[MOD 0.12.20+] Misanthrope 0.3.7 -- Better Biter Mechanics

[Kitsune]

Hey there.

Wanted to ask if its possible to, if i try hard, to prevent the evolution to raise? I really like the mod-idea and want to use it but i'm not very deep into the game still learning things. xD
As far i understand it, if the evolution reaches an point the biters will start to attack me but in the time the evolution meter decreases right? So can i do it that way, build my factory but
only that big that the decrease that happens with an attack is high enough that, on that first point they start attacking me, the evolution meter dont increase beyond this point?

Or is it simply a "run as far you can or you will be eaten if you dont come to far"?

In forward thank you for answers.

[Hexicube]

I would really like to see a lite-version, with a bit less agressiv biters that ignore rails.

The thing you want is actually in the first post under notable mentions. It only works for rails (not signals/stations), but it changes rail network building difficulty from 'practically impossible' to 'quite difficult'.

[zakthefallen]

So... the aliens are never leaving "Peaceful" state for me. I set the game to normal settings for them, but despite my pollution touching their bases, they wouldn't change to "Normal" state. Several phases of Peaceful went by, now at 2.5 hours of gametime...but no attacks. Am I supposed to ramp up the enemy settings for the mod to have any effect?

I went and destroyed a tiny little base that wouldn't attack me, but that didn't provoke a reaction either. The biter evolution is at 3.1%, as noted by EvoGUI... isn't the state supposed to change to Normal once they hit 0.15%?

I also disabled any other mods that affect the aliens, but with or without them I can't seem to get the aliens changing out of Peaceful state.

[Afforess]

So... the aliens are never leaving "Peaceful" state for me. I set the game to normal settings for them, but despite my pollution touching their bases, they wouldn't change to "Normal" state. Several phases of Peaceful went by, now at 2.5 hours of gametime...but no attacks. Am I supposed to ramp up the enemy settings for the mod to have any effect?

I went and destroyed a tiny little base that wouldn't attack me, but that didn't provoke a reaction either. The biter evolution is at 3.1%, as noted by EvoGUI... isn't the state supposed to change to Normal once they hit 0.15%?

I also disabled any other mods that affect the aliens, but with or without them I can't seem to get the aliens changing out of Peaceful state.

Peaceful is the only phase until you reach 15%. I can only assume you live the life of some non-polluting hermit.

[zakthefallen]

Actually I was trying hard to pollute them as much as possible xD

I just tried a map on the highest alien settings, placed a few burner drill/furnace setups right next to their bases... still nothing. I have no idea why the rate took so long to raise. I even set down some gun turrets to harass them.. all they did was blow up the turrets and return to peaceful mode. I didn't wait until 15% though, only 2 or 3.

Knowing it takes 15% evolution to trigger the next phase is a HUGE relief, I was really worried about them rushing my base within 10-15 minutes, lol

Thanks for the help!

[Pandemoneus]

Actually I was trying hard to pollute them as much as possible xD

I just tried a map on the highest alien settings, placed a few burner drill/furnace setups right next to their bases... still nothing. I have no idea why the rate took so long to raise. I even set down some gun turrets to harass them.. all they did was blow up the turrets and return to peaceful mode. I didn't wait until 15% though, only 2 or 3.

Knowing it takes 15% evolution to trigger the next phase is a HUGE relief, I was really worried about them rushing my base within 10-15 minutes, lol

Thanks for the help!

In my RSO world I have been playing for 6h and they still haven't attacked, however the phases are currently changing between normal and passive aggressive, so they get closer to me. I suppose I will have to fight them soon.

[Darloth]

Are they meant to get this close at 50% evolution?

I was just about doing okay until it breached 50, and then... uh, well, now this. I'm not sure I'll be able to recover.

[Afforess]

Are they meant to get this close at 50% evolution?

I was just about doing okay until it breached 50, and then... uh, well, now this. I'm not sure I'll be able to recover.

Yes, the goal of the mod is to be so challenging that defeat is possible. Hence the name, "Misanthrope".

[kyranzor]

this mod concept is great. Perhaps an idea to help with rugged railways is underground rails which are just invincible above-ground rails with no texture, and when a train is on an underground rail the train's texture/entity is changed such that it is invisible/invincible too.

