Couple of simple tweaks to infestations

[Pax_Empyrean]

At present, an infestation can kill people with no chance to save them. Hives appear, bugs appear, and if they're too close when they spawn in there's nothing the player can do about it.

There is an easy fix and a harder (but cooler) fix. The easy fix is to have the bugs appear ~5-10 seconds after the hives appear just to give the colonists a chance to get out of certain death. The harder fix is to have the hives appear inside the mountain near the excavated areas and then mine their way into the base.

Compare two scenarios: the first is what we've got already. Bugs appear out of thin air in Bob's bedroom and Bob is dead before he can do anything. The others rush in to help, but killing the bugs before they kill Bob just isn't going to happen. Might as well just have an event that drops a meteorite on one of your pawns for all you can do about it.

The other scenario is an infestation warning. Bugs are trying to break through the wall into Bob's bedroom. You assign Bob to repairs on the wall; it won't hold forever, but it slows the breakthrough down enough that the others can rush into Bob's room and get set up to unload everything they've got into the chokepoint before the bugs can spread out inside the base.

Bugs appearing out of thin air and killing your guys isn't fun or fair, and there's nothing the player can do about it. Giving the player an opportunity to react, even if it's a fairly short window, is exciting. Scrambling to set up a firing line before a tide of bugs breaks through the wall is awesome. Increase the number of bugs as necessary to maintain an appropriate challenge.

[ShadowTani]

I agree; I had the Bob scenario happen to me a couple of times. That's an insta-savescum for me. I can deal with mistakes of my own doing, but when I had no warning before it was too late then it is just random punishment rather than a challenge, not even Dwarf Fortress consider that the formula for fun. I understand infestations is a necessary challenge to provide a disadvantage to the otherwise defensive bonuses of a mountain area, and I agree about that design choice, but it need to be a challenge, not a random pawn execution event.

A similar scenario done right is how the mechanoids sometimes decides to land inside your base - it always give me a few seconds to rally my people away from the impact zone, while providing a nice challenge forcing one to rely on your building dodging skills and gerilja tactics rather than passive defenses like turrets etc.

Most of the bugs will spawn with a delay anyway, the problem is those times a few of those bugs spawn at the same time with the hives which is very troublesome. I rather see some additional AI for the bugs instead, more hive-like tendencies, perhaps more abilities as well - just give me a chance to move my colonists out of the way before they rush out of their hives. >_<;

EDIT1: I dunno if I like your idea of them potentially making the mountain area into a swiss cheese tho, they do enough damage for my OCD as it is, lol, but yeah, their spawning mechanism definitively needs a fix.

EDIT2: I feel like I should mention that I do like bug infestations outside those times they end up being a pawn execution event, the insect meat seems to work well for kibble, and insect jelly is always a treat. Sadly the insects are very dumb and don't work together much so the challenge is so-so, hence why I said I'd like to see better AI for them.

[TrashMan]

Someone proposed dogs being able to sense incoming hives and stealth raids.
That is also a good solution.