Factorio Forums

There used to be a mod that made biters avoid pathing or at least increased the cost of pathing through areas that contained dead biters. This caused biters to appear more intelligent as they would attack different parts of your base, almost as if they were probing your defenses looking for weaknesses. You could also expand this logic so that newly destroyed turrets (with a decent kill count) become highly desirable paths biters take in order to get to their target and only with time and additional biter corpses in the area do they start avoiding this breach in your defenses.

Exceptions should be made for biters attacking players or their vehicle or anything in a specific range around a nest otherwise they might exhibit weird behaviors when directly combating the player.

Having biters avoid biter corpses has some examples in the real world. Humans don't like the smell of corpses for instance. Bees will attack something when they smell the innards of a dead bee.

For gameplay purposes, making the enemies smarter is quite irrelevant IMO. Your factory gets attacked a million times, and your defences already get tested from every angle. Most of the time the killing is automated and unattended, so you won't see the enemy behavior very much anyway.

BUT. Whenever I do pay attention to the enemies (or when I notice the pile of corpses afterward), they do seem very dumb indeed. The bugs feel like robots, with nothing in their programming except GO --> ATTACK. Occasionally, it would be interesting to see the group of bugs scramble as they start taking damage, or maybe one of them could survive and run back home, for example.

I think it would be nice to add this and other little behaviors to give the illusion that the bugs are intelligent, even if they aren't really. If the bugs are blatantly primitive, defending against them doesn't feel like as much of an achievement as it could.

Also. Killing is bad. Factorio is a great game if you want to feel a little conflicted about the amount of power you have. I like that even when the enemies in Factorio are gross bugs, they clearly have the moral high ground. I should feel a little bad about killing them. But again, they are not smart enough to be taken seriously. I can't really convince myself that these bugs feel pain or mourn their dead or anything.