The insect hive event is important since it creates a new threat for people who make mountain bases. The problem is that it's so incredibly poorly implemented. They made it worse because now as soon as you ignite one of the hives, the entire army of insects raids you. In my situation the hives happened to appear in the caves away from my base but that really only makes it harder to deal with.
This wouldn't be so terrible if the insects weren't the most insanely tanky npcs in the game. i have a colony of 10 dudes outfitted with LMGs, miniguns, heavy SMGs, etc and none of this puts a dent in the army of bugs before they overwhelm the colonists. They are just too numerous, and i don't have the luxury of time when it comes to creating more defenses, since THE HIVES REPRODUCE AT A GEOMETRIC RATE.
If you don't fight them within 3 days of the hives appearing your savefile is effectively ruined since the hives spread with no upper limit. The amount of insects will become nearly impossible to handle, and if you get raided or something else happens to delay you, then they will actually reproduce so much that it causes severe framerate loss due to all the insect NPCs constantly pathing around and digging, etc. It's just a horribly conceived event.
Glad to see ludeon has doubled down on making this the most unenjoyable event in the game! At least in the past the bugs didn't suddenly become skynet when you ignited their hives.
It would be very easy to make this event decent: Hives should not reproduce AT ALL. Instead, they should periodically spawn manhunter spelopedes that hunt down colonists and dig through walls, etc.
are you playing at high difficulty?
i'm terrified if this was at medium
yeah, i typically play on high difficulty. the hive event, if encountered early on, is actually not that bad. if it's one or 2 hives then you just have to ignite the hives and back off and deal with the insects as they come, and there's not that many. the problem is that this event gets exponentially more difficult based on how many hives are spawned. i am in the mid-late game and the number of insects is staggering, nearly impossible to deal with even with a fully kitted out squad of pawns.
I'm playing on cassandra rough, i get 4-5 nests all at once, inside my mountain base, often in bedrooms.
I handle them fairly easy, i love to see some bugs, makes for good kibble.
i don't kill a nest until i know i am ready to take on the rest,
The ways i deal with em is
i hold open all doors needed to guide them outside and have one shooter hit a bug n run while the rest wait outside in ambush.
I lay down wooden stools behind a door seal em in, set em on fire n let em all just burn, too easy there
just recently i had no option to do neither, i selected all 15 pawns which came with 6 or so dogs.. and melee'd them to death, 5 nests: 5 mega spiders 4 spelopedes n a few megascarabs, had a few injuries but hammered em
Just hit one and run to your turrets
come back n kill the nests
I don't think they're to hard at present :)
That only works if your base is flammable, and if the hives actually spawn in your base.
In my case, they spawned in a section of mountain i had stripmined out. As soon as one is aggroed, they all come out of the mountain. Even with all my pawns sitting ready with their weapons, there are too many of them to counter. They eventually get through the hail of bullets and start to melee pawns, and at that point the fight is already lost.
This annoyed me so much that i made a mod to improve it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=757053824
Quote from: twoski on September 12, 2018, 10:21:29 PM
This annoyed me so much that i made a mod to improve it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=757053824
Subscribed, looks great.
I think you may have approached the problem the wrong way. Insects are fairly stupid, and are very much vulnerable to fire. No need to use it against them directly, but making a kill corridor and set fire to some flammables inside it as the insects come rushing for you is very effective. I've used that tactic a lot, and the insects willingly rush through the flames to get to you when they can't find another open path.
Unless the area is open in every single direction, ofc, because then it gets much trickier.
Without insects, mountains would be too easy and incredibly unbalanced. Take the good with the bad -- no droppods land on top of your colonists. No shelling during a siege.
Quote from: vzoxz0 on September 18, 2018, 03:24:54 PM
Without insects, mountains would be too easy and incredibly unbalanced. Take the good with the bad -- no droppods land on top of your colonists. No shelling during a siege.
No shit.
I'm not saying the game should not have insect hives, i'm saying they are terribly implemented and don't scale well into the late game.
I've talked to several other people who've all admitted to me that they've had to enter dev mode to delete hives because if you happen to let them multiply once or twice in the late game, their growth becomes impossible to stop.
My solution to this was to just remove the hive reproduction and instead replace it with something that's still dangerous to deal with, but scales better into the late game.
Play on lower difficulty, learn to play better. You're SUPPOSED to have colony-threatening events lategame.
So much 'Git Gud'.
