Infinite Biters Defending Nests
Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2017 3:27 pm
I know there are a lot of suggestions around biter behaviour and the like but the biggest problem that stands out to everyone is assaulting a group of spawners is painful due to the literal infinite wave of bugs running at you. It's a big contributor to players relying on turret creep and it effectively boils any other strategy down to "kill the nests first". Usually this means running around with a horde on your tail, either biters or Destroyers. It also doesn't make much sense that when provoked a spawner retains its thousands of biters so it can release one at a time to be slaughtered, or that it takes five seconds to hatch and mature a new biter.
I don't think it would be hard to make this more engaging, simply limit the spawners' ability to spawn. If each spawner generated, say, 5 biters when the player approaches or attacks, many more options open up. Long range instakills (hopefully rockets) would prevent them being spawned at all, at least for a few spawners so you have less to deal with. Then you can deal with the wave of biters, and lastly run around mopping up the empty spawners.
This could be extended further, perhaps another option is still to ignore the biters and kill the spawners, but then rather than trying to defend some craters the biters attempt to flee to set up a new nest somewhere else. This way you have a means of quickly and efficiently ridding an area of biters, but those biters will then run off and start a nest somewhere else or expand an existing nest, perhaps with a significant boost to evolution (local or global) or greater aggression for emphasised long-term cost. While fleeing they might forms groups of about 10 to give the player a chance to hunt some or all of them down.
I don't think it would be hard to make this more engaging, simply limit the spawners' ability to spawn. If each spawner generated, say, 5 biters when the player approaches or attacks, many more options open up. Long range instakills (hopefully rockets) would prevent them being spawned at all, at least for a few spawners so you have less to deal with. Then you can deal with the wave of biters, and lastly run around mopping up the empty spawners.
This could be extended further, perhaps another option is still to ignore the biters and kill the spawners, but then rather than trying to defend some craters the biters attempt to flee to set up a new nest somewhere else. This way you have a means of quickly and efficiently ridding an area of biters, but those biters will then run off and start a nest somewhere else or expand an existing nest, perhaps with a significant boost to evolution (local or global) or greater aggression for emphasised long-term cost. While fleeing they might forms groups of about 10 to give the player a chance to hunt some or all of them down.