In addition to count, how about adding density as well? By that I mean using a single entity as a group of bugs. For example, if the density is set to '20', then each spawned bug will have 20 times the hit points, and each time it loses 5% of its hit points, a corpse will spawn. That would be a simple, easy-to-code way to handle it. That way, those 140 spawned biters could represent 2800(!) biters without the UPS hit.

You should definitely have an option to float the current density count above each spawned entity so players can keep track of them. You'll need that for debugging, anyway.

(Alternatively, you could track each 'sub-bug' of each spawned entity separately, and either exposed to the system as normal, or some weighted randomness determines which sub-bug gets hit by each attack. I wouldn't bother, though.)

Does that sound reasonable and doable?

Cheers!

Hello! Apologies for the delayed response. Was looking into the feasibility of your ideas/the density premise, and ended up implementing a form of matryoshka doll style "life" or "revive" system for each biter/enemy; that being, depending on difficulty/settings, each time an enemies dies, a count is decremented for the given unit; while this number is above zero, each time that unit dies, they're revived until the count reaches zero.

Does the above seem to fit with what you were thinking/had in mind?

Hello! Apologies for the delayed response. Was looking into the feasibility of your ideas/the density premise, and ended up implementing a form of matryoshka doll style "life" or "revive" system for each biter/enemy; that being, depending on difficulty/settings, each time an enemies dies, a count is decremented for the given unit; while this number is above zero, each time that unit dies, they're revived until the count reaches zero.

Does the above seem to fit with what you were thinking/had in mind?

That should work well, and is much the same as my idea, as long as a corpse is spawned each time the enemy dies, so it's not simply one enemy that just won't die.

For options, I would have both a mean and a range, so the number of enemies per enemy will be somewhat randomized. For example, if the mean was 15 and the range was 5, an enemy could contain 10-20 enemies. It should also work with the evolution scale, so 100% evolution would double both the mean AND the range. (In the given example, an enemy could contain 20-40 enemies.)