Ironically I find insects to be more dangerous on open maps compared to mountain biomes. This is due to the swarming insect army spreading across the plains ready to kill all. Now in a mountain it's pretty easy to build a flammable insect haven and just burn them down whenever they pop up.
Simple. Not so simple dealing with 20 megaspiders swarming out of a stripmined hillock, deciding they just don't like your chickens, or that they like them very much.
Definitely a more punishing experience in the flats once you know what you are about.
Stripmining doesn't just happen in flat areas, if you happen to stripmine an entire mountain area out then having the insect hives appear there is a death sentence too.
The insects have a million avenues of escape (even if you build walls, because they can dig), so unless you pre-built wooden floors through the entire mountain (which nobody will do), good luck stopping them with fire or any other trickery like that.
To be clear: earlygame insect hives are not a problem because they don't spread that quickly and there aren't many insects to handle. It's the lategame ones that are a major issue because it starts the map off with 5 of them. Each hive spawns about 5 insects total, give or take. If you let them survive one reproduction cycle, then you have 10 hives to deal with, and each hive will have about 5 insects. That's 50 insects you now have to worry about when you aggro the hive.
If you get waylaid by a raid or some other problem, then these 10 hives will reproduce and create 20 hives. Now you have about 100 insects.
At this point you are either forced to fight the insects or abandon the colony because it's impossible to stop that many insects. If the hives reproduce again, you'll have 40 hives and 200 insects to deal with. Now you'll have severe FPS loss and the game becomes unplayable and you either have to enter dev mode and delete a bunch of the hives and insects or give up on your save.
This geometric growth is incredibly stupid and it is incredibly difficult to stop 50 aggroed insects coming at you from 10 different angles, let alone 100 or 200. If you're lucky the hives MIGHT spawn in a spot where you can set up some kind of dumb heat trap and metagame/burn them to death but realistically the hives can spawn anywhere under a mountain roof, which includes all the spots where you stripmine etc.
Events should follow the difficulty curve (roughly), and the problem with this event is that it becomes exponentially more difficult the higher the player's richness is. At a certain point its difficulty far surpasses what an event's difficulty should be in relation to the difficulty curve
manhunter insect spawns....which seems to be the overall OP suggestion in the thread is INSANELY easy to cheese.
Got a hive spawn outside your base? yay! free meat FOREVER! Just let turrets or traps (probably turrets, they're far cheaper in the long run) kill the lone bug every time...problem solved...forever
Quote from: Limdood on September 20, 2018, 11:54:02 AM
manhunter insect spawns....which seems to be the overall OP suggestion in the thread is INSANELY easy to cheese.
Got a hive spawn outside your base? yay! free meat FOREVER! Just let turrets or traps (probably turrets, they're far cheaper in the long run) kill the lone bug every time...problem solved...forever
it'd eventually crash your game/overrun you with hundreds of bugs.
they duplicate.
QuoteEvents should follow the difficulty curve (roughly), and the problem with this event is that it becomes exponentially more difficult the higher the player's richness is. At a certain point its difficulty far surpasses what an event's difficulty should be in relation to the difficulty curve
This is how raids work in general, not just insects. Do you think it's proportional to get ten mechs drop-poded into your non-mountain base? No. It's supposed to be hard and people are supposed to die, especially on higher difficulties.
Quote from: twoski on September 19, 2018, 04:04:26 PM
Stripmining doesn't just happen in flat areas, if you happen to stripmine an entire mountain area out then having the insect hives appear there is a death sentence too.
The insects have a million avenues of escape (even if you build walls, because they can dig), so unless you pre-built wooden floors through the entire mountain (which nobody will do), good luck stopping them with fire or any other trickery like that.
I actually took to building cheap flammable power conduits in my mines and sectioning it off with some stone doors here and there.
>Insects spawn
>Deconstruct appropriate door
>Throw Molotovs on central burn pile
>Wait
>Listen to the screams
Only had them bust out on me once with enough conduits and maybe some animal corpses/wool lying around as well.
Quote from: Swarx on September 20, 2018, 12:05:20 PM
Quote from: Limdood on September 20, 2018, 11:54:02 AM
manhunter insect spawns....which seems to be the overall OP suggestion in the thread is INSANELY easy to cheese.
Got a hive spawn outside your base? yay! free meat FOREVER! Just let turrets or traps (probably turrets, they're far cheaper in the long run) kill the lone bug every time...problem solved...forever
it'd eventually crash your game/overrun you with hundreds of bugs.
they duplicate.
