter grabs them, puts them into a grinder and you sell the resulting meat to happy creeper merchants. Let's also say we have a device to scare them - a loud beeper that makes animals less likely to go near it when on.

With predictable animals, you can calculate how much space you need to feed and keep them. They won't eat the grass in a stupid pattern that will force them to wander off despite loads of grass being available - in fact, if you calculated the space well, you can just cover the grass at the sides and you don't even need a pen. When the time for slaughter comes, you can scare them into the center/side of the pen, where you have the grinder and you can be sure they will run into the proper direction.

Now, with unpredictable animals, you can only calculate the amount of grass they will eat given time. If the grass regrows slowly, they can "eat themselves" into a pattern of grass that will force them to start wandering around, maybe get mad and knock down walls. This means you need more space for each animal than is just enough to grow enough grass. How much more? You won't know until you try a bunch of times. When the time for slaughter comes, you have to use the same technique you'd use for predictable animals, just with more safety devices, beepers and thicker walls.
In the end your solution will be less elegant, less optimal and you won't be able to improve it without either reverse-engineering the RNG or lots of trial and error. Until someone does all the tedious experiments. Factorio doesn't have the player base of Dwarf Fortress, so you can't really hope that anyone will do it.

I'm not all against randomness. Many games are much better because they are random and unpredictable. It's just that one of the best things about Factorio is that it is not random so you can engineer the perfect solutions for stuff that don't depend on having RNG worked out.