@@24thcenturygamer, So the Biters are drug addicts, I think if they had the ability to make society and if an alien race tell them to make industries, I am sure they will gonna kill themselves.
pollution is a drug for the bugs that they can sell to each other, this also allows them to read ancient Chinese texts about warfare. Love it thank you
My theory is that they love the pollution, but they're simply not that smart. They're heading into your base because that's where the pollution is. They knock down polluting buildings, hoping to find more pollutants inside, not realizing that they're killing their golden goose.
Animals in the real world actually do this.. like cats or dogs attacking their automated food dispenser when it runs out of food expecting more to be in it.
Installs 100,000 solar panels, 10,000 beacons, and 50,000 MK3 efficiency modules + super-efficient nuclear power. Going green, no more brownies for the biters.
Haha yeah, actually when I played with high biter settings, I used efficiency right when I unlocked it and hilariously, pretty much 0 biter attacks until I started uh, using artillery on them.
@@Alavaria when i started playing i thought that was the idea, to keep low a low pollution and i rarely ever got attacked doing that. typically only did because I had expanding turned on and those groups sent to expand would attack me or nests would pop up in areas I had already cleared.. so i expanded more to prevent their expansion which caused me to pollute more..an endless cycle more or less especially when your mines run dry. I had just gotten to producing mortars and using them after converting from a spaghetti base to a main hub but felt no desire to expand or fight anymore.. I was highly addicted to factorio for a short while racking up well over 200 hours it was fun while it lasted
I'm afraid that you have completely misunderstood what the biters _are._ They aren't a native species, but, instead, a Terran terraforming tool designed to process all atmospheric gases that aren't conducive to human health. (As MICROorganisms are all too readily mutated into something dangerous, MACROorganisms were designed, as they don't tend to mutate and are _infinitely_ easier to find and get rid of once the job is done.) The crash site was chosen because it is one of the original seeding sites and so has been active long enough that the biters in the area devolved and natually died out in that area. As pollution is produced, it reactivates the biter network, which starts re-evolving to achieve its original state of efficiency. The reason that biters are so easy to kill is because they are supposed to be; once terraforming is complete and the biters have natually devolved, aerial bombardment of the few remaining nests and tightly-packed mobs of biters with a potent-but-completely-biodegradable pesticide allows for easy cleanup. ...except terraforming *_isn't_* complete, most of the biters *_haven't_* devolved, and you *_don't_* have the pesticide available to you. Oops; sucks to be you!
Oh, well, that makes me feel better about polluting some alien planet knowing that after I leave the biters might eventually find a chink in the defenses (or I could make one), then they'll tear down the base and it'll be all nice and clean when they're done.
Ive had to re-load older saves and straight up disable the mod, fix the defenses, and then enable it again because of how many times my base, even in late middle game with Krastorio and Space Exploration has absolutly demolished my factory lmao
This is just some food for thought - I put it to you that, despite various claims by random people, the biters are *NOT* a peaceful species. Not only is this never said by the game, there is evidence within the game to directly contradict it. I can't tell you how many times I have seen biters attacking rocks and trees. There is also no remaining land based wildlife on the whole planet. They will also aggressively attack you on sight, even if you have never polluted in any way at all. Even if they're not defending one of their nests but just migrating. Even if you have never fired a single shot in anger. I put it to anyone who reads this that they're actually a bioweapon. An unknown party released them onto the planet for an unknown reason and they wiped out everything that moved. You just happen to be unlucky enough to have crash landed there. Personally, I'm blaming Weyland Yutani.
I would go with this hypothesis, or that they just won the genetic lottery and managed to basically wipe out all wildlife, then proceeded to devolve to more efficient forms as a result of overpopulation and no compelling threats. As a threat emerges, hives once more produce specialized units to fight that threat while avoiding sending out squishier units. The fact that a captured hive will always spawn a behemoth upon spoiling, and that you can get many eggs implies that they are inhabited. The ones we see are just the harvesters/soldiers. Anyone who has antagonized ants before and watched will notice they'll start sending bigger ants out
This is supported by my death world experience where I was left alone after the factory was mostly destroyed. The biters wandered aimlessly among the destruction seeking the pollution they just destroyed. There was more structures to destroy and I wasn't dead they just stopped. They wanted the factory to grow just got a bit overzealous.
i have the same theory, that explains why there are no other animals on the planet, probably that super-organism eats plant biomeass from the surface, and to have all the biomass, they just killed all the herbivores from the planet.
