Factorio Forums

Simple Idea I thought up to make enemies scale in difficulty to your level. The pollution bug hives are exposed to is what causes them to evolve and spawn the bigger tougher guys. The more pollution they're exposed to the faster they grow. It could work locally on each individual hive or globally accumulative every hive gets stronger for any hive exposed to a ton of pollution, or maybe even somehow spread between hives if locally. I'm not as much of a fan of just the time based evolution, it makes me feel like I'm gonna have to rush building an amazing factory to get a leg up. Though it would be cool if there was an option between time and pollution based evolution, because everyone has their preferences.

This way the game is easier if you try cause the least amount of pollution possible, and harder if you're a lot greedier and polluting the crap out of the planet making a giant factory. Don't really have too much more to say about this idea other than that, it's a simple mechanic.

Comments and criticism?

It is already working the way you suggest it does! The more you pollute, the faster they evolve.

The passage of time very slightly increases the evolution factor.
The global Pollution Production increases the evolution factor.
Destroying the enemy spawners significantly increases the evolution factor.

See https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution

Interesting I imagined it did already work that way actually. But I noticed one day my pollution never reached a hive (on a save with a massive starting area) and yet the enemies still evolved. But that makes sense if time affects it also simultaneously. Since it does actually work both ways then I suppose my new suggestion would just be to allow us to edit the variables of evolution in sandbox starter screen (one number for time based, one number for pollution based, one number for hive kills). That way you could get rid of certain methods of evolution or multiply them to your liking.

I think there are already mods, that allow exactly this.
https://mods.factorio.com/?page=1&q=evolution