Factorio Forums

slay_mithos wrote:Well, Bitters seems to be intelligent enough to build shelters, to identify the source(s) of threats and are usually not attacking without reasons to, rather than just hunting like animals.

Their "shelters" seem more like biological structures, a part of their lifecycle.
They currently consider things able to shoot or move (around) as a threat, both of which are quite obvious.
They also attack things that "stink". That's not a very complex behavior. It's rather hard to explain without giving them intelligence, though. They'd need a reason to naturally want to smash chemically smelling things. For example, an ability to digest sulfur and maybe even iron (like some IRL bacteria).

It would be cool if biters preferred moving things that they see, like active inserters, belts, assemblers, steam engines, pumpjacks and mines but not furnaces/boilers (fire is scary and you can't claw it to death), chemical plants or refineries.
Would give them both a more natural feel and would make their attacks less dependent on pollution chunks. Pollution would still attract them globally, but movement would make them switch from "roaming" to "raging".
That attraction could also depend on size - small biters would avoid furnaces until they cool down, but big biters could fearlessly (and mindlessly) smash everything in their way.

On the point of biter intelligence, let me remind you of the current goal of the game: to build a rocket defence system capable of protecting landing colony ships. Again, IIRC in tha campaign you encounter a whole lot of downed spacecraft. On the other hand, there is totally no entity in the game that could have realistically hurt a spacecraft. Worms have far too limited of a range, biters... are biters and they BITE. Thus we have to assume one of the following: either there is Someone Else, probably in orbit or in some unreachable area, or the RD is actually something else - probably a ballistic missile silo?

Biters really strike me now as something not quite intelligent - think Alpha Centauri However, the idea in the spoiler might be actually very feasible in this case:

Or like in the film "avatar" where the whole planet fights against humans?
Why shouldn't there really big native cannons, shooting at every spaceship? Shooting also at the colony ship, so that they can't help us?

Evil? Are you kidding? I kill off entire biter villages including civilians then I use their corpses to power my generators that shoot their children. This is beyond evil, this is genocide.

ssilk wrote:Or like in the film "avatar"

From now on, my face when destroying spawner camps:

It's actually funny that people realize that pretty "late".

I like Factorio BECAUSE of this very aspect.
Humans are unique (self-consciousness and all the crap) yet deadly stupid to everything they touch, yet able to pure form of empathy, yet...

Surviving is about eating or being eaten.
Evolution discards the creatures that do not possess the will to outlive their competitors.

Humans are no different, and when facing the dilemma, they -often- chose to live.

Factorio is about both aspects : Being able to produce genius constructions... but for an evil purpose... And that's one aspect I simply LOVE, because it reminds me who we -the humans- are.

All in all, it raises consciousness, and that's a pretty amazing feature in itself for a game!

ssilk wrote:Or like in the film "avatar" where the whole planet fights against humans?
Why shouldn't there really big native cannons, shooting at every spaceship? Shooting also at the colony ship, so that they can't help us?

Just because you never encounter one . And yes, at high evolutionfactor it should be the whole planet fighting. However, I can not imagine a situation in which an untouched planet would evolve anti-space weaponry. Even if we assume its whole biosphere is effectively a single organism.

you and your peaceful ways!

I want to strip my aliens brain and be able to use them as cheaper logistic bots, using one alien body and two advanced circuit as a land based logistic bot chassis

with an alien port using trees and fish to make a food slurry to sustain the alien bot chassis instead of electricity.

Sir Nick wrote:Just because you never encounter one . And yes, at high evolutionfactor it should be the whole planet fighting. However, I can not imagine a situation in which an untouched planet would evolve anti-space weaponry. Even if we assume its whole biosphere is effectively a single organism.

You can turn your eyes to multiple big universes where there is a whole race using some kind of hive mind.
The Zerg from Starcraft, or the Tyranides from Warhammer 40k are examples of biological armies that evolved all the weaponry they needed, including gigantic space ships and anti-air creatures capable of taking down big vessels.

It all comes down to selective evolution though, with creatures with different purposes living with the same "mind", and there only seem to be 2 paths right now: bitter (3 kinds, just bigger and stronger, not really different) and worms (ranged weaponry).

I could totally imagine worms evolving to a much bigger version, to be able to attack at very long range (balistic missile style), and be a threat to bases and space ships.

Yes, this is cool!

On the left side the party, which wants to kill all aggressive native life to make a good living on this dammed planet. On the right side those, who think this is just the beginning of much, much bigger creatures, which makes living really painful and so want to make peace with them.

I actually wonder if Biters are someone's terraforming device and security system. Plonk them down on a planet, let them do what they're designed to, and in a couple of centuries come back to a planet habitable for your species. And at the same time, you've given them the means to defend the planet from any other would be takers (Clearly, since we need a rocket defence system to protect our own colony ships) - Would make sense of why they zero in on pollution creating things and try and destroy them so fast - you're upsetting their own, more subtle, terraforming processes.

about this time last year i posted my idea that the entire planet was just a factory for creating creepers, and that the ones we saw were just the rejects.

this could also apply to biters, the biters worms and hives all have the look and feel of underground bugs, whats not to say that they're just small fry parasites which were forced out of their happy zone by bigger bugs?

Ravenholme wrote:I actually wonder if Biters are someone's terraforming device and security system. Plonk them down on a planet, let them do what they're designed to, and in a couple of centuries come back to a planet habitable for your species. And at the same time, you've given them the means to defend the planet from any other would be takers (Clearly, since we need a rocket defence system to protect our own colony ships) - Would make sense of why they zero in on pollution creating things and try and destroy them so fast - you're upsetting their own, more subtle, terraforming processes.

So, following that scenario we are just the second guys trying to settle the planet. Sucks to fly 250 ly (or so) just to find out someone already is there terraforming the planet. I kinda like that scenario, especially if there already was a a native, intelligent species even before the biter invasion, struggling for survival on the now biter overrun homeworld. And it would tie in nicely with the proposed zerg-like transformation of the ground around nests. Such a transformation seems quite extreme for a species that developed on the planet, but as some form of "living terraformers" for another alien species it would make sense. Interesting scenario.