Insect hive is still an awful event

Started by twoski, September 12, 2018, 01:10:42 PM

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twoski

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.

Swarx

are you playing at high difficulty?

i'm terrified if this was at medium

twoski

#2
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.

Bobisme

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 :)

twoski

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.


OFWG

Quote from: sadpickle on August 01, 2018, 05:03:35 PM
I like how they saw the naked guy with no food and said, "what he needs is an SMG."

lancar

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.

vzoxz0

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.

twoski

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.

vzoxz0

Play on lower difficulty, learn to play better. You're SUPPOSED to have colony-threatening events lategame.

Thane

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.
It is regular practice to install peg legs and dentures on anyone you don't like around here. Think about that.

twoski

#12
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

Limdood

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

Swarx

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.