FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 2:59 pm
This much just sounds like evolution as a pure factor of distance?
Exactly.
I can explain why this approach is really good at least in some cases.
This will be much different gameplay.
Detailed explanation for "why?":
My kids are playing factorio and there are some common issues i want to solve with this.
Factorio is hard to play for kids, but it developes them develop reasoning, planning, math, reading and much more - I can see it works!
The issues:
1. You can't just leave your factory running for half a day, even if it's stopped and does zero pollution - the time still ticks.
And kids tend to play few minutes and just leave game as is to run around or do something else.
Now they are back to play.
But evolution is say 50%
And its fatal mistake for a game... You have to start over as your economy just cant keep up with it.
4 hours ago you had a task to connect burner drill to smelter with a conveyor belt - that was your easy task a kid could and was willing to do.
Now your task is building economy capable of dealing with Behemots.... that is challenging even for adult who played factorio for quite a long time I say.
And that's totally impossible for a kid.
He just have to start over again. And he didn't even understand why?!
2. You can't just plumb a warehouse after mining site. It'll create big pollution.
The pollution cloud itself is fun, I like it - it triggers attack and action - we all like it.
But then: yes you built defences, yes you removed the warehouse, the pollution is gone...
But evolution is say 50%
And its fatal mistake for a game... You have to start over.
3. You can't just go and have some brake by having fun at killing biter bases. Even if you have a tank.
So... you build for a tank. You invested a lot of effort (for a kid) into building a tank.
And there you have it. But you can't just use it! Because after you destroy nests for an hour your base will be destroyed.
And kids won't even understand why that happen. Why?!
And its fatal mistake for a game... You have to start over.
So the solution is distance only based evolution.
But it's absolutely ok for mod users to have any mixed approaches they like - maybe one can find some other interestion combination.
How it will work:
- You'll anyway have to go futher from your base eventually - when your resources are over. And the more experianced player you are - the faster you'll deplete starting resources and have to go futher
- Your resources richness and size will matter much more than now. (Now time, pollution and kill counts matters more).
- With mod setting you should be able to set difficlullity - that is how fast evolution growth from distance. Will behemots be in 1000 tiles from start or 10 000 makes big difference
- The pollution still matters - it still triggers attacks, but not the evolution.
thelordodin wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 12:16 pm
While there is an event for enemy spawning, it should be noted that nests do spawn biters without the need of absorbing pollution.
I play factorio for quite long and NEVER seen this. Well the nest does spawn some biters
that protect the nest.
This group have limit and won't go away from nest if it doesn't see player.
The biters will ONLY attack you in two cases:
1. The pollution reached them and they started building attacking forces from it. They just can't build "attacking" biters without pollution.
2. Biter base expantion - ! IF ! you turned it on - than, yes the base will sometime spawn a group to make a nest.
And that group can sometime hit your defences, occasionaly, not intentionally - they just go building their new spawner.
In fact if you have zero pollution the biters won't even have pathfinding algorithm to go to you
Because they are guided by pollution gradient - i.e. they make next step to the direction with greater pollution.
So for:
thelordodin wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 12:16 pm
While there is an event for enemy spawning, it should be noted that nests do spawn biters without the need of absorbing pollution. That's where the biters that hang around the nests come from. It's the attack waves you probably need, but I'm not sure what that event is called.
Edit: Well, actually, every spawner has a absorbed_pollution property, so I suppose if you create yourself some thresholds on this, each time a nest spawns an enemy, you could just check this against your thresholds and replace the nest accordingly.
Just count them all. Thouse 20 biters the nest spawns for defence won't do much difference in calculation - if they stay there. Or you cant just ignore first 100 biters spawned.
And if you build a turrent near a spawner so the next defenders constantly attack it then, well, it's your fault and you have to deal with it
But that just one nest!
thelordodin wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 12:16 pm
That said, evolution also controls worm size spawned from expansion parties. If late game an expansion party manages to sneak in and spawn closer to 0,0, it probably shouldn't be spawning small worms.
Very edge case, but I think it should spawn small worms and spawners with small biters in it, because else it kills all the idea.
You don't have any control over it - you can't prevent it as a player. So it just shouldn't happen.
If you are on burner stage and a behemot comes to you - it's an unsolvable problem (at least for a kid).
For me game design is not about how to make game very realistic, because in reality the war isn't fun at all.
For me game design is about fairness: the more effort put in, - the more results you gain. In the game you need to have control over what's going on.
So:
- If time passes - you don't have control. Well a pro player have this control, a novice - don't. Any time-based mechanic always discriminate novice players, so I really hate it.
- If some randomness kills you - it's also bad mechanic, because you have no control over it.
- If you destroy a biter base on the north and now your base is totally annihilated from the south - you don't understand why?! - it's bad mechanic because it's very counter intuitive if you don't know it, because it ignores locality: how did biters on south came to know that they need to evolve? Why? They have internet or a cell phone?
On the other hand:
- If you build near spawner nest and it constantly send defenders to you - this is nice and fun to have it evolve. Because it's totally your responsibility and you can see very clear why that happen. Also your big base have enough resources to deal with 1 spawner after all! Or you can just retreat from it and leave it alone for a while.
- If you have to kill biters to get that nice oil patch - that's also good.