Hey question, what do the biters think when you start going mor green with your factory? The whole planet is addicted and you aren't producing as much as before In you story: biter would become more angry to convince you to expand polluting stuff In game: less pollution = less biter attacks
@@24thcenturygamer ummm drug addicts usually do some crazy stuff when they're going through withdrawals though...... wouldn't they attack? great vid, i do like it.
@@calebjohnson4167 I would think the bug brains have fairly short memories. They could go for some more, but with nothing in the air, they don't know which way to go. Until a source or a threat is detected, not much to do but chill out and be huge.
The Rampant mod makes the biters much angrier. They behave like an any colony, explore, actively find and exploit weaknesses in your defenses. If anyone finds the biters too easy, highly recommended.
The problem with this conspiracy is the fact that there is no explanation towards time factor of biter evolution, as well as why biters don't attack or do anything about 0 pollution bases. With all that said, I really enjoyed it, and would love to see some more stuff
I think the biters are no the main form, I think the biters are the subsurface's method of keeping things just the way of keeping things nice. I think the subsurface biter mass needs the nests to respirate, and thus needs to both defend the surface bases and also gets not so happy when pollution comes around, which is why less pollution of going into surface bases means less attacks. another thing. this also explains why biters on the other side of nauvis are evolved, as it is one organism that spans the planet, and also explains why a few biters/spiters are what are used to make new biter bases, as the biter subsurface mass needs the biters to dig to unearth it.
This also explains why biter bases cannot be made past a certain distance from any other biter bases, and this is due to, according to my theory, the need for bases for respiration, and the fact that biter bases are made from biters uprooting the subsurface growths.
I've always assumed that the reason biters near spawn are so weak is because the ship crash created a local extinction event. Also, pollution is only used to make more biters. They get stronger based on TOTAL pollution made (meaning if you absorbed it all before a biter ate any, they would still get stronger from it). I know this because I tried a challenge world where I tried to make pollution the only way for biters to evolve, but it didnt work like I thought
Ok this explanation is good but I thought of another one that might also be interesting : what if the biters were a fungi-like species with a subterranean network of nerves and nutrients. Nests and spawners would be a defense mechanism against pollution (which damages trees that wouldn't give them the nutrients that they need) and a mean of scouting and expanding (get a few biters out -> go in an unexplored area -> start a new network -> new network merges with main one). To explain how they underpower our defenses at first then get stronger, we can assume that growing nests is extremely costly and therefore the "biter network" needs to adjust to the threat. However our factory expands quickly relative to the nests, so they lag behind. The fungi-like species hypothesis explains how biters evolve evenly no matter the location (nerve and nutrient network) and why they attack (to protect the ecosystem). so to answer the question in the title : the attacks match the threat as closely as possible to minimize the losses in nutrients and energy. this is just an explanation that I thought was more elegant than the one proposed in this video, it might be less fun but we're talking about factorio, we're not having fun
2:50 Actually that is a common misconception. While the charge over no mans land was indeed dangerous and often caused a good bit of casualties, it was also the one pretty much every army in WW1 solved relatively fast. Because the attacker has the advantage of being able to concentrate their forces, and choose the (perceived) weakest point on the enemy line, this meant taking the first enemy trench line was usually successful, and quite often inflicted as many, or more casualties then the attackers took. However now your troops are exhausted, running low on supplies, and your artillery, the deadliest weapon of the war, is out of position for the defense of the newly captured trench line. And to move supplies, fresh soldiers, and Artillery up to the new positions, they too have to cross no-mans land. Meanwhile your enemy can attack over relatively unbroken ground and their artillery is in a perfect position to support their attack. So the reason for the stalemate was not that noone managed to cross no-mans land without getting machine gunned to death, but rather because after you crossed the counterattack would be brutal, and surviving it proofed extremely hard. 3:40 tanks really aren't all that effective against trenches, as can be seen in Kursk in WW2 where Germany ran their best tank division into well prepared soviet trenches, and essentially lost them and any chance to regain some measure of initiative. Or look at Ukraine currently. The reason we haven't seen major trench warfare in WW2 was not because of Tanks, but rather because the conditions for trench warfare never really developed.
