TL;DR
Change the biters interaction with player base. Get better experience for new (and not so new) players.What ?
Base changes:1. Buildings are just damaged, but can't be fully destroyed by biters. => Player needs just to repair, but not to plan and build destroyed part of base anew. => Player loses less time. => Player less irritated.
2. Building damage slows production (by tears: green hp – no reduction; yellow – moderate reduction; red – heavy reduction). Heavy damaged defenses (turrets etc) don't work at all. Heavy damaged walls are traversable. => Player is motivated to repair and defend.
3. Biters not constantly ravage on base after destroying defenses, but loot items and return with them to nest and despawn (or alternatively just return after dealing some amount of damage). => Player can recover after attack and has time to rebuild. => Player loses less time. => Player is less likely to drop the game.
Additional changes:
4. Rebalancing biter nests, so they could be effectively destroyed only with explosives/lasers/frame. => Prevent players from early offensive and suggests to concentrate on base building and defense. => Better experience for new players.
5. Add wide range "biter beacon" (lure biters to beacon location) to simplify base defense. => Player doesn't need to spend lots of time on building long walls. => Player spend more time to build production chains. => Player get more fun (hopefully).
Why ?
In short – to make Factorio better citybuilder for more players without ripping off combat gameplay (by setting game to "Peaceful mode").Factorio's main gameplay loop is citybuilder. It has very long (10-30 hours) sessions and relaxing planning-building gameplay. In contrary biters are element of RTS games, which have short (0.5-3 hours) sessions and intensive gameplay where you try to outbuild your opponent. Closest to Factorio popular example would be They Are Billions, where you rushing against timer to build defenses against zombie horder. (Also Factorio has legacy elements of Minecraft/Terraria-style games, but that's for another post.) The point is – RTS and citybuilder is completely different genres with completely different gameplay pace. So biters in current state add only irritating and frustrating gameplay:
1. If biters destroy part of your base you have to rebuild it. It's irritating. You're loosing time for something you've already done. Moreover. If biters destroy whole your base – even if you can rebuild it do you really want to do it after you already put 5, 10, 15 hours to build it? A lot of players just ragequit the game and many never came back.
2. If you're building heavy defense against biters it's become boring very soon as you just build hundreds of wall tiles, placing same turrets and filling them with same ammo. On vast territory (as bases in Factorio are very-very big). On a completely plain land. All by hand.
In tower defense games you have different mazes created by developers or by player with indestructible towers, you have different towers to combat different types of enemies, you have short intensive sessions. In Factorio you have none of that. Just boringly long wall and boringly many turrets. (I guess that can be fixed only by another suggestion like Biter Beacon with VERY wide range, so you build small fortresses around it and not miles of walls.)
3. In offense lies two different problems: personal experience with combat and – more importantly – influence of combat on citybuilder gameplay. Let's start with latter.
3.1. Combat in citybuilder is typically used to diversify the gameplay and prevent player to become bored from main gameplay loop as it's typically pretty slow. Like in Anno series, for example (not that combat is very good there either). In Factorio you have many combat related things (researches, weapons etc), but when it comes to offensive combat itself it just narrows to one thing/tactic for the whole nest "encounter" (you run-and-gun or turret-push etc) which lasts from one to tenth of minutes. In other words, combat is pretty repetitive and quickly became boring. So combat doesn't much fulfil it's role of entertaining boring player. Moreover, as mentioned earlier offensive combat is logically supposed to be an alternative to boring "miles of walls" building – so player switch from one boring thing to find another boring and irritating thing. But let's dive deeper. Factorio now is brilliant game, but not very friendly and intuitive to new players – it has complex concepts like dual-lane conveyors+inserters, not-lineal branched production chains, main bus organization concept and on top of that don't show enough examples, don't directly tell any production rates etc. And so if new player plays without using youtube and guides first playthrough of Factorio is often frustrating. And so instead of thinking up solution and overcoming that frustration players (myself included) decide to relax and kill some biter nests as it's "needed to be done" sooner or later (as player thinks). So ultimately new player experience changes from one negative emotion to another. In contrary there is Satisfactory out there where first 10 hours is pretty much fluid and well guided even without any special tutorial missions.
