My friends and I have gotten a lot farther on our map, but we've run into a few problems with certain types of enemies.

The electric biters in particular have been causing problems. Projectiles are supposed to be blockable according to the mod description, but the electric beams travel through any number of walls and attack the turrets directly. Since the turrets don't seem to have any resistances to electric damage, they die incredibly quickly. The walls also get damaged along the way, so even Bob's reinforced walls get shredded and leave completely undefended gaps in the walls.

We're really liking this mod, but that having massive holes ripped in your defenses that quickly and frequently is just crazy. Nothing we've tried seems to be capable of holding them back. Is there something we're missing, or is this really what we're expected to defend against? We really don't want to have to give up on this.

Yes the effect was intended, with that said, I'm happy to do balancing based on feedback.

I'm hesitant to make any suggestions without knowing more about what the effects of the various startup settings are. After all, we might've ended up setting everything to the extreme on accident.

The only settings we've changed from the default are enabling new enemies, increasing wall resistance, disabling friendly splash damage, setting worm/nest/unit tiers to 10, and setting the ending enemy level to 10. Based on the descriptions, it sounded like increasing the tiers would merely add more in-between tiers without affecting the final size or speed of progression. Not entirely sure about the effect of ending level, but it sounded like tiers higher than the max would be unable to spawn regardless of how many tiers were actually selected.

For now we're going to try turning on nocturnal mode, enabling rail safety, and disabling the raiding AI. Hopefully that'll keep the attacks to a manageable level.

Edit: Apparently we were still on 0.16.34 as well. In light of the new toggle for siege AI, what's the difference between raiding/siege? We've noticed a definite pattern of periodic large attack waves where every nest on the map seems to start spawning attack waves regardless of distance. This isn't the same kind of attack that triggers the warning message though, so it seems to be a regular behavior. Whichever AI it is that produces that is the one we'd want to turn off until we get a better idea what we're doing and/or up against.

Roughly enemy levels 1 - 4 correspond to the vanilla biter tiers.

the health levels basepoint for instance on the neutral faction are as follows
{
type = "attribute",
name = "health",
[1] = 15,
[2] = 75,
[3] = 150,
[4] = 250,
[5] = 400,
[6] = 750,
[7] = 1500,
[8] = 3000,
[9] = 5000,
[10] = 10000
}

the indexes correspond with enemy level and the number is the center of the Gaussian distribution for the health stat per level.

You are correct about the tiers filling the power curve.

Enemy evolution requirement when you select 1-10 levels is roughly every 10% evo gives a bump to biters.

For the enemy levels, they should be spread across the tiers selected. So if you selected 5 tiers
with enemy level 1-10 then the levels that would appear in the game are { 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 }

Nocturnal mode overrides the siege/raiding/migrating AI states. so if you select nocturnal the other settings will not function as you expect. The nocturnal setting is functional, but I haven't fully integrated the behaviors from the toggles

Raiding AI is attacking based on build/player/pollution distance, but does not require the nests be covered by pollution to engage.

Siege AI is the same as raiding, but unit groups can also build nests and will build toward the player.

Thanks for the informative reply.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the evolution requirements for the tiers are working if it's supposed to be in increments of 10%. We were already seeing pupae class at 6% and overlord class at 45%. Based on your description those should be 10% and 70% respectively.

We decided to disable the electric biters to see how much further we could get. From what we can tell, it's always the AoE attacks that destroy our defenses. Individual attacks aren't too problematic, but then some perfect storm happens where a general class suicide biter ends up damaging a large area of wall and destroying the bullet supply belt/flamethrower pipes at the same time, followed by several acid spitters breaking what's left of the walls 5 at a time just to let the physical biters in. That kind of situation has forced us to reload a save several times.

We would make the wall even thicker, but the default reach distance will only let us make it 6 thick, so there's only so much we can do. Even as it is currently we're spending the majority of our time building repair packs and outright replacing damaged walls to fix them inside the base. Even with three people they break them faster than we can fix.

What is your mod list?

Also the evo numbers I gave where the base for were the random numbers kick in, so even if it said 70% evo requirement sometimes it will be around 70% other times it is more or less.

The complete mod list is:
AAI Signals
All of Angel's mods except Ore Silos and Warehouses
Atomic Artillery
All of Bob's mods except adjustable inserters
Cliff Deconstruct
Colored Blueprint Books Redux
EvoGUI
Expanded Color Lamps
Extended Angels
FNEI
Factorissimo2
Fast Remove Tiles
Loader Redux
MadClown's AngelBob Locale Fixes
Mushroom Cloud
Perfectly Generic Object
Rampant (Obviously)
Recursive Blueprints
Renamer
RSO
ShinyAngelGFX
ShinyBobGFX
Soundpack: Alerts and Sirens
Switch Button
Text Plates
There is my ghost
Todo List
Unminable Robots
Vanilla Loaders HD
Warehousing Mod
YARM
Yemto's Item Count
And five of my own mods that I've been working on to tweak various small things about Angels and Bobs mods. Mostly they just remove unused items from FNEI, adjust collision boxes to be consistent with vanilla, and rearrange recipes to cut down on the tab clutter. They aren't on the mod portal though since I'm unsure about how the licensing would affect publishing it. We've tested with and without these, but haven't seen noticeable differences.

I can provide copies of the mods and saves if you'd like.