Factorio Forums

ok i started the lets play im doing, and used basic settings, but set the biters settings to very low, very small, and very poor, just like i did in my 0.7.5 game.

in 0.7.5 i got attacked, and it built up, to the point i was surrounded and getting attacked quite often, but i had a few real hours to get setup and be ready.

in this new version, i set everything exactly the same, except i shose the largest base size this time, and well im almost 8 hours in and still not a single attack.

did i bug it, or is this normal? can i change the settings now that im so far into it, so that some spawn? or will they eventually come, ive went exploring around for a good wasy, several fully zoomed out screens and nothing, im producing a decent amount of pollution, more than i was when i got attacked in the old game. any info would be appreciated. thanks in advance.,

EDIT***
ok after half hour of running i made a car lol, drove a ways out and did indeed actually find biter nests and worms, they are up to medium biters so i guess im good, just gonna have to wait for my pollution to expand to them before i get attacked.

If my memory serves me corectly starting area was increased in 0.8. Meaning using same settings would place biter bases a bit further out.
Setting starting area to Very large is almost like teling Factorio: "I don't want to get attacked until I have insane base or I atack them first."

And another thing I learned is that forests make huge difference. Seting the dense and large forests could alow you to make considerable sized base before first atack even if all the rest of the setings are default.
But this presents you with another more anoying problem. And that is that you have to keep removing trees to be able to build your base. And when biters attack you could easily get stuck in forest when you try to run and keep safe distance from them.
And on my computer I also get a bit of lag when I have zoomed out screen of dense forest (large number of transparent sprites rendered).

Starting area wasn't changed in 0.8, but setting it to large really does mean that virtually no attacks wil happen. And there's another thing -- although we tried to make the beginning of the game a little more predictable, the map generation is still random. This means that you can get a game with only a few enemy bases even when playing with default settings. I understand that someone might not like this, but in my oppinion it adds some replayability to the game and forces you to adapt to the environment instead of blindly following one optimal strategy.

Yes, I tried out many maps. With defaults about 20% is super optimal, 80% is ok, and 20% nearly unplayable. Well. I think that's ok. BUT! I think it takes too long to check that. To check a map I need to run around about a minute or 2, before I can be sure, this is "playable".

But I think what's playable and what's not is highly dependent on the player. And I think it would be a very first step in direction of multiplayer to have maps and high scores on a page; this makes it compare able and so there is a chance, that a player wich never would play such a horrible map like that, will begin to play it, because others did.

yes, it just took a lot longer than normal, i am now happily swamped with biter nests, and they are slowly moving inward closer to my base, all is right in the game, having the settings i used, simply prolonged it much further than i had anticipated(mostly due im guessing to increasing starting zone size).