Another possibility is electrified rails, that kill biters that touch them, but perhaps this causes huge power-drain on your factory as a consequence.

I might try this mod once I get my soldier stuff going well enough, something to shoot at

[Darloth]

Yes, the goal of the mod is to be so challenging that defeat is possible. Hence the name, "Misanthrope".

Oh I know, I was just checking that was the intended behaviour at 50%, since there's a tier for "assault" and I would consider this pretty actively towards my structures already... But presumably it gets even worse!

Regarding electrified rails - it's a nice idea, but spitters are the real problem by the time you're really having regular biter trouble. That could be fixed by making rails immune to spitters, but I don't like that solution all that much, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense. That said, I would pay resources for acid-proofed electrified rails. I'd also use the mod that made biters ignore them if it didn't also make them invisible on the map and unblueprintable.

They're certainly a lot smarter with the new avoiding common death areas code now - they've been pressuring all around my base, I've had to put up turrets in places that never needed any before. It's a very different experience, so it's working well!

[kyranzor]

Yes, the goal of the mod is to be so challenging that defeat is possible. Hence the name, "Misanthrope".

Oh I know, I was just checking that was the intended behaviour at 50%, since there's a tier for "assault" and I would consider this pretty actively towards my structures already... But presumably it gets even worse!

Regarding electrified rails - it's a nice idea, but spitters are the real problem by the time you're really having regular biter trouble. That could be fixed by making rails immune to spitters, but I don't like that solution all that much, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense. That said, I would pay resources for acid-proofed electrified rails. I'd also use the mod that made biters ignore them if it didn't also make them invisible on the map and unblueprintable.

They're certainly a lot smarter with the new avoiding common death areas code now - they've been pressuring all around my base, I've had to put up turrets in places that never needed any before. It's a very different experience, so it's working well!

I think "acid proof steel" used to make hardened rails (perhaps recipe could be steel + lubricant + copper for electricity + some rare ore from various mods) is reasonable enough, the spitters attempt to attack the rails and don't get anywhere (While their biter friends are electrocuted trying to melee) and then a Gun train goes past and kills all the spitters?

[Darloth]

It's the not getting anywhere part that's the difficult bit. It'll tie up biters and cpu cycles.

If it could be done that the spitters would ignore it, but the melee-biters would bite it, cost electricity, and die, that would be great though. Of course, they should also do damage to the rails (once - or more, in case of really big ones) and even if they have more health they'd need maintenance occasionally.

I wonder if that roboport train mod is still working. Not sure it ever worked on the move, mind you, and none of the guntrain mods look great (though they seem to work better nowadays!). I may have to look into them all soon, I'm not sure how long I can hold out once this last bit of iron runs dry...

[Adil]

I wonder if that roboport train mod is still working. Not sure it ever worked on the move

It'd be trivial to add moving roboport to my guntrain mod. However, without additional train AI scripting, if a rail connection is broken somewhere, the train would not depart to fix it. And in vanilla trains zip around way too fast for construction bots catching up with them after the deployment in case of maintenance repairs. I don't know whether there's a way of making a whole train slow when a particular carriage is connected to it.

This is why I find the rail chewing to be the most controversial feature of the mod. Irl they simply don't run trains in the unguarded territory, however in factorio guarding all the rails would mean rather anticlimatic setup of evergrowing wall box separating biters' and player's territories.

[Darloth]

If the rails were tough enough, a robot would be dispatched to fix it as the train rolled over it - you'd have to fix any ACTUAL breaks yourself, yes, but a constantly rolling gun and robot train would keep most incidents down.

I'd like that personally.

Yes, you'd need a lot of robots, and they'd often show up low on charge, battered, bent, and maybe even complaining about having to fly back AAAALL the way home (uphill both ways, naturally), but I still think it would be worth having.

Just the ability to use one roboport to cover multiple areas (long wait times, maybe even smarter circuitry + smarter trains to make sure it has the correct robot complement before it departs, and then it goes to the next station and repairs that bit) would be amazing, so if you do feel like adding a mobile roboport carriage, please do.

