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I actually prefer to completely turn off biters. They’ll still be there on other planets, but the anxiety on the home world is gone

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Agreed. The difficulty creep that was demanded by vocal experienced players has made Factorio much harder for newcomers to get into.

Factorio is a brilliant Zen garden and an absolutely terrible real time strategy game. Since the beta there's been more and more biter types and a gradual ramp up in how frantic you have to be to keep up. It's tremendously off-putting and completely opposite to what makes Factorio what it is.

Hopefully the developers realize this at some point and knock it off. Make a 'frantic mode' toggle for the experienced players but don't make it the default. I can handle needed a turret or two at key points but I can't handle needing to race the tech tree to keep up. I don't get why they made the defaults so hostile to new players. I'm not even that new to Factorio but it's still waaaay too frantic with default settings.

I actually liked having the biters on my first couple of playthroughs of the game. It added a sense of urgency and a feeling that this was a dangerous alien world.

After that I started playing mods that in and of themselves increased the difficulty of the game, and having the biters on top of that was just way too much.

Also, in a vanilla game, once you're more or less invulnerable to the biters they become just an extra annoyance, and I'd rather just focus on building.

On the other hand, without the sense of urgency that biters give the game can become kind of boring...

I agree. It adds pacing, as you can't simply dive down one branch of the technology tree. You're forced to always be developing your offense and defense, pushing you down branches you would have ignored otherwise.

I second this. Played with a friend some 150hrs and eventually started a new game with more mods and crazier biter levels ultimately increasing complexity and build formulas.

It was so nerve wracking I felt like progress was so much slower due to all the fighting. After maybe 50 hrs in we realized the krastorio mod want being called correctly, so when we fixed that we learned all the new complex recipes were obsolete and all our defense were useless due to the restructuring of ammo types

So I guess my point is. Bitters have a time and place and I'm over them.

The other harsh lesson biters teach you as a new player is to restart with what you're learned so far.

Your second or third base always goes so much smoother

I've never felt the desire to turn off biters. I'm in it for the building, not the fighting, but taking out biter camps combines well with exploration, and it's often a nice change of pace between all the thinking about logistics.

I'm currently playing with the Krastorio 2 mod, where the ridiculous range of the anti-material rifle makes killing biter camps a bit too trivial.

IMO the bugs add some needed entropy. If you’re not paying attention your bases will eventually be demolished. Makes me more thoughtful about my planning and design rather than just plopping some half assed shit down.

they're also the entity that gives "bite" (pun intended) to the pollution mechanic, which complicates lots of tradeoffs in the game. with biters/pollution, trees are both an inconvenience and a helpful pollution buffer. it's not trivial to decide whether to build your starter base in the open desert or nested between forests. additionally, the tradeoffs between solar vs steam and the effect modules are shallower when you ignore pollution.

I understand some people just aren't really into the tower defense side of factorio. that's okay, and it's a good thing that the settings can be adjusted to suit a wide range of playstyles. but if that's you, I'd recommend at least trying a low pollution / efficiency-focused playthrough. the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution, and the biter threat can be pretty minimal if you use them. imo this preserves the balance better than just turning off biters.

I rarely defend. Factorio is a great example of a good offense being the best defense. Just take out any biter camp that comes close to the edge of your pollution cloud, and you never really have to bother with defense.

> the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution

The popular Krastorio 2 mod adds even more: wind turbines from the start, more efficient ways to produce energy between steam and nuclear, and it even has air purifiers that reduce pollution. That's almost cheating. On top of that, taking out biter camps is a lot easier with the anti-material rifle.

There's a lot of important details in this : when, how and where biters expand, how much less killing settlers rather than nests increases evolution, &c.

Good point. I often play train worlds and the normal settings there is to not have biters expand at all. I often change that to having them expand slowly, but much more slowly than they normally do. Having new biter camps pop up in your cloud will require some defense of course.

My understanding is that the purpose of biters is to prevent you from building too big too fast and also as a resource sink to get rid of excess iron. There is a FFF they wrote about it and Katherine of Sky has a great video about why you should bet biters IIRC because she was against them when they got buffed as well but changed her tune. I can't seem to find either though.

I'm not sure I agree. I gave up on my first sandbox game of Factorio mid-way through, because I realized that biters were a pushover against my new tank... (not realizing that biter settings or mods existed)

Many of my fun memories of Factorio do involve biters though, both defending against them, and attacking them by building power lines and quickly building and then un-building laser towers near their bases (and later just by having super strong armor and a shotgun).

But I guess a toned down offense on your base, while still allowing the same kind of attack, would work just as well.

Also, the biters are somewhat boring at end of game, it's just the whole world map full of the exact same evolved bases everywhere.

I don't recall thinking the biters were at all frantic on default settings. They shape your play, but they don't really push things hard in my experience. I get why people play with them off (though I reckon a lot more it's because people wind up finding them boring after the first few runs), but I don't think it's obvious that it's something that should be the default for new players.

