Hi!
Very good mod. The critters really give me a run for my money!

I have played a fair amount of time a Death World with Rampant AI (further modified with scarce minerals). I see patterns in the Biters, but I might also imagine things. If you don't mind Veden, would you be so kind has to answers my questions?

Correct/Incorrect:
- The Biters are definitively be able to work around your defenses and hit you in the back, correct?
- Biters groups can be generated from nests outside of pollution
- They accumulate biters for several attacks worth, then send them over the course of a day or two until they have depleted their pool of attackers, then they accumulate again.

This behavior in particular, I'm interested to know if that's real or not. The Biters definitively not attack my defenses continuously, but there are lull, like 3-5 days where nothing happens. So often I start to scale down the defense because I need to reinforce another points in the perimeter. And then they attack, the vicious critters!

So...
- Bitters like to attack where defenses are weak? Or at least, even if they can suicide themselves against strong defenses, they also perceive weaknesses and hit for them.

How in general do nest manage to form up their attack parties? In vanilla, outside of expansion parties, which are weak, then they only generate biters if the nest is in pollution, but in Rampant this seems to be far from true. I have been hit by nests that are well outside the pollution cloud, sometime as far as 6-8 chunks away from my most distant outpost.

If there from time to time a mega attack or never? I see a slight variation in the size of attacks, but not that much.

Thanks for the answers!

The Biters are definitively be able to work around your defenses and hit you in the back, correct?
Probably not as much as you think, but to a limited degree yes.

Biters groups can be generated from nests outside of pollution?
Yes, the raid and siege states allow for attacks outside pollution. Migration state can also have wandering parties which may appear as attack, but they are just trying to build a new nest.

They accumulate biters for several attacks worth, then send them over the course of a day or two until they have depleted their pool of attackers, then they accumulate again?
The AI accumulates credits to spend on biter squads, nest upgrades, worm upgrades, and faction upgrades. When in a combat state will spend credits until they can no longer purchase more units or the ai state changes to a non combat state.

The lull you are experiencing are the non combat states.

Bitters like to attack where defenses are weak? Or at least, even if they can suicide themselves against strong defenses, they also perceive weaknesses and hit for them?
There isn't any explicit code that I've written that causes them to target weak defenses. Biter squads have a chance to be suicide squads when formed, so they don't care about weak, strong, or death. Also anytime a squad merges or retreats there is a chance they switch to a suicide squad.

How in general do nest manage to form up their attack parties? In vanilla, outside of expansion parties, which are weak, then they only generate biters if the nest is in pollution, but in Rampant this seems to be far from true. I have been hit by nests that are well outside the pollution cloud, sometime as far as 6-8 chunks away from my most distant outpost.
The easiest way to think about which nests are active is another type of pollution, which is called pheromone in this case, that the player buildings give off. If a nest has enough pheromone on the chunk that the nest is on then they can form attack waves. Each type of player building has a certain amount of pheromone it gives off.

The size of attack waves should scale with evolution factor.

At the moment, there is not a mega attack.

Let me know if this answers your questions.

Yes it does, thanks a lot for the details, specifically to understand that there is a kind of extra, hidden pollution called pheromone explains a lot for me.

So bad for the mega attack thing, this would create a surprise, as it would push defense beyond their resistance point. For now, I know that if my defenses in a sector hold semi-easily waves, then they are basically safe.

Last point, I have failed to find the option you cite in your readme, about bitters attacking mostly at night.

Again, thanks a lot for your good work!

Under map mod settings -> Attack Wave: Nocturnal Mode

Thanks.

A specific situation happened to me and I would like to know something about that.

I set up a forward outpost on a stone deposit. I rapidly saw that my defenses were not up to the task, so I dismantled everything in hurry. The initial Bitters attack destroyed what I could not evacuate in time but smashed itself against the forward outpost where I retreated.

And then for a full day, waves upon waves of Bitters attacked the outpost. Difficult time must I say, where dozens of grenades, units of flamethrower fuel and probably 300 AP magazines for the outpost turrets were expanded!! It set me back quite a lot, because I don't produce that much (Deathworld setting, Rampant and me basically a newbie player).

So my question... Were the waves an extra spawned from thin air, meaning I basically screwed badly by having generated for nothing Bitters that spent most of my ammo stockpiles ... OR
Were the waves using accumulated credits from biters nests, and in this case, I soaked up assaults that anyway were bound to happen?

I would so much prefer the 2nd option. It would make things much less artificial somehow.

Once disturbed biters go players retreat route as I noticed. So if you ran through foreign territories and some bites went after you, then even after you drive away no matter how far, they'll eventually come to your terrritory approx at the point your entered back. In Vanilla they stop somewhere after loosing player's trace.

Concerning mega attack waves you can read in 3 options in the bottom of the list in Mod Settings->Map (they are changeable after map creation). As I understood if some random chance occured, then nests quickly produce biters out of nothing (no pollution cloud required like in Vanilla) and all those biters from different map generated nests come. 'map generated nests' is all nests generated by Factorio engine (perimeter around of discovered OR polluted land - what is further). I don't know if all the nests take part in 'Raiding AI' attacks or only some of them...

Ah but the raids were definitively more than the biters I stired by trying to establish the outpost. There was some medium sized nests close (like 4 chunks from the failed outpost) and after my hasty retreat to the other outpost, I got relentlessly attacked by waves upon waves of biters. I strongly doubt these were only the ones generated for the first outpost attack. It seemed that all the 'stockpiled' biters from all the region were coming at me for a day long.

You can always check if it was a mega attack or something else by loading autosave from a few minutes before. Reloading will not keep random seed and mega attack of Rampage AI won't happen :(

Raiding AI state affects nests within a certain radius of player buildings. Higher concentrations of player buildings will cause the radius to be larger.

When the AI destroys a player building the AI gets credits, so if the AI destroys your outpost you can expect additional units until the AI state changes or it again runs out of credits.