Problem

I would like to disable the faction on an existing save. I have been able to do this in the past but hit a non-recoverable error immediately after load with the latest version of rampant.

How to Reproduce

1. Sync mods with the save
2. Disable a biter faction, I have reproduced the issue with the spawner and physical biter factions.
3. Load the save
4. Factorio will warn you that entities were removed and then it will immediately show a second error.

Mods

AutoDeconstruct 0.1.14
Automatic_Train_Painter 0.3.2
Dectorio 0.9.16
Rampant 0.17.32
RampantArsenal 0.17.18
artillery-bombardment-remote 0.17.3
base 0.17.79

Error Message

The mod Rampant caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event Rampant::on_entity_spawned (ID 129)
Rampant/libs/BaseUtils.lua:194: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
Rampant/libs/BaseUtils.lua:194: in function <Rampant/libs/BaseUtils.lua:186>
(...tail calls...)
Rampant/libs/BaseUtils.lua:287: in function 'upgradeEntity'
Rampant/control.lua:958: in function <Rampant/control.lua:936>

Needless Backstory

Some of the factions exploit weaknesses in the factorio AI and that can be annoying. It's fun to mess with the AI as the player but it's worse when it's your AI working against you. So for example, the cannon turret doesn't know what friendly fire is so it blows up the whole front line if a spawner spitter attacks. Your robots will march to their deaths like lemmings whenever a wasp, hornet, or fire biter attacks because they don't understand persistent AOE damage. The fire one is tolerable because the AOE is small but the other two cause robot genocides that you are powerless to stop. I think the new enemy types are fun in general but I'd like to be able to disable some mid game that are frustrating.

I'd also to mention I'm having the exact same problem, so it isn't an isolated incident.

It seems to also not like me changing map settings either. For example, turning player proximity aggro on/off or changing difficulty scaling. It will take the change, but then sense I play on a server it starts desyncing every few minutes.

I just noticed that you can't tweak the health/range for some enemy types in existing saves either. It looks like the health scaler takes effect immediately on some things but not others. I tried lowering the worm range scaler all the way to zero but it had no effect.

It looks like it should be applied in SwarmUtils.fillEntityTemplate(entity) & SwarmUtils.scaleAttributes(entity). I don't see anything immediately obvious.

It would be really nice if you could tweak these during startup. Level 10 worms outrange even the most advanced turrets and level 10 nests require ~100 advanced artillery shells to kill.

Re Aggro -> I've had a really hard time attacking biter bases with this update. They can regrow turrets + nests within seconds making it very difficult to capture territory. They often regrow one level lower but they can upgrade back to their original level within a minute or two. You can't turret walk because they outrange everything and you can't use artillery because they're basically immune to explosive damage. Do you know any way to reduce the base regrowth rate?

The scalers should be fixed, with a small bump to hive spawning times.

As for the desyncing, If you can consistently reproduce the issue send me the save.

The removal of factions should be fixed now.