Absolutely! And indeed, a later war tactic was assault, take the positions, do damage... and withdraw. That kept the casualty ratios "favourable" (ew) to the attacker. You're not going to see any of that in a Hollywood flick, though. In WW2, defence again had the upper hand. Which is why you had to concentrate so much firepower to have any chance of getting through, which is an extremely complex (and expensive) task... or find a way around. Tanks certainly didn't end trench warfare, but if used fast enough, could prevent it from developing. _If_ you had overwhelming force (and lots of drugs to keep people running without sleep :D ). Trenches were if anything even more effective in WW2 - if you had the time to build them. And of course, the Maginot Line was extremely effective and did exactly what it was planned to do. It didn't stop after WW2 either. But it's really funny that everyone seems to have their pet black horse of the one thing that finally won WW1. There was no such thing. It was a brutal war of attrition, with unending new developments and counter-developments that kept the balance of power until one side was utterly drained and couldn't really keep fighting anymore. It wasn't air power, it wasn't tanks, it wasn't gas, it wasn't better logistics, it wasn't new tactics or strategies - though _not_ adopting all of those when the enemy did _would_ have been fatal, of course!
rather, trench warfare is still a thing today, we just understand it's weaknesses as a strategy better than we did 100 years ago and it's no longer as good as it was then.
Fish, you ask? We are the fish, there is not a single one human being on the surface of the Nauvis. Player is just a humanoid aquarium full of sentient fish. You are not healing with fish, you just replace a dead one.
The real answer is that they are like the zerg. Any hive can migrate and create a new hive cluster. The evolution isn't because of the pollution, it's because they respond to the threat that is you. Since the biters have no difference between colonies, they all undergo the same evolution as the ones in contact with the pollution originally, and likely share a hivemind that can convey the need to change.
2:32 By the end of the war the British forces under Haig were using combined armed tactics that we consider as “modern”, but these came in steps by refining on the successes of prior attempts. Some of the bloodiest tactics came from failures Haig had no control over, such as faulty shells making artillery barrage ineffective at clearing wire for example. Another fascinating point was the defender’s advantage being beyond just firepower, major troop movements came via trains so they needed pre-existing infrastructure. Communication was at best cable based and prone to severance, or even limited to runners/animals.
My headcanon is that your ship blew up so hard when it crashed that it significantly weakened biters in a wide area near your start, so the closer the biters are to the ship, the weaker they are. Then they just try to slowly regain strength. And the rest of the planet is just fully evolved biters.
This is why I integrate biter nests directly in my factory as natural preserves sucking up all that juicy pollution from within but their jealous brethren still yearn to join the free housing program and relentlessly come knocking at the factory's doors.
Fun hypothesis, but doesn't fit in with the fact that biter density increases the further away from your crash site you go. One would assume they would gather round to consume it if they liked it so much.
IIRC the game says that biters make new nests by sending out some biters from existing nests to create one. That could explain why a) nests only form close enough to others, and b) evolved biters carry their genes to new nests outside the pollution cloud.
I always thought that the biter behavior was tied to forest fires. With the state of the planet before our arrival, forest fires are the closest thing to the conditions that induce biter attacks. So I assumed that biter attacks are a behavior that has evolved to halt and extinguish forest fires. When they breach the walls, they simply try to get to the burning trees; and when they attack the assemblers, they just try to unearth the smoldering tree trunks. I haven't figured out why needing to react to forest fires would make the biters evolve, though. And why evolving makes the biters much less susceptible to bullet wounds, but only marginally less susceptible to fire.
You misunderstood we are doing the RDA 2's landing on Pandora in Avatar the way of the water, wipping an circle around our landing spot something goes wrong we crush and wake up after some time as the Biters have already taken some ground back from the cricle but at less evolved state.
I enjoyed that plot twist but would have loved some looking at the behaviour from the code side of things. Like were those bases upgraded because you revealed them and the general biter difficulty increased (i presume thats how it would work) or do all biter bases upgrade to a general difficulty?
I strongly agree with the video conclusion. From a game design perspective, the biters also represent a way for the developers to induce motivation in the player to expand, since escalating attacks require escalating production and research as you described!
My dream game is Factorio with different planets that have different kind of threats in them. Like biters, or an evolving flesh hivemind or a rival faction of factory builders or an Automaton Super AI that requires you to be quick and change up your defense often.
was hoping at some point you would go the "planet has a anti reaction like a immune system, and the biters react to the toxic intruder and his signals, so you and the pollution. (therefore all are evolving equally since they all are just the planets way of dealing with intrusion)" route, but this is quite the theory as well.