3.2. I'll write down my personal experience with combat and its problems. I should mention that this is my PERSONAL experience as a new Factorio player (thou I saw few streams and read Factorio devblog for 2 years by now) and many other players could and do play differently. But still, I guess, my experience could be addressed as pretty generic for gamers.
If you decided to use offense instead of defense you'll try to destroy enemy nests near pollution zone. For new player it looks like a viable tactic. That's even more true to multiplayer where one player can just go and kill stuff while another would build base and create supplies. The problem is that combat gameplay in Factorio is pretty simplistic and rough (thou it changes on different stages of game) and player traverse speed is not that great (thou can be improved by different means). So if you're new player of offensive type, you'll do that pretty early with just rifle and some simple armor. And you'll spend a lot of time travelling by foot and slowly killing nests around your base. Only to know some time later that enemy nests respawned somewhere within pollution radius as they begin attack your base from nowhere and all that "cleanup biters" time was a waste. And also make other nests stronger.
As for my "combat" experience as a new player:
- stood still holding space button and weaving mouse cursor (feelings: convenient)
- building turret, filling it with ammo, build next turret closer to nest, fill ammo, sometimes hold space, repeat (feelings: interesting, but little irritated: why don't auto-fill turrets (and other entities) if not a default option in vanilla?.. – now I know that there is a mod, but still – why not in vanilla?.. also disassembling walls and turrets afterwards is so……)
- same as before but running different directions to avoid worms' spit (feelings: fun at first, but trying to kill bigger bases is becoming saveloading)
- crafting a car to ride around nests holding space (feeling: and that was THE MOST terrible experience as car is going too fast and you KEEP crashing in random rocks or trees – and if you crashed bites surround you and welcome load screen)
- same as previous but throwing grenades (keep crashing stuff and saveloading)
- same as previous with grenades and turrets (keep crashing stuff and saveloading)
- ragequit, played another game, some time later give Factorio another chance, but in "Peaceful mode"
But, I guess, combat could become later not irritating if you have personal roboport and blueprint of mini-fortress with laser turrets. But that moment somewhere in midgame. And what offensive players should do before that?
In general combat is fun for each two-three nests, when encounter new/more enemies and need to act differently, craft new/more weapons and so on. But after those two-three nests combat becomes repetitive and boring until next escalation. Also traversing territory and searching for nests neither by foot, nor by car is boring and/or irritating. "Don't do that before acquiring a tank" you say? How do new players should know about that so they not have a ruined experience? There is no single answer but rebalancing nests, so they could be effectively destroyed only with explosives/lasers/frame could prevent players from early offensive. Also some tweaking needed in quantity vs. size/difficulty of enemy nests (spawned during session, not starter ones) – killing more nests is opposite to having more fun for general player. But if someone likes Factorio combat, I guess, map settings allow to spawn as many biters and nest as he want – but shouldn't game by default be tweaked to accommodate more new players?
(Above are mentioned more simple solutions, but in the end Factorio's combat needs an RTS mode like discussed "throne room" aka "command center". Moreover Factorio itself needs to strip off last Minecraft/Terraria-style elements like direct controlling one unit instead of more accessible RTS style free cam, maybe, with "commander" unit as in Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander series. It could do Factorio better and newbie-friendly not only gameplaywise, but also logically – today we play as some guy that wears some bulletproof vest and rifle, cuts trees and mines ore by pick axe, but has automated factory-size production(!!!) and warehouse-size storage space in pocket (ok), that could store not only materials, but lots of whole buildings(!). Yes, gameplaywise such "deep pockets" are convenient, but absurd nevertheless. In mentioned Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander we had giant mech as "commander" unit and had no such questions.)