Atomic bomb effects to make biter eradication more interesting

[Mauslag PIngman]

I'd like to be able to blow up an atomic bomb in a lake and create a tsunami that can drown biters over a large area of maybe ten nest complexes. This would work particularly well if you could use landfill to create cliffs. I like using the map and existing terrain for planning. Build a large basin with cliffs by linking existing cliff structures together. When you blow up several atomic bombs you'd create a series of tsunami waves radiating out from the blast in all directions and the water would move across the landscape like in the Japanese event and pour down the cliffs to fill the basin you've created. Fallen trees could be pushed along to form rafts. Some biters could survive by pulling themselves up on the rafts. The whole thing could swirl around for awhile and then recede. Structures would need to be protected from tsunamis with walls, maybe special walls. You could also make a lake of crude oil and create a flaming crude oil tsunami.

I'd also like to farm large worm eating birds that battle those things that poke out of the ground. Birds or bunnies. Sometimes the birds win and other times the biters eat the birds. The birds might also be a little bit of a threat to the engineer so maybe they must be kept happy in some way.

[NotRexButCaesar]

Please read the pinned posts.

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[Koub]

I don't know if it's moddable, but if it is, I think mods would be the right tool to get this.

[Anachrony]

It's hard to imagine that dropping a bomb on an ocean would create a wave more destructive to a nearby city than the blast of dropping the bomb on the city directly. When you look at simulated nuclear exchanges, none of them assume bombs being dropped offshore to create destructive waves. Perhaps under a very narrow set of circumstances if it triggers a shift in an unstable land mass, but Factorio isn't the sort of game that attempts to model geographical features with any sort of nuance like that, or even model basic physics much at all. There isn't even a Z axis. It would seem out of place with other features.

From a gameplay perspective, it doesn't seem balanced or interesting. Water is abundant with default settings. Proximity to a body of water is not an unusual circumstance. If it was fun to have bombs that were far more destructive than the current ones, they could just make them that way, but it's not necessarily adding to the fun if the blast radius is so big that you can't be anywhere near it to observe the results.

There are mods that make more destructive nuclear bombs if you want to experiment with them. It wouldn't be too hard to script one that changes the blast effect depending on nearby water. It's the sort of thing that you'd want to try out with a mod to see if it makes sense, and if it does, then that's a much stronger case for adding a mechanic like that to the game than mere speculation that it might be fun.

There are mods that allow you to raise animals that help you attack. And if there isn't one that exactly matches what you want, you could develop one. This sort of agriculture is well outside the feel of the normal vanilla tech tree, and they'd have to dramatically overhaul the game for a feature like that to make sense in vanilla. But it could work fine as a mod.