I did quite a Vanilla Ish run, but with armored biters
I started without clock work, but I think that mod is kind of necessary, otherwise the days are a bit on the short end.
The start was difficult, I think I started with the harder settings, especially the armored biters were soaking up a lot of my iron. After flamethrower things got easier quick.
Later game it was just annoying that the days were short and that the biters were interrupting my expansion building before i could get the defenses up. At that point I installed clockwork... However the run was already almost over.. I think at ~75% evo, I was building my silo, and attacks were with mainly big biters, but they posed no challenge anymore.
Some statements about how I felt about the run (Not all are BREAM relevant)
- Overall, I really enjoy the concept, outside the walls is never really safe
- Personal lasers owned the biters
- I think brick/concrete production is expensive enough to be considered safe zone. ( I also used the "Stable Foundations" mod to incentive the upgrading of foundation for higher tiers of bricks/concrete due to increased bonusses)
- Kind of missed that arty is no longer really useful, perhaps i should have kept normal biters as well.
- I think late game the amount of biters spawned could be higher.. Perhaps different presets could be available?
- Perhaps you could think of a version with bases, every night the bases can grow back... so that clearing your pollution cloud is also pointless, but you can also be attacked during the day and arty still has some relevancy?
Some thoughts about your “things to fix/add”
• Add an option to make certain buildings prevent spawns for a larger radius. For example, IR3's forestries need open unpaved terrain for the trees to grow, so I want to prevent bugs spawning near those forestries.
----Would some brick paths provide enough protections? Other wise perhaps a custom "fertile" tile that is also considered safe?
• Add an option to multiply the fuel/power costs of all lamps (including steam/burner) by a configurable number, so it's not feasible to cover your whole pollution cloud with lights.
----I think that is not needed, if you enforce that bricks/flooring is necessary, perhaps enforce a minimum brick surface area?
• The mod tries to spawn bugs in "attack mode", but sometimes they can't find anything nearby to attack, so they'll just sort of wander around, until you come close enough to aggro them. So maybe add an option to only spawn when there's something to attack nearby. Or maybe BREAM should keep track of the bugs it spawns, and convert them back into pollution if they're too lazy to attack anything.
----They look a bit weird now, I would vote for revert to pollution. Or perhaps in the “very hard” with bases mode, they could start a new base?
• Change this mod so that it can actually soak up pollution from a chunk over time. Keep track of a list of chunks where you're gradually soaking up pollution, then when you've accumulated enough pollution, use it to make one big swarm.
----Good idea, all the attack groups were now rather small. (especially in the late game)
