More natural biter behavior

[Hannu]

I began a new game and played to phase where I have to make exploration. And I found again how unnatural and annoying insane biter density is. There is no possibility to avoid colonies by sneaking. You have to get power armor 2, 3 exoskeleton legs and some shields and just run away. And go in thick forest or use a minute to kill hundred biters to get 5 seconds time to look at map.

I suggest that biter colonies should have a territory in which other colonies can not expand. The larger colony the larger territory. When biter colony can not expand their territory it should stop growing. I think that circular territories would work well enough and be computationally very cheap. Area of the territory could be for example 2000 tiles + 100 tiles per nest or worm. It would also be easy to make area dependent on biome so that there would be more and larger colonies in better zones (just for more natural feeling).

[Vals Loeder]

Natural biter behaviour?

[Hannu]

Natural biter behaviour?

Not actually, but in my opinion AI animals should behave somewhat like natural animals. The simplest behavior or reactions to environment and situations would not be hard to program or time consuming to execute. It would not necessarily change much playing but it would give much more entertainment than for example high res graphics which do not change playing at all but take very large work investment. In my opinion such a polishing is quite futile if enemy AI is from 80s.

[Vals Loeder]

Natural biter behaviour?

Not actually, but in my opinion AI animals should behave somewhat like natural animals. The simplest behavior or reactions to environment and situations would not be hard to program or time consuming to execute. It would not necessarily change much playing but it would give much more entertainment than for example high res graphics which do not change playing at all but take very large work investment. In my opinion such a polishing is quite futile if enemy AI is from 80s.

Can't you change the settings before you create a game? I am very new to the game but tinker with the settings all the time. Besides that I have joined a few multiplayer games (Shredguy99's Bug Bonanza) with modded biter behavior. So there already is a way to make the game the way you like. One of the strong points of this game is how moddable it is. For me that means that the publisher creates the canvas on which we write the story of our game.

[Hannu]

Can't you change the settings before you create a game? I am very new to the game but tinker with the settings all the time. Besides that I have joined a few multiplayer games (Shredguy99's Bug Bonanza) with modded biter behavior. So there already is a way to make the game the way you like. One of the strong points of this game is how moddable it is. For me that means that the publisher creates the canvas on which we write the story of our game.

There are some mods but I do not know how they work during end game when there are thousands of biters. I have tendency to continue gaming hundreds of hours. I suspect also that they just make biters more interesting as enemies than credible biological creatures.
Problem with mods is that they use lua scritps which must be interpreted and are very inefficient compared to C code. It is quite impossible to mod interesting behavior to thousands or tens of thousand of entities.

[bobingabout]

I'm not sure how expansion works no, it's been a while since I've actually played the game, but when I did, I noticed a huge difference between map spawn alien bases, and expanded alien bases.

Basically... extreme settings, the whole map is red... less extreme settings, and well, you have huge biter megabases with narrow paths between them.

Biters expand? tiny patch with upto a dozen nests and worms. that's it.

It would be... better, if when expanding, instead of creating a whole new nest a tile or two away, they instead just added more nests to their borders. I'm not saying get rid of the migration and setting up a new colony entirely, I'm saying that they should expand their colony as well.

Mods probably do this already, but it should be behaviour in the base game.

[Jap2.0]

I'm not sure, but I think they do expand their base. I'm not sure if this happens super slowly, or only to a certain extent, or slows exponentially with size, or what though, because I notice very little growth, especially in map gen bases.