What a nice idea. Really enjoyed it. Everyone plays into each others addiction. :P On a side note: If you are actually bored of the vanilla-behaviour of biters, check the modpage of Factorio. There are tools, that will make your life a living hell: Varying resistances for biters. No more wall of napalm death, laser immune once, ect. Introducing new attack patterns to the biter AI. There are ways.
with enemy expansion turned on, biters can actually expand their territory right next to your wall, spawning a behemoth worm that outranges your defences. This is more common on deathworlds however, but that could be considered offensive artillery.
"so long and thanks for all the fish" were, if I remember correctly, the last words of the dolphins who repeatedly tried to warn us about the upcoming apocalypse before finally leaving the planet. (HHGTTG)
Half the time most of the biters are dead from the lasers and uranium bullets before the flames even hit the ground. Its only the absolutely massive attacks where they properly get used
I think it's a hat tip to this amazing xenobiology sci-fi scenario: Unintelligent alien planet fauna with a unique evolutionary defensive mechanism exists in the form of harmless (or low-harmful) creatures, that usually form a symbiotic relationship with each other or even an entire hivemind. However, as soon as a threat that risks changing their preferred environmental balance emerges (e.g.: external species invades and tries to dominate over it) the local fauna collectively reacts by rapidly evolving and complicating itself until reaching the state that can eliminate such a threat. It does not just mean getting stronger and tougher but also means becoming more complex and even sapient. Only when the threat is erased, does the fauna shift back to its usual weak and unconscious state. Until then, it won’t stop the rise to its apex form. Pollution doesn’t cause the "mutations" of the hivers. Surely, it is an aggravator, that forces locals to attack its sources (because bugs literally “don’t like it”), but the real cause for their rapid evolution is your turrets that kill their numbers. Correct, the more biters die, the more resources and attention to the threat the hivemind pays (the Earth ants have a similar instinct: when one of them suddenly dies, its body starts producing special pheromones that naturally draw even more ants to the area to deal with a potential threat). Hence, when the hivemind realizes you are not just a common roaming predator but rather a dangerous "competitor" and a potential environmental crisis, it keeps progressing and evolving on a broader scale activating all its nexuses around the planet to focus on your demise by spamming the caste of constantly upgrading heavy warriors, which would never be created if you didn't show up. Such an amazing speculative biology feature may be found in these books and movies: Harry Harrison - Deathworld Clifford D. Simak - The World That Couldn't Be Alan Dean Foster - Sentenced to Prism Cameron's "Avatar" movie (was partially based on “Harry Harrison - Deathworld”) The "Hive" episode in "Love, Death & Robots” series.
My theory is that all the nests are connected to each other under ground like mold it's why they all simultaneously have the same evolution and why the nests seem to just pop out of the ground a certain distance from other nests without anything having to go there and build it.
While the Bitter get closer to your Factory, the drugs intensity is higher than ever, so they need to come closer and munch on anything that stays on their way.
I take exception to your comment about the tank not being useful. It is a super weapon in the early game. But yeah once you get to later game, the spider with legs and shields mixed with your personal lasers in your suit is basically invincible.
Haig's blunder was that he and Sun Tzu never really understood the concept of force multipliers.† Sun Tzu is forgivable because Art of War was written at a time when differential equations, the number zero and negative numbers hadn't been invented yet.‡ Haig's is less forgivable. He did have advisers who understood the mathematics of war. Yet Haig's strategy in the Somme amounted to little better than that of a Stone Age general from the caves of Cro-Magnon: "big army big, small army small, big army win, what be machine gun?" † - No. 21st century reinterpretations of the Art of War do not count. If he didn't say force multipliers, he didn't talk about force multipliers. ‡ - [dubious - discuss]. The ancient Chinese Maths textbook "Nine chapters on mathematical art" dates to the 2nd Century AD, i.e. 600 years after Sun Tzu. But the Nine chapters incorporates knowledge of Chinese maths dating back to 1000 BC. And chinese abacuses existed contemporary to Sun Tzu (just). You need zero to understand them[citation needed].