Then if I could just find/get/make some really good guntrain graphics (could reuse the logistics wagon one from.. .somewhere, for the roboports, though a nice one there would be great too.)

[BlakeMW]

One possibility would be adding hardened infrastructure - such as Armored Pylon, Hardened Rail and Buried Pipe. Give the hardened infrastructure extra resists and hitpoints, but just make the AI ignore hardened infrastructure. That is the FPS friendly solution.

[Darloth]

But we're not looking for solely the FPS friendly solution, are we?

Presumably most people who download this mod want to actually be pressured by the biters to some degree, such that they can't just build 10 laser turrets at one side of their base, 10 at the other side, and happily forget about the biters for another 40 hours of gameplay (which - unless using RSO, has been my experience of vanilla factorio as soon as you get to lasers.)

Given that we want the biters to be a threat, and to blow up out stuff, then it follows that:

a) we want to be able to defend our stuff, but also
b) we want to have to defend our stuff.

More hp is good because it means stuff can be defended less - a pair of laser turrets will eventually kill most of the smaller raiding parties, but with the default HP those raiders could otherwise destroy half a dozen belts and a power pylon. If everything had 10x the hp, that's not the case, but player (or robots-on-a-train) intervention would still be required to top everything back up to full HP, and/or reload the ammo of the turret if you're not using lasers for some reason like not having enough power or not even running power all the way out to wherever.

I can see the justifications for not guarding rails themselves (there's a LOT of rail), and if a way could be found to have biters ignore just them, I'd be fine with it, but I'm happy they go for transport belts and power pylons and other such things.

If someone makes an acid-resistant steel mod, and lets you build certain things such that they won't really be affected by small to medium spitters, that would be great in my opinion, it opens up different types of defense (electrified fences around acid resistant pylons, for example) - but I don't think that the AI is smart enough to realize when it isn't doing any damage, so you might end up with a big circle of spitters just constantly spitting at a building with enough acid resist to totally ignore them. THAT sort of immersion-breaking FPS loss is what we should strive to avoid.

[kyranzor]

If someone makes an acid-resistant steel mod, and lets you build certain things such that they won't really be affected by small to medium spitters, that would be great in my opinion, it opens up different types of defense (electrified fences around acid resistant pylons, for example) - but I don't think that the AI is smart enough to realize when it isn't doing any damage, so you might end up with a big circle of spitters just constantly spitting at a building with enough acid resist to totally ignore them. THAT sort of immersion-breaking FPS loss is what we should strive to avoid.

What about "not much damage" as opposed to "no damage" so that if left unchecked they will successfully destroy the rail - this means having gun-trains and auto-repair trains on loops becomes critical for protecting long stretches of rails. The acid-proof rails just need to hold out long enough on average for the gun trains to zoom past.

[Darloth]

That would probably be a fine solution, and I can't think of any good reason I didn't think of it. I know how the resistances work, I know perfectly well you could set 95%/0 resist to acid or something.

But yes, something like that would be great. If you feel like doing it please do If not I might eventually get around to it.

[Vas]

I can verify that multiplayer works, if you wish to join our server to see how your mod is doing then let me know and I'll give you the info!

However, I would like AI to be smarter too. Not just attack the nearest thing, they need to learn what to avoid and what they can hit to hinder us. Make them more human like in strategizing and such. For example, periodically you can have an enemy wave bulk up, and run a scan of all sectors visible to the enemy using player sight range for enemy units and radar sight ranges for their hives. They will find the weakest point to attack within their sight range, and attack it.

Perhaps periodically, hives within a certain amount of blocks of your structures, will build a wave and then all of them will attack simultaneously too, so if you use energy turrets everywhere, this could be a severe power drain and cause your defenses to fail.

[inno]

Been playing multiplayer for 2 days of gametime, working great. Best experience in factorio was being flanked while laser creeping a biter base ( trying to clear stuff from around a prospective mine a good 4 minutes run from my base). They took out my power line, and I was suddenly deep in enemy territory with a bunch of laser shaped statues frantically trying to escape.

My only problem so far is that the critters keep spawning until the server uses 100% cputime and grinds to a halt, forcing a console kill all.

Great work thanks!