Experimental Biter expansion too strong

[DBD]

Look at what happened here, and you'll get an idea of what I mean. https://www.youtube.com/live/lRDNm85FATI

6 Hours, 5 minutes, and 10 seconds. You'll see the problem. This massive nest was not native, it was the result of a biter expansion. It's enormous, which on its own would be completely fine, but it spawned so close to my walls that I couldn't defend it because it basically resulted in an endless stream of biters attacking the wall from the nest after my flamethrower turrets attacked the first wave. I got myself killed, the problem isn't that I died, I could have handled the situation better. But that hive had around 25-30 nests in it, and it was the result of an expansion, and it plopped itself right beside my walls. By my estimation it's extremely excessive, and there needs to be some sort of protection against the nests spawning too close. I've never seen an expansion nearly this large before, I like the size increase. But what I don't like is that the "safe distance" that they would plop down the hive away from your existing military structures has either been greatly reduced, or downright removed. This is 100% excessive, and there should be safeguards against them plopping down a 30 nest hive that close to your existing walls. I worked really hard to make sure I could get the flamethrower turrets down, and in the end it didn't even matter. They would have just kept on sending bodies to my walls until the walls fell, because the hive spawned way too close to the walls.

[Loewchen]

Post the save and add the version of the game to the title following 3638 please.

[Klonan]

So, with 2.1 we made some effort to try to make the expansion nests more similar in size and threat as the map generated ones,
As well as making the expansions more reliable and intuitive as to where they expand to

And from reviewing the video, I pretty much think the nest was the right size given:
- You chose a deathworld which specifically makes bases 200% normal size
- You were 5+ hours in with a evolution factor high enough to spawn mediums
- You extended the wall perimeter close to the edge of their territory

I can understand the frustration of an unexpected gameplay change like this, and the system and numbers might need some fine tuning,
But I don't specifically see anything right now that would show the logic isn't working correctly

Other tweaks, the range that the player buildings affect spawning was increased from 2 chunks to 3 chunks, but that just reduces the chance of expansion,
If there are no better spots they can still get close to the walls

But also consider they are a wild animal and shouldn't necessarily respect 100% your asserted property rights

Bonus image of the problem with pre 2.1 nests

06-25-2026, 17-26-40.png (88.9 KiB) Viewed 1377 times

[berggen]

Other tweaks, the range that the player buildings affect spawning was increased from 2 chunks to 3 chunks, but that just reduces the chance of expansion,
If there are no better spots they can still get close to the walls

Any chance we could get the new formula for this? Prior I believe it was 10/(10+buildings in this chunk+buildings 1 chunk away/2+buildings 2 chunks away/4). Is it just extending the series to buildings 3 chunks away/8 or did it change it entirely?

[DBD]

Basically I had to place individual wall segments to shut down biter expansion by using the "show-enemy-expansion-candidate-chunks" debug thing. It worked, it stops them from settling down too close to your wall. What happened to me might have been a fluke, but placing individual walls down around the outskirts of my defensive wall pretty much entirely eliminated the possibility of it happening. I think Wube scaled up the size of biter expansions, creating far larger hives comprised of many more nests, but they did this without scaling up the "safe distance" between where they settle down and where your defenses are, so they end up settling too close to the wall and then your turrets just end up in an endless shooting fest against the biter nest.

[Klonan]

Other tweaks, the range that the player buildings affect spawning was increased from 2 chunks to 3 chunks, but that just reduces the chance of expansion,
If there are no better spots they can still get close to the walls

Any chance we could get the new formula for this? Prior I believe it was 10/(10+buildings in this chunk+buildings 1 chunk away/2+buildings 2 chunks away/4). Is it just extending the series to buildings 3 chunks away/8 or did it change it entirely?

Sure, its in the map-settings.lua:

Code: Select all

      -- Distance in chunks from the furthest base around.
      -- This prevents expansions from reaching too far into the
      -- player's territory
      max_expansion_distance = 5,
      min_expansion_distance = 3,

      friendly_base_influence_radius = 6,
      enemy_building_influence_radius = 3,

      -- A candidate chunk's score is given as follows:
      --   player = 0
      --   for neighbour in all chunks within enemy_building_influence_radius from chunk:
      --     if neighbour has player buildings:
      --       player += neighbouring_chunk_coefficient^distance(chunk, neighbour)
      --               * building_coefficient
      --
      --   base = 0
      --   for neighbour in all chunks within friendly_base_influence_radius from chunk:
      --     if neighbour has enemy bases:
      --       base += neighbouring_base_chunk_coefficient^distance(chunk, neighbour)
      --             * other_base_coefficient
      --
      --   score(chunk) = 1 / (1 + player + base)
      --
      -- The iteration is over a square region centered around the chunk for which the calculation is done,
      -- and includes the central chunk as well. distance is the Euclidean distance, and ^ signifies exponentiation.