It makes sense they are bad at war since it doesent seem like they have any other enemies on the planet, when we get there the little bitters arent even combat ready, they look like they gnaw on trees
The main reason trench warfare was so brutal was because until the introduction of tanks, the only way to win trench warfare was to attack your enemy with as much force before they dug in further. If the Biters were true WW1 enthusiasts, they should make a beeline to the crashed ship with as much force as soon as possible to defeat you before you dig in and fortify your position. However, once you are dug in they still have to keep the pressure up with mass assaults that are likely to prove ineffective, as while they may lack offensive capability the player certainly won't for long. The Biters cannot afford to just fortify their position around the player's base as not only does that allow the player to get stronger, but the player's pollution will reach the Biters regardless of how well fortified a wall of Biter nests are
If you dont expand fast enough though, they DO destroy your factory to the last furnace. The evolution further out could be explained by supposing biters are divided into factions and the nests do infight, we just dont see it, therefore tye evolved biters spread outwards and dominate the small ones due to natural selection.
I want a mod scenario thats similar to Brave New World, but you play as biters trying to take out the factory builder instead of Sentient Robots, where you outpace the factory builder by absorbing as much pollution as possible to evolve faster.
This is the weirdest factorio video I’ve watched
I think he smoked a bit too much of what he said the bitters were having.
Cause who is having more pollution than bitters? the player.
The horrors of the auto save screen gave me a new perspective I wished to share with you all.
@@24thcenturygamer, So the Biters are drug addicts, I think if they had the ability to make society and if an alien race tell them to make industries, I am sure they will gonna kill themselves.
@@24thcenturygamer Don't ... give ... WUBE ... ideas.
@@Whistler-007 too late; see new achievement related to "stink". ;)
"why do the biters always lose?"
Survivor bias, we don't ever see the engineers who lose to the biters
I do.
I do. Every time I play
I lose to biters literally every time. I lose to biters on peaceful mode.
Lier
I do
@@redstocat5455 liar*
Biters: "We must have more"
Player: "500 Furnace Stacks"
Biters: “What is it?”
Player: It is called pollution.”
Biters: *SNIFF* “The aroma is most pleasing :)”
@@Duggy22 i was curious to taste it...
"The professor said that the coal was to be ignited and the ores inhaled"
The biters don't have lungs to get cancer in... maybe I don't leave enough gibs to figure out their anatomy
@@Streetcleanergaming bugs still breathe just differently
Instruction unclear, biters got nuked.
Eh, that works too.
Yes
pollution is a drug for the bugs that they can sell to each other, this also allows them to read ancient Chinese texts about warfare. Love it thank you
This one is worth more than the rocket
My theory is that they love the pollution, but they're simply not that smart. They're heading into your base because that's where the pollution is. They knock down polluting buildings, hoping to find more pollutants inside, not realizing that they're killing their golden goose.
I find this more in line with possibility
Animals in the real world actually do this.. like cats or dogs attacking their automated food dispenser when it runs out of food expecting more to be in it.
It all depends if you see the biters as smart or dumb
THIS. wdym there is no more pollution in this building? IT JUST CAME OUT CARL
the expanse protomolecule moment
Installs 100,000 solar panels, 10,000 beacons, and 50,000 MK3 efficiency modules + super-efficient nuclear power. Going green, no more brownies for the biters.
Haha yeah, actually when I played with high biter settings, I used efficiency right when I unlocked it and hilariously, pretty much 0 biter attacks until I started uh, using artillery on them.
@@Alavaria death from above
Mk3 efficiency is so expensive in terms of upfront pollution but eventually buys you a lot of space and time
Peaceful ending
@@Alavaria when i started playing i thought that was the idea, to keep low a low pollution and i rarely ever got attacked doing that. typically only did because I had expanding turned on and those groups sent to expand would attack me or nests would pop up in areas I had already cleared.. so i expanded more to prevent their expansion which caused me to pollute more..an endless cycle more or less especially when your mines run dry. I had just gotten to producing mortars and using them after converting from a spaghetti base to a main hub but felt no desire to expand or fight anymore.. I was highly addicted to factorio for a short while racking up well over 200 hours it was fun while it lasted
I'm afraid that you have completely misunderstood what the biters _are._ They aren't a native species, but, instead, a Terran terraforming tool designed to process all atmospheric gases that aren't conducive to human health. (As MICROorganisms are all too readily mutated into something dangerous, MACROorganisms were designed, as they don't tend to mutate and are _infinitely_ easier to find and get rid of once the job is done.)
The crash site was chosen because it is one of the original seeding sites and so has been active long enough that the biters in the area devolved and natually died out in that area.
As pollution is produced, it reactivates the biter network, which starts re-evolving to achieve its original state of efficiency.
The reason that biters are so easy to kill is because they are supposed to be; once terraforming is complete and the biters have natually devolved, aerial bombardment of the few remaining nests and tightly-packed mobs of biters with a potent-but-completely-biodegradable pesticide allows for easy cleanup.