Not based on the OP suggestion. He suggested NON-duplicating hives that occasionally spawn a manhunter...more hives = more manhunters, but if they're nonduplicating, more hives would only happen from the initial firing of the event or another, separate infestation event.
Either way, it takes a deadly, serious threat to mountain bases and makes it trivial, free resources, and a bigger threat to open bases than mountains (if the hive didn't spawn IN the base, the bugs would almost certainly need to path into the base from the outside, right thru the defenses.
Also, if the hives aren't swarming with insects because they only spit out one at a time, why not just draft a couple snipers and take out each hive? that's something that gets you chased by an angry insect horde currently.
I see the bugs as a timed threat with mounting pressure, the clock is ticking, a vital threat style if you ask me
Perhaps instead of just doubling and doubling, they double by half, so if you have 5, the next day you have 3 extra, you now have 8 the next day you have an extra 4 and so on,you have 12+6.. a situation you need to handle, time sensitive heh
They could reduce the bug spawn as well, perhaps after the first initial bug/nest spawn the next nest doesn't instantly spawn the bugs
Instead in between each nest spawn is a bug spawn, so like, every 12 hours your getting either a pile o' bugs or more nests, lets say that the original nests don't spawn a whole fresh batch either, just a periodic 1 more bug..
I have no issue with bugs yet, they can be a pain but i can walk away relatively unscathed.
I would consider a mountain base more difficult to stop bugs, in open terrain you have alll this area to consider a tactic and alot of time to do so, in a mountain base, you kill them with what you have there n then before the exponential growth n hope for the best, most times anyway..
Quote from: Limdood on September 20, 2018, 11:54:02 AM
manhunter insect spawns....which seems to be the overall OP suggestion in the thread is INSANELY easy to cheese.
Got a hive spawn outside your base? yay! free meat FOREVER! Just let turrets or traps (probably turrets, they're far cheaper in the long run) kill the lone bug every time...problem solved...forever
You wouldn't be able to keep the manhunters away safely without dedicating at least a handful of turrets to guarding their hive. Eventually your turrets will miss enough shots that the bugs will get up close and destroy them. Traps wouldn't be feasible since you'd be perpetually stuck rebuilding them, which means you have to micromanage your pawns to make sure they aren't building them while a manhunter runs after them.
It spawns one manhunter per hive, so you're dealing with more than a single manhunter insect. The more hives there are, the more insects it spawns perpetually.
It creates a permanent threat that the player has to deal with or risk having a stream of insects invade their base forever, without the nonsensical exponential hive growth. The insects will also hunt other animals too, so if the player relies on hunters to gather meat then this threatens their food supply too.
Quote from: Bobisme on September 21, 2018, 12:37:11 PM
I see the bugs as a timed threat with mounting pressure, the clock is ticking, a vital threat style if you ask me
Perhaps instead of just doubling and doubling, they double by half, so if you have 5, the next day you have 3 extra, you now have 8 the next day you have an extra 4 and so on,you have 12+6.. a situation you need to handle, time sensitive heh
They could reduce the bug spawn as well, perhaps after the first initial bug/nest spawn the next nest doesn't instantly spawn the bugs
Instead in between each nest spawn is a bug spawn, so like, every 12 hours your getting either a pile o' bugs or more nests, lets say that the original nests don't spawn a whole fresh batch either, just a periodic 1 more bug..
I have no issue with bugs yet, they can be a pain but i can walk away relatively unscathed.
I would consider a mountain base more difficult to stop bugs, in open terrain you have alll this area to consider a tactic and alot of time to do so, in a mountain base, you kill them with what you have there n then before the exponential growth n hope for the best, most times anyway..
shit whoops
I can tell you that while everyone is fixated on how insects are a hard counter to mountain map bases, they're much worse on large hills bases with rivers when your colony wealth is massive 10 years into the game. Imagine twoski's scenario but the bugs spawn on water tiles so any sort of a killbox is a stupid investment of 12 wood per bridge tile. Basically 2-4000 wood to get ready for an infestation and when you have 2 or more equally large overhead mountain water areas the wood cost goes up stupidly.
Easier just to disable insects in the scenario editor or avoid mountain maps and large hills maps entirely (which I doubt was the intention of the mechanic seriously). I like all the mods that improved bugs that I've seen over the years because they sadly did need a lot of improvement. So for me it's disable them, use an embrasures mod or avoid maps with overhead mountain.
Please don't tell me to 'git gud'; it's really unproductive to the discussion.