So, I'm around 8 hours into the game, and the early game was fairly eventful, but I finally purged my near surrounds of biter bases around hour 5, pushing them out of range of my pollution cloud.

I am using RSO, so biter bases are fairly wide spread, as are resource patches, so this process was not as impossible as it likely would be in a more nest-dense game. I am hovering at 20% evolution, due to not having evolution increases from killing biter bases, so most of it is from pollution and time.

For the last 3 hours, the Rampant AI appears to be stuck in AI_STATE_AGGRESSIVE, I enabled all debug chat messages after I realized I hadn't been attacked for two hours, which was hardly what I expected of the normally-vicious Rampant AI.

It quickly became obvious something had gone wrong. The AI was consistently in AI_STATE_AGGRESSIVE, at all times. Worse still, the AI had a massive point balance, and it spent nothing during that entire time. So I took matters into my own hands, setting the AI manually into migration, just make sure it was possible for it to expand.

It was VERY possible, and the AI burnt it's entire point balance in expanding everywhere it could, meaning that all the code was functioning properly. Then the AI State switched back to aggressive, and it stayed there for another hour, again stacking up a large point balance. And again, posing zero threat to me.

So, I guess the key question is why... I'm not seeing sieges, no attacks, no nothing. And, worse still, the AI isn't expanding, which means if I need to push my borders, I can attack isolated and small nests rather easily.

I really feel this behavior badly harms the Rampant experience. I would suggest ensuring that if the AI ever cannot spend it's points on attacking, it should shift into a state where it can either expand, or move to siege, as those both can end up pressuring the player.

I am now going to shove evolution to up 100%, to see if that actually changes anything.

Evolution at 100% didn't change much. AI still didn't change state when it's time ran out, and no attacks occurred.

Just went through all my settings to make sure I didn't toggle anything off... I didn't. Everything SHOULD be working.

At this point, if I can't find out the cause, I'll have to scrap the game entirely and restart without rampant. I don't like that option, since this was meant to be a highly challenging survival against a powerful foe, but at this point vanilla would likely do more.

What version of Rampant are you running? There was a bug that was fixed where AI_STATE_AGGRESSIVE couldn't generate attack squads.

(With that bug fix, AI_STATE_AGGRESSIVE does still have its attack squad generation throttled. It will only create an attack squad once every 1-3 minutes or so.)

1.1.1

I always try to keep things as up to date as possible, especially when there are problems.

Honestly, even if they were attacking, they would be attacking from a tiny handful of nests, which I could easily destroy. It's like playing an RTS where the enemy isn't building up their strength, meaning they'd only be able to attack with tiny forces even if they did attack.

Even if AI_STATE_AGGRESSIVE is having problems, the real problem is that it never switches to another AI_STATE.

Ok, so some research in other threads is showing this is a common problem.

"Is it possible that when there is decent distance between base and nests the bitters won't attack?

I'm using a efficiency modules and generally trying to reduce pollution as much as possible and rampant pretty much doesn't attack at all.
Maybe that is working as intended though."

"Basically, no biter base in pollution = Rampant doing nothing."

"Then it is dependent of what? Globally generated pollution? Because after 20+ hours of play, they never pre-emptively attacks."

"I might have similar issue with Rampant.
I'm playing with modified evolution due to science multipliers and I have only evolution from pollution others are at 0.
I might have seen 1 or 2 attacks from Rampant over 20h of playing. I don't get the usual vanilla attacks since my pollution cloud doesn't reach any spawners."

Clearly, there is a weakness in the rampant logic involving RSO style low biter density.

::::

My Rampant Stats are as follows:

aN:0, aRN:18, dPB:0, IEU:0, IEB:0, rL:0, bEB:22, iCB:0, aB:0
temp: 0.42918527295006, tempScore:-1416.2945409988, points:287.94490309558

This is directly after I forced it into migration state, so it consumed it's 7000+ point pool.

::::

From what I can understand, this entire problem is happening because the AI is never switching into migration/siege, even when it is far away from the player. This means it doesn't have anything to spend points on, and that it never gets closer to the player, which means it never taps into the pollution and thus starts to ramp up.