> needing to race the tech tree to keep up

Is that actually how it ends up going? Unless your base is extremely small, then going slower means less pollution reaches the biters and they evolve slower.

If you won't have 20 drills going after several hours, "play the tutorial" is probably the best advice.

"Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.

> "Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.

Don't people just take whatever starting position the game gives you? Sometimes the starting position simply is a treeless wasteland. As far as I understand, moving to start far away from your starting position is a bad idea, because there's more biters there and the resources you need are much further apart.

Mineral patches are farther apart, but much richer. The starting patches will have a few thousand units, ones that require a train ride to get to will have millions of tens of millions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqJ3Vx6tdbc

One build style has you rushing to decent weapons, then walking far from spawn to set up your main base, so you don't have to bother with trains to get up to rockets. (The patches are randomly placed and don't have exclusion zones, so it's not impossible to see a 10M iron, copper, coal and oil all next to each other.)

I will note that getting to the rocket launch stage only requires 3-5 patches outside the starting area and you can very easily reach that with belts. Trains are for going big or simply because you like them.

I simply like them. I always play a train world, rush train tech, and have my trains handle everything. Much more fun than belts.

This RSO is specifically a mod that uses its own resource generation system. (Also incompatible with map preview !)

The random map generation is not the ideal experience for new players. Most of them are fine, but sometimes you get accidental hard mode from no trees or cut-off starting resources or oil being super far away. And the solution is hitting the new seed button.

Not sure about resources being further apart, and agree about new players. However it's well known that your starting area can have an immense impact on the game difficulty.

There are games where there needs to be some investment, something at stake, for the game to be fun. Playing such a game on easy makes it less fun and eliminates the satisfaction of overcoming challenges. I wondered if this might be the case with factorio, so in my second year of playing it, I launched a deathworld map. Nope, it was just tedious as I thought it would be. Launched the rocket and never played with biters again.

The obvious missing piece is biter-clearance automation. The game is about increasing levels of automation. The next level after we get laser turrets and we get flying bots should be reaper drones with lasers that automatically patrol and eliminate biters within a large range. Also, I've put several thousand rockets into space (4K SPM baby), but I can't fire a nuclear weapon more than 54 meters?

That's what the train artillery (and now spidertrons) are for.

Of course there are also mods, like M.I.R.V., by one of the devs :

https://youtu.be/k56fS2XygxM

Train artillery requires a base. Artillery agros biters, so they navigate to the location of the train. If the train is still there, it gets destroyed. If the train isn't there, the tracks get destroyed. And in any case, the train isn't automated: it doesn't drive out to where they are and kill them. The train artillery just makes more sense than stationary artillery: it has the same range, and it is the most effective way to transport artillery shells. Think about that for a minute: the most effective way to transport artillery shells to stationary artillery is to send it in a train artillery wagon. Why the fuck would you build stationary artillery! LOL!

Spidertrons are also not automated. They don't patrol. They don't run away when they are out of ammo, come back and reload.

Love the MIRV: like the too-short-range nukes on the spidertron, they are a great way to bomb yourself back to the stone-age. The video nicely shows how it's first missile on automatic mode blows up his own base. Brilliant.

1.) Biters don't attack tracks.

2.) You can totally set an artillery train to patrol between outposts, not to mention that there won't be much biters left after the first cleanup.

3.) I guess you might want stationary artillery if you want to be extra-sure the nests are taken out ASAP ?

4.) I didn't get the opportunity to use a spidertron yet, is there really no patrol functionality, like the AAI Vehicles mod has ?!

I mostly play for the engineering side of it, so in all my bases over the years, I always always play on "peaceful" mode. It makes part of the tech tree useless (no need for better guns if there's nothing to shoot) but I find I enjoy the game much more that way.

I haven't played mods, but in vanilla Factorio I have never felt rushed at all by biters.

The vanilla biters are brain dead simple to deal with if you’re at all competent.

Same, but that's true for most base building and RTS games, the base building / turtling is more fun than the attacking / combat part.

I've found the other planets to be the real PITA that got old quick. Biter asteroids in particular.

I love Space Exploration, but when you hit late game man it starts to get tedious fast. I've gotten to naquium and the higher end space sciences, but I get bored with the logistics of keeping it all running and have quit both times I've reached this point.

Can confirm; I've gotten two (multiplayer!) SE games stalled out on Naquium now.

What's the best faster-start mod? I want to start with robots instead of remaking my base midway through.

Haven’t tried it, but this seems like something you can customize ingame at any time with the builtin map editor.

See the “setting up research” on the editor wiki page:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Map_editor#Setting_up_research

Edit: you’d probably have to give yourself the necessary modular armor, roboport and initial bots.

Try Companion Drones (don't have a link to hand) - gives you a pair of very capable personal drones that can attack/defend as well as filling in blueprints.

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