Enemy expansion group spawns far less structures than there are colonists

[1nc0mpetence]

As seen in https://youtu.be/3LgELN8PVTo?t=151 an enemy expansion group of ten(10) natives only spawns two(2) spawners and two(2) worms. Totalling up to only four(4) instead of ten(10) structures, when the expected behavior would be that ten(10) new structures would be spawned.

Short:
Expansion group of 10 only leads to 2 spawners and 2 worms, while the other 6 get despawned.


Due to me never having enough radar coverage I have never seen this in action in my own games, therefore I am not able to provide a logfile or savefile. However, new expansions tend to be a lot smaller than bases that have been there from the start.

[kovarex]

How is this a bug? Do you think that one biter has enough of mass for a spawner?

[1nc0mpetence]

Well at least from the wiki it would sound as if each biter/spitter forms his own nest/worm:

"Once they have found a suitable spot, each biter/spitter in the group dies and forms a new nest or worm. There is a delay between each member sacrificing itself for to create a worm/nest, so creating the new base from the expansion group can take quite a long time, depending on the group size. Medium worms are only formed if the current evolution is higher than 0.3, big worms only if the current evolution is higher than 0.5 and behemoth worms are only formed if current evolution is higher than 0.9. The game randomly chooses whether to form a new biter nest, spitter nest, small worm, or bigger worm if the evolution factor is high enough." https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies

[Bilka]

That's why the wiki now also says "Forming a new nest or worm will destroy anything that is in the way, which can include members of the expansion group."

[1nc0mpetence]

Ok, I guess that's fair

However I still think that this is unintuitive behavior, as you can even manage the expansion group size. And if I am able to manage that as a player I would expect that to have a direct effect on the size of the expansion and not only to have a indirect impact because sometimes them members of the expansion get despawned (which i guess is more likely the bigger the expansion group is).

However I was not able to reproduce this easily, and i guess it is a minor inconsistency and not of great importance to the overall gameplay.