Expansion rebalance suggestion: start small, keep growing.

[snakeru]

I kinda like both how the old and the new expansion strategies worked. The old one because an expansion is something that starts small in the real life and the new one because even though one typically starts small - they doesn't necessarily stops there.

What about keeping the expansion parties small, just as before and instead allow them to extend/enlarge existing nests? Factorio has some natural scaling factor of a typical biter base - they are small near the crash site and get bigger the farther away you go. What if expansions close to existing biter nests were not less but MORE likely in case the nest is way too small for its position?

This idea could even be scaled further - by scaling the expansion parties DOWN. In the extreme case it would be just a constant stream (ok, at the beginning just a trickle) of individual biters going around the map, looking for a new place where to settle and to transform into a SINGLE extra spawner. Sometimes it would be in a completely pristine spot, but more often than not it would be really just an extension of a pre-existing next. These "individual biters" might still have body guards to increase their chances but body guards won't transform.