...except terraforming *_isn't_* complete, most of the biters *_haven't_* devolved, and you *_don't_* have the pesticide available to you. Oops; sucks to be you!
Oh, well, that makes me feel better about polluting some alien planet knowing that after I leave the biters might eventually find a chink in the defenses (or I could make one), then they'll tear down the base and it'll be all nice and clean when they're done.
... I like this.
thats soo fucking cool is that real lore?
@@nicuciocan-wd40 "thats soo fucking cool is that real lore?"
It bloddy well should be!
Yeah, that sounds about right. Pretty tight theory.
Ive had to re-load older saves and straight up disable the mod, fix the defenses, and then enable it again because of how many times my base, even in late middle game with Krastorio and Space Exploration has absolutly demolished my factory lmao
@@coreytaylor5386 playing rampant with SEK2 is another level of masochism
This is just some food for thought -
I put it to you that, despite various claims by random people, the biters are *NOT* a peaceful species.
Not only is this never said by the game, there is evidence within the game to directly contradict it. I can't tell you how many times I have seen biters attacking rocks and trees. There is also no remaining land based wildlife on the whole planet. They will also aggressively attack you on sight, even if you have never polluted in any way at all. Even if they're not defending one of their nests but just migrating. Even if you have never fired a single shot in anger.
I put it to anyone who reads this that they're actually a bioweapon. An unknown party released them onto the planet for an unknown reason and they wiped out everything that moved. You just happen to be unlucky enough to have crash landed there.
Personally, I'm blaming Weyland Yutani.
I like the theory that they are meant to process pollution better, since they are so easy to kill
I would go with this hypothesis, or that they just won the genetic lottery and managed to basically wipe out all wildlife, then proceeded to devolve to more efficient forms as a result of overpopulation and no compelling threats. As a threat emerges, hives once more produce specialized units to fight that threat while avoiding sending out squishier units. The fact that a captured hive will always spawn a behemoth upon spoiling, and that you can get many eggs implies that they are inhabited. The ones we see are just the harvesters/soldiers.
Anyone who has antagonized ants before and watched will notice they'll start sending bigger ants out
Iunno, they seem to be winning in my worlds...
Your bitters need to learn about 'the tragedy of the commons'
It's a mistake, like a virus doesn't want to kill its host, but it mayt happens by accident
I should've included that
@@24thcenturygamer just get more guns then
This is supported by my death world experience where I was left alone after the factory was mostly destroyed. The biters wandered aimlessly among the destruction seeking the pollution they just destroyed. There was more structures to destroy and I wasn't dead they just stopped.
They wanted the factory to grow just got a bit overzealous.
See, my hypothesis was that the biters were an immune response from a titanic subterranean super-organism. I think I like your take more, though
That's an insanely cool take. Never even considered it till now. Thanks for sharing!
i have the same theory, that explains why there are no other animals on the planet, probably that super-organism eats plant biomeass from the surface, and to have all the biomass, they just killed all the herbivores from the planet.
Explains why more pollution (which could represent antigens) makes the biters more powerful, and larger in numbers.
So basically Planet from Alpha Centauri, I can dig it.
@@reidmock2165 you should read my theory because that is basically what I said
I’ll remember to keep researching new technologies and expanding to keep up with the biters next time I’m on factorio
After getting flame turrets, nothing is an issue anymore got a problem with bugs? Simply turn them into smoke.
@@Streetcleanergaming deathworld marathon, next oil patch is next to large biter nest, evolution 69%
Hey question, what do the biters think when you start going mor green with your factory? The whole planet is addicted and you aren't producing as much as before
In you story: biter would become more angry to convince you to expand polluting stuff
In game: less pollution = less biter attacks
Well they’re completely addicted so I’d think the reduced biter attacks in that case would be due to them undergoing some fairly brutal withdrawals.
@@24thcenturygamer ok lol
i have a world where i never let polution get to bitters
@@24thcenturygamer ummm drug addicts usually do some crazy stuff when they're going through withdrawals though...... wouldn't they attack? great vid, i do like it.
@@calebjohnson4167 I would think the bug brains have fairly short memories. They could go for some more, but with nothing in the air, they don't know which way to go. Until a source or a threat is detected, not much to do but chill out and be huge.
An important addition to Factorio lore and world building. Thank you!
Wube should hire me as story director.
