Insect hive is still an awful event

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

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vzoxz0

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.

Thane

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

Limdood

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.

Bobisme

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..

twoski

#19
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.

Swarx

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

RicRider

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.
##Coding Scrub##