I’ve had difficulty with constant biter attacks, and from what I understand, raids come from nests outside scanned areas, right? Is pollution not a factor at all in this mod?

Do you have any tips for strategies to deal with raids, bar putting turrets everywhere? Personally I would like to be able to avoid raids by dealing with nests inside the pollution cloud – even on easy/low settings, I’m having trouble. Perhaps there could be an option implemented where raids are only triggered from nests within the pollution cloud, or perhaps I am misundertanding the mod.

You are mostly understanding it correctly, but there are two different systems.

Scheduled raids are not triggered by pollution. They are pressure events from the mod. The mod chooses one of your known target areas, then looks for an enemy spawner outside your visible/scanned area within range of that target. Pollution is only a small bias when choosing between possible spawners: lower-pollution spawners are actually preferred, because high-pollution nests are often already busy with Factorio’s normal pollution attacks.

Research Pressure is the pollution-linked system. That one reacts to research progress and mobilizes existing biters from polluted enemy areas.

So clearing nests inside your pollution cloud helps a lot against vanilla attacks and Research Pressure, but it will not fully prevent scheduled raids. Scheduled raids are meant to stop the “clear pollution cloud = total safety” strategy.

That said, if Easy/Low still feels too constant, that is useful feedback. The intended counters are:
- clear nests near important target areas, not only inside the pollution cloud;
- use radar/vision carefully, because raids avoid visible/scanned spawners;
- build layered defenses around core/front/outpost areas rather than turrets everywhere;
- lower Raid Intensity or turn scheduled raids off if you want pollution-cloud clearing to be the main defense loop.

A setting like “raids only from nests inside pollution cloud” is possible, but it would change the design: it would make scheduled raids overlap much more with vanilla pollution attacks and Research Pressure. A better option may be a new raid mode, for example:
- Strategic raids: current behavior.
- Pollution-bound raids: only nests inside pollution cloud can launch raids.
- Off: no scheduled raids.

I’ll consider that as a compatibility/preference setting rather than changing the default behavior.

As a practical test, try disabling Research Pressure first and see how the game feels with only scheduled raids enabled. Scheduled raids are intended more as occasional player-attention events, so defenses cannot become fully automated forever after clearing the pollution cloud. Research Pressure is the system that can add more constant background pressure. If Easy/Low still feels too demanding with Research Pressure off, that is useful balance feedback and I can tune the lower settings or consider an optional pollution-bound raid mode.

What about performance, did we fix it? then ill close the discussion

Regarding performance, I replied in the other thread.

I’m not entirely sure research pressure works as intended. After starting a new game, a massive raid required me to load a previous save and disable research pressure to progress, as defeating the raid is not possible with only a pistol and no turrets. You said it’s to do with pollution, but no nests were inside my pollution cloud. In fact, the only nests visible on the map were very far away.

https://i.imgur.com/LXtaVVy.png

I am also using Armoured Biters, Toxic Biters, Frost Biters, and Explosive Biters – I would assume they would replace enemies in raids and not simply add more enemies to raids, but if they do add more enemies to raids, that probably shouldn’t happen. This is with research pressure set to low. The map settings have enemies settings turned slightly up – but only marginally. Research pressure raids currently occur despite no nests consuming pollution.

In my previous game, I found that raids were far too large in general, being extremely difficult to overcome, and random enemies would constantly attack every part of my factory, including areas that have no pollution and are not near any nests.

Perhaps you could take this information and tune the balancing. Raids don’t necessarily need to only occur from polluted nests, as not being safe despite managing pollution is a great challenge, but even on easy/low settings, raids were too frequent and too difficult in my playthrough, even without research pressure. I think, at least on easy/low, raids need to be much smaller and the radius of what nests can raid be much smaller as well.

I also think that raids should occur from visible nests. It doesn’t make sense to me that nests far away from your factory, nests you can’t see, would raid you. I think it should be the opposite – visible nests, even when consuming pollution, should raid you. That would make more sense to me, so perhaps it could be an option.

I’m also getting small raids an hour into the game, but no nests are in my pollution cloud, and Enemy AI Enhancement’s first raid timer says it’s 28 minutes until the first raid. Is this expected behaviour? Although I am also using More Enemies (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/more-enemies) (I was not using this before – I just added it), and I’m not sure if that’s the cause of that particular thing.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

Yes, constant attacks come from More Enemies.

Raids from this mod only trigger when the raid timer reaches 0, and they can only come from low polluted areas. Otherwise, the game itself may steal raid units to form engine attacks, which would defeat the purpose of the raid system.

I also have a function that checks whether raids have a walkable path, so that part is intentional.

That said, I think the raid size may currently be too large when harder enemies are enabled, such as Armored Biters. I need to think about how to better balance wave size when stronger enemies appear in the early game. Do you have any ideas for that?

Research Pressure makes polluted nests angry based on the research cost of the technology you just finished.

So this mod triggers attacks only when:

1. The raid timer reaches 0.
2. A research finishes.
3. One of your towers gets destroyed, which triggers a breach force group.

So if the raid timer is not 0, and you have not finished any research, then the attacks you are experiencing are not caused by this mod.

Research Pressure uses enemies that the game has already spawned naturally. It does not spawn new enemies by itself.

I still need to find a good solution for raid balance. The raids should not become comically easy when playing without enemy mods, but they also need to stay manageable when using modded enemies.

Right now, the balance is tuned around normal, unmodded Factorio enemies.

Without More Enemies installed (as mentioned, I just added it earlier), and with research pressure enabled, I got a massive raid, as shown in the earlier screenshot, after researching for the first time in my save, despite not polluting any nests. No nests were in my cloud, and I did not have Mroe Enemies or similar mods installed.

As for raid sizes, the size of raids is far too large, I think, when using additional enemy mods. I’m using Armoured Biters, Frost Biters, Toxic Biters, and Explosive Biters (although I’ve never really seen frost biters in a raid, likely due to not being in the right biome, but the others are there). Ideally, having these mods installed would just replace some of the enemies in the raid with some of the modded enemies – or add, say, 10 or 20% extra enemies. Currently, the raid sizes are unmanagable and too difficult, in my opinion, with those mods installed.

The issue isn’t the spawn count itself, since that’s already capped. The real balance problem is the huge strength gap between modded/armored biters and small biters, which makes raids feel disproportionately difficult when modded enemies are present.

I’m currently working on a raid descaler that automatically detects modded enemies and scales raids down accordingly.

Glad to hear that. Thank you.

Do you know why research pressure was sending enemies towards my base when I had none in pollution cloud?

Current research pressure is calculated from the research-time cost*evo = X, then searches for X chunks that contain biters and have pollution greater than 0 wich could also be outside the cloud. It then mobilizes the nests inside those chunks. This is currently far too strong in the early game.

Yes, I wanted to play with it enabled, but I had to disable it for the new game as a ginormous raid made it unprogressable after the first research, even on the low setting.

You mentioned working on a descaler that detects modded enemies, which sounds fantastic and for which I’m quite excited about. I’m presuming this would fix the issue with this too.

Check it out, the update is live!