The Rampant mod makes the biters much angrier. They behave like an any colony, explore, actively find and exploit weaknesses in your defenses. If anyone finds the biters too easy, highly recommended.
Plus 1, most fun I've ever had playing factorio, even better than space age. Many, many save resets.
The problem with this conspiracy is the fact that there is no explanation towards time factor of biter evolution, as well as why biters don't attack or do anything about 0 pollution bases. With all that said, I really enjoyed it, and would love to see some more stuff
so this is what too much Factorio does to a person....another one has been lost
I think the biters are no the main form, I think the biters are the subsurface's method of keeping things just the way of keeping things nice. I think the subsurface biter mass needs the nests to respirate, and thus needs to both defend the surface bases and also gets not so happy when pollution comes around, which is why less pollution of going into surface bases means less attacks. another thing. this also explains why biters on the other side of nauvis are evolved, as it is one organism that spans the planet, and also explains why a few biters/spiters are what are used to make new biter bases, as the biter subsurface mass needs the biters to dig to unearth it.
This also explains why biter bases cannot be made past a certain distance from any other biter bases, and this is due to, according to my theory, the need for bases for respiration, and the fact that biter bases are made from biters uprooting the subsurface growths.
@@AaronCoutts-cp6pk The idea that the biter mass also lives underneath your base is horrifying tbh.
@@wanderhillen2435 Yes but that is why you destroy the bases near you.
So that the mass beneath your base dies as it can't respirate.
This is a breakthrough moment in the field of factoriology.
I've always assumed that the reason biters near spawn are so weak is because the ship crash created a local extinction event. Also, pollution is only used to make more biters. They get stronger based on TOTAL pollution made (meaning if you absorbed it all before a biter ate any, they would still get stronger from it). I know this because I tried a challenge world where I tried to make pollution the only way for biters to evolve, but it didnt work like I thought
Ok this explanation is good but I thought of another one that might also be interesting : what if the biters were a fungi-like species with a subterranean network of nerves and nutrients. Nests and spawners would be a defense mechanism against pollution (which damages trees that wouldn't give them the nutrients that they need) and a mean of scouting and expanding (get a few biters out -> go in an unexplored area -> start a new network -> new network merges with main one). To explain how they underpower our defenses at first then get stronger, we can assume that growing nests is extremely costly and therefore the "biter network" needs to adjust to the threat. However our factory expands quickly relative to the nests, so they lag behind. The fungi-like species hypothesis explains how biters evolve evenly no matter the location (nerve and nutrient network) and why they attack (to protect the ecosystem). so to answer the question in the title : the attacks match the threat as closely as possible to minimize the losses in nutrients and energy.
this is just an explanation that I thought was more elegant than the one proposed in this video, it might be less fun but we're talking about factorio, we're not having fun
2:50 Actually that is a common misconception. While the charge over no mans land was indeed dangerous and often caused a good bit of casualties, it was also the one pretty much every army in WW1 solved relatively fast. Because the attacker has the advantage of being able to concentrate their forces, and choose the (perceived) weakest point on the enemy line, this meant taking the first enemy trench line was usually successful, and quite often inflicted as many, or more casualties then the attackers took.
However now your troops are exhausted, running low on supplies, and your artillery, the deadliest weapon of the war, is out of position for the defense of the newly captured trench line. And to move supplies, fresh soldiers, and Artillery up to the new positions, they too have to cross no-mans land. Meanwhile your enemy can attack over relatively unbroken ground and their artillery is in a perfect position to support their attack. So the reason for the stalemate was not that noone managed to cross no-mans land without getting machine gunned to death, but rather because after you crossed the counterattack would be brutal, and surviving it proofed extremely hard.
3:40 tanks really aren't all that effective against trenches, as can be seen in Kursk in WW2 where Germany ran their best tank division into well prepared soviet trenches, and essentially lost them and any chance to regain some measure of initiative. Or look at Ukraine currently. The reason we haven't seen major trench warfare in WW2 was not because of Tanks, but rather because the conditions for trench warfare never really developed.
Absolutely! And indeed, a later war tactic was assault, take the positions, do damage... and withdraw. That kept the casualty ratios "favourable" (ew) to the attacker. You're not going to see any of that in a Hollywood flick, though.
In WW2, defence again had the upper hand. Which is why you had to concentrate so much firepower to have any chance of getting through, which is an extremely complex (and expensive) task... or find a way around. Tanks certainly didn't end trench warfare, but if used fast enough, could prevent it from developing. _If_ you had overwhelming force (and lots of drugs to keep people running without sleep :D ). Trenches were if anything even more effective in WW2 - if you had the time to build them. And of course, the Maginot Line was extremely effective and did exactly what it was planned to do. It didn't stop after WW2 either.