[DBD]

If the size of biter expansions has increased lately, then maybe the radius of the "circle" where they settle down is ending up closer to walls than it did before. Like a bigger circle would imply a larger radius, but if the center of the biter expansion was the same distance to the walls as before, and no tweaks were made to the "safe distance" between the wall and the center, then technically the radius would stretch further closer to the walls than it did previously.

[Klonan]

If the size of biter expansions has increased lately, then maybe the radius of the "circle" where they settle down is ending up closer to walls than it did before. Like a bigger circle would imply a larger radius, but if the center of the biter expansion was the same distance to the walls as before, and no tweaks were made to the "safe distance" between the wall and the center, then technically the radius would stretch further closer to the walls than it did previously.

The distance was increased from 64 to 96, so it should offset the increased base size enough,
But again that is just a disincentive, so if there are no better chunks they can get close
There is the hard limit, that they won't try to expand to a chunk with any player buildings

[berggen]

There is the hard limit, that they won't try to expand to a chunk with any player buildings

Wow, that's really significant. Also ironically makes a lot of previous low odd expansion candidates impossible, which I think is actually a player nerf if you're building hard walls at the edge of your base (previously expansions would often target inside your walls and just get deleted by defenses). If you cheese this by building scarecrows outside of your base, you can definitely 'disable' expansions in a large area quite cheaply.

Also, if this is the intended behavior, I have found cases where it takes more than a single structure to invoke this functionality. Should I file a bug report?

[Jap2.0]

There is the hard limit, that they won't try to expand to a chunk with any player buildings

Wait so are the victory poles of like 0.12 or whenever back? That's an interesting change.

----

Edit: changes appear to include, added minimum expansion distance (3 chunks); reduced maximum expansion distance (7 -> 5 chunks); adding more than 1 building in a chunk no longer matters (only 0 -> 1 changes expansion probabilities); and at some point when a few chunks* in close proximity contain an entity, some or all of them will become off-limits for expansion.

*Somewhere between 1 and 4, experimenting with this confused me.

(Sorry for spamming in bug reports)

[Klonan]

I will move this to Balancing for further discussion

In short, the expansions should be relatively larger than in 2.0, but similar in size to the nests that are naturally occuring,
There is also an added random element to the size of expansions,
With evolution 0 = 5-20
With evolution 0.5 = 10-40
With evolution 1.0 = 20-80

We can tune these numbers, maybe make the starting numbers start lower and scale higher,
But in my playtesting (and others in the team), the expansion sizes generally felt right with the player progression at that time,
I am interested in save games for further testing and tweaking, if anybody would like to provide them

[Stringweasel]

There is the hard limit, that they won't try to expand to a chunk with any player buildings

So some form of victory poles are still possible? You just need a lot more victory poles

[worph]

What I noticed in the new update is that on two occasions, on normal settings, in the early game, think right around military/blue I had two nests expand INTO my pollution cloud, very close to my base. Which never happened before and really threw me off. Needless to say I am not a huge fan of that.

[Erfar]

I Like idea of bitters expansions are as big as hives BUT I believe there is some sort of clunkyness in evolution logic of itself

My small gripes with evolution is that "time" as an evolution factor is already included in "polution" and "bitters nest destroyed". Wuth changes to 2.1 I would like to see at least default time evolution factor reduced to 0, as now there should be impossible to "pacify" bitter with wall cages.
It will also solve issue that Gleba start ticking it evolution factor from moment when Engineer reach orbit.
I Already was burned twice by coming Gleba orbit without landing and when going to gleba it was like 20%+ evolution both times


ANYWAY
I believe nests should get some form of "reconstruction project" aka - If bitter nest has low amount of nests/worms after some form of player attack, or just due to map generation issue (like spawning next to water) nests should slowly spawn back nests/worms until they reach status of "healthy nest"

Also, to prevent world of becaming too crowded with bitters (save spacing between nests) what about of having small chance after 100% evolution factor that nest will increase in quality or that bitter expansion will spawn higher level nests? Game has stats for legendary behemoth bitters and spitters.

[Stargateur]

I like the change, I always was disappointed of bitter expansion size compared to far nest on the map. About balance I don't think using a deathworld settings is a good start to complain about bitter. Thus I agree bitter doing nest too close have always been a problem, specially with worms. The safe distance should take into account the closest nest not the center of the new base or whatever it use currently. Specially in space age where artillery is long to get.

[Tertius]

While early and mid game, I don't want to deal with biters very much. I abandoned maps and disabled biters on my first maps. If they expand back into areas I just cleared, it's kind of frustrating and it was ok the new expansions were small and only about the size of the initial nests in the starting area.

Later, when I have flamethrower turrets and time+resources to actually fortify my perimeter defense, I'm prepared for bigger expansions. You know, if you just unlocked a new tech it doesn't build magically around your base, especially without bots. It needs some time.

After artillery unlock, expansion size doesn't matter. Actually, I kind of miss bigger expansions since the artillery and the whole defense has so little to do.