In short, the way to 'win' rampant is just to play low-pollution and always aggressively kill any biters that get close to you. I am sure that is not the intention. The question is whether this is a bug in the behavior, i.e. it should be switching to siege or migration in this situation, or if it's a design error.

Can you post your save?

Yes, I would be happy to.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bG0GPqa8Ofbrz9t7ouvAG90w-9zhbyVS/view?usp=sharing

:::

Also, to give the rampant system credit, it has finally switched to a migrating state without me forcing it to.

This was, however, in hour 10 of the game...

I have not been attacked for more then 5 hours, despite having crappy factory chugging away producing pollution. I even built a defensive wall near some of their nests just to find out if they would attack it, and nada. I don't view this as a serious problem, since the enemy is nowhere near me, and thus I could understand them not attacking. But the lack of any major expansion is seriously concerning, the vanilla biters would have expanded massively by comparison.

So, now I'm at roughly 17 hours, and I have new insights. I think the problem was coming from the maximum time between AI expansion setting. I had it set to the default of 60 minutes, and I was also at very low evolution for a long time. That setting works well for a normal game, but does not work well for rampant, and I suspect is the reason the AI completely refused to every go into migration state for so long.

I changed that setting, and now the AI is much more willing to enter migration states, and in fact is slowly expanding. VERY slowly, but it is doing it. I am now nearly convinced that the AI is functioning properly, but the nature of my game has confused it's logic and is causing it to behave stupidly.

Based on observing the behavior for a long time now, I would like to make a few suggestions from a design perspective, for balancing cases like this which are not typical of the average factorio game:

1. Increase the distance the AI is willing to establish new bases. Right now the AI is crawling towards me, carpeting the area very thickly, but it's still a long way away from me. This means it cannot tap into my pollution cloud at all. Equally, my resources are very far apart, due to using RSO, this means the AI is struggling during migration to find new resource areas to occupy, and seems obsessed with fortifying it's existing positions. I have also set the distance of expansion as high as possible (20). I believe siege is intended to address this, but forcing the AI into siege state just causes normal expansion for some reason.

2. Something is preventing the AI from switching into raiding mode, and I'm not sure exactly what. But raiding is exactly what it should be doing right now, given it is outside my pollution cloud. Raiding does work, I tested it by forcing the AI into that state, and they did a great job attacking, so again, I'm fairly sure it's the internal design which is having problems deciding to raid, rather then the code not functioning. Sieging should also be allowing it to expand nearby, and it isn't. That might be an actual bug, since even when I force it into siege, it just expands right around existing nests. Perhaps the distance is just too high? But the raiding is doing great, so it clearly knows where I am.

3. Point generation (without pollution) seems a little low overall, I've turned it to 4x and it still seems quite slow. My guess is that I'm not actively engaging in combat, and my pollution cannot reach any nests, so it's only getting passive gain. I'm only at 34% evolution, so perhaps that is also a factor. Or perhaps it is gaining points based on the number of nests, which is far below vanilla levels? Not sure, but it's making any actions quite sluggish and easily repelled. Or, if they gain points from nests on resources... well, resources are pretty widely scattered.

...Just continuing to add information... should I still have vanilla biters?

I see lots of special biters on the map, but the vast majority of biters I see and fight are just normal biters, no tiers, no nothing.

...Just continuing to add information... should I still have vanilla biters?

I see lots of special biters on the map, but the vast majority of biters I see and fight are just normal biters, no tiers, no nothing.

There's an option to enable Rampant's new enemies. I believe it's in startup settings. So if you have that enabled and Rampant isn't conflicting with another mod then you should have no vanilla biters.

...Just continuing to add information... should I still have vanilla biters?

I see lots of special biters on the map, but the vast majority of biters I see and fight are just normal biters, no tiers, no nothing.

There's an option to enable Rampant's new enemies. I believe it's in startup settings. So if you have that enabled and Rampant isn't conflicting with another mod then you should have no vanilla biters.

It was a mod conflict, of a sort. RSO biter generation interferes with Rampant biter generation, but does so in a very inconsistent way that is hard to detect.