But it's really funny that everyone seems to have their pet black horse of the one thing that finally won WW1. There was no such thing. It was a brutal war of attrition, with unending new developments and counter-developments that kept the balance of power until one side was utterly drained and couldn't really keep fighting anymore. It wasn't air power, it wasn't tanks, it wasn't gas, it wasn't better logistics, it wasn't new tactics or strategies - though _not_ adopting all of those when the enemy did _would_ have been fatal, of course!
rather, trench warfare is still a thing today, we just understand it's weaknesses as a strategy better than we did 100 years ago and it's no longer as good as it was then.
Fish, you ask? We are the fish, there is not a single one human being on the surface of the Nauvis. Player is just a humanoid aquarium full of sentient fish. You are not healing with fish, you just replace a dead one.
this has... interesting implications for spidertrons
"All warfare is based" (c) Sun Tzu
The real answer is that they are like the zerg. Any hive can migrate and create a new hive cluster. The evolution isn't because of the pollution, it's because they respond to the threat that is you. Since the biters have no difference between colonies, they all undergo the same evolution as the ones in contact with the pollution originally, and likely share a hivemind that can convey the need to change.
7:10 Sun Tzu said: "All warfare is based"
2:32 By the end of the war the British forces under Haig were using combined armed tactics that we consider as “modern”, but these came in steps by refining on the successes of prior attempts.
Some of the bloodiest tactics came from failures Haig had no control over, such as faulty shells making artillery barrage ineffective at clearing wire for example.
Another fascinating point was the defender’s advantage being beyond just firepower, major troop movements came via trains so they needed pre-existing infrastructure. Communication was at best cable based and prone to severance, or even limited to runners/animals.
My headcanon is that your ship blew up so hard when it crashed that it significantly weakened biters in a wide area near your start, so the closer the biters are to the ship, the weaker they are. Then they just try to slowly regain strength. And the rest of the planet is just fully evolved biters.
“I’ve never seen nests interact”
Literally only 2 minutes and 12 seconds later:
“BITER SOCIETY”
They don’t physically interact, but they have SMS obviously.
@@24thcenturygamer oh man, didnt even think about that thanks for explaining!
Dark and dystopian, just as it should be.
This is why I integrate biter nests directly in my factory as natural preserves sucking up all that juicy pollution from within but their jealous brethren still yearn to join the free housing program and relentlessly come knocking at the factory's doors.
My man has a zoo💀
@@Мыслитель-ы9ф The person of unidentified gender sure does :)
@@Soken50Women do NOT play factorio
@@bones._ They do, at least one of them even posts videos of herself playing it.
Sorry to shatter your tiny misogynistic worldview.
@@Soken50 I refuse to believe this
So what you're trying to say is that your character in the game is British, the biters are Chinese, and the game is set in 1839?
Yes, watching a history video on WW1 warfare tactics is exactly what I expected when I clicked on this video.
Fun hypothesis, but doesn't fit in with the fact that biter density increases the further away from your crash site you go. One would assume they would gather round to consume it if they liked it so much.
IIRC the game says that biters make new nests by sending out some biters from existing nests to create one. That could explain why a) nests only form close enough to others, and b) evolved biters carry their genes to new nests outside the pollution cloud.
good video in the middle of nowhere i didnt realise it was 60 views 200 subscribers until i glanced like 8 minutes in
The level of tomfoolery I aim for.
This is one of the most thought out ideas I've seen behind biters. Someone at Wube hire this man stat
3:21 Technically the players artillery caN HAVE MOBILITY IF IT IS TRAIN BASED
Ah true I forgot about that. You’re the first one to notice that and point it out.
@@24thcenturygamer you... used train based artillery in your video lmao
Yeah that was recorded after I put the text note in criticising my own script.
As fun as that conspiracy is lol, it's more likely the biters are both gestalt & the pollution is triggering them to start birthing fighter drones.
This is the greatest factorio video I've watched
A brilliant documentary about the terrifying lore hidden deep in Factorio. I salute you, sir. Keep spreading the truth!
i have never thought of it like this, i like this interpretation more honestly.
7:24 “this is a video game and the devs made it that way for gameplay reasons, not considering lore impacts”
would have been a banