[MOD 1.0] Alien walls [0.9.5]

[vedrit]

See, not the way I play. With Rampant & Natural Evolution and the settings I've got, it seems like a group will chew through a Tier 4 1000HP wall pretty quickly if I don't kill them fast enough.

Of course, the way I add mods is a bit of an arms race...
"I think I'll try some tougher enemies."
"Better add some improved defences to counter them"
...later...
"Ooh, new combat toys!"
"Hmmm, the enemies are getting killed too easily now, guess I need to find stronger ones..."

And repeat :p

It seems like a lot of people play that way. In fact, I think it's hard not to play that way.

[Light]

I've been tweaking the balance on the recipe a bit, it used to be you got 5 plates per artifact, I adjusted it down to 2, as I ended up with a lot more artifacts than I expected in my playthrough. Let me know what you think of the current recipe.

In the case of Bob's, two plates may be a bit generous for a single pink artifact. Pinks could give one plate, coloured artifacts could give three. That's how I'd make it function given the coloured artifacts are less common and pinks are easily available in the thousands.

It also gives an incentive to use Angel's alien spores to create those less common artifacts for walls, which is something I don't think anyone has ever used. Bob's alien science for better weapons will use only a fraction of those coloured artifacts and then it's just a chest filler.

You may also be interested in the Stormwalls mod, I like that one too for a different approach.

Stormwalls isn't multiplayer compatible and the developer shot down my suggestion that the walls should be intensely power hungry like the original one was. When many walls are being chewed on, it makes no sense why the power grid isn't affected in the slightest. It makes the walls very OP if you stack them in layers or turning all of them into the best wall type without any negative impact. I tested this in the wave defense scenario with endless biter waves and it still held strong after a few hours of hard punishment with NO defenses, just densely packed red and purple walls held them back.

I prefer this mod for walls because you must actively hunt for materials instead of just sitting back at base all day. If you neglect your defenses too much then you may run dry on artifacts and have to hunt for more until later when the costly option comes your way. (Angel's Yay)

See, not the way I play. With Rampant & Natural Evolution and the settings I've got, it seems like a group will chew through a Tier 4 1000HP wall pretty quickly if I don't kill them fast enough.

It seems like a lot of people play that way. In fact, I think it's hard not to play that way.

If biters are to exist then you may as well go hardcore with them so they're an actual threat. They're quite easily the weakest part of the game since the developers keep neglecting them to the point they can just be turned off. The problem is that the mods can only allow you to go so far with them. I personally don't install any defense mods that trivialize the entire point of harder biters, which shows quite adequately in my family game where we take on a lot of punishment and have just the vanilla/Bob options to lean on which doesn't always bode well. Flamethrowers are still pretty OP though.

[welcome057]

Error while running event AlienWall::on_research_finished (ID 18) AlienWall/control.lua:128: attempt to index field 'player' (a nil value)

Error in playback research
The game is off

[vedrit]

Seems I mislabeled an update, so version 0.9.4 may never have shown up for people. Any way, new version is out.
I'm thinking of adding in my own science pack to put more of a strain on the dropped biomass, but I'm kind of on the fence about it. On the one hand, it would go a long way toward resolving the complaints many have had about having way more biomass than they'll ever need, but on the other... I'm just too lazy.

It's been asked if I could implement infinite research.
Short answer: Love to, but can't find a practical way to do it.

Long answer: Because Factorio does not allow entities to have their max HP adjusted during game play, I have to generate new entities for each tier of wall in order for there to be a new max HP. But Factorio also does not allow entities to be generated during game play, so I have to generate the entities during startup. There can't be an infinite number of entities generated, otherwise the game would literally die just in the attempt. I've seen some other mods do something similar, but I've looked through their code and I can't really follow how they're doing it. I'm not THAT good with LUA. Heck, I don't think I'm even good with LUA at all, so that this mod even works at all is a big thanks to the help I received early on (I haven't removed their names for a reason)
Anyway, side tracked.
So, unless I can find a way to separate the entity from their health allowing it to be increased indefinitely, then infinite research won't be possible and the best I can do is just... code in a bunch of researches with costs that get so high that there's no practical way players could reasonably complete it in any timely manner.
I could, I suppose, put in a way to allow players set the number of research upgrades, that wouldn't be terribly difficult, but... I dunno. Not a very great solution, in my opinion.