Rampant Evolution

by Veden

Changes evolution mechanic to allow for green play. All evolution parameters are configurable and retroactively work on-the-fly. Tries to balance evolution level with number of nests covered by pollution. Killing units reduces evolution. Sets vanilla map evolution factors to 0 in new game settings and can change existing save map evolution factors in mod settings. If you want the vanilla options still, use the mod settings in Rampant Evolution. Has stats for displaying evolution in game.

1 year, 6 months ago
1.1
26.0K

b Evolution %%

2 years ago
(updated 2 years ago)

Hello,
After some playing and tests I suspect, that there is some problem with evolution %% mod set for global evolution value.

  1. At some points I had over 100% evolution for spawners killed partly negated by some -80% contribution from units killed. It confuses player, because expected 100% maximum is a finish and can't be exceeded.

  2. Those big numbers of %% look like being simply added up into one total evo % value, but it can't be real, because total evo high numbers (especially over 90%) is very slowly achieved in Factorio due to greatly decreased value of any evo factor with the growth of entire evo %.

  3. In situation when some of factor values do not change in absolute form their %% values are expected to decrease. For example spawner absorbed pollution after all spawners in pollution cloud reach were purged long ago (so we put out of scope the situation with reset counting after mod settings were changed) %% value does not change, but it is expected that its %% value will go down, because it makes up less contribution comparing to other global evolution parts added up by other, still growing factors' values.

Right now player can achieve 100% evo in the very beginning of the game if allows spawners to consume a lot of pollution or kill some considerable (not ultra huge I must admit) number of spawners. In Vanilla it is also easy to achieve 50% evo with killing every spawner found, but after that spawners kill number factor doesn't make so much sense. And after 90% evo it is an incredible work to do (especially if player reduced value from 200 to something smaller in start map settings) to get another 10% of global evo only with nests extermination.

Absolute numbers in units can be much more useful for understanding mod logics. For example via other console command or setting in options what format to show.

2 years ago

Update. Point-2 seems to have a work around - forcing evaluation recalculation fixes extremes of abnormal values.

2 years ago

The contribution is an absolute unit, otherwise I'm not sure how you would represent a negative contribution.
The contribution is how much evolution has been added to the total evolution.
I can remove the % at the end of the contribution lines in the message, but then there isn't a unit to interpret the number that is displayed.
Do you have a save that shows the 100% evo in the beginning of the game?

2 years ago
(updated 2 years ago)

I see. I'll imagine, that those are not %%, but some kind of units.

No, I don't have gamesave with 100% global evolution result of point-2 above. Need to disable Rampant mod and turn on cheats mode to survive. Will do later if you need it.

I change mod settings every hour now (maybe more or less frequently - depending on factors contributions) to remove incorrect contributions summation and RampantEvolution works perfectly for me. For example I change evo-per-second contribution from 2 to 3 and then back.
With game progress I need to do it less often and it removes only several redundant global evo %% instead of dozens %% in the early game.

2 years ago

can you describe what you mean by incorrect contributions summation?

2 years ago

Those particular contributions are for some unknown reason too big both in "units" shown for them and resulting influence on global evolution (I made screenshots in other thread) and they are greatly reduced after evolution recalculation. That is especially true in the early game, when absolute basis is very small, and makes less sense in later game. I don't understand how it happens.

2 years ago

Do you have the vanilla pollution modifiers on?

2 years ago

can you share the save you are seeing the effects on?

2 years ago

No, I don't have vanilla evolution factors set - all were zeroed at game start. Game has some kind of settings in between default and deathworld, and doubled tech price, but I suppose it shouldn't make sense for this issue.
Provided gamesave via github.

2 years ago

Was a bug around not updating counts which lead to increasingly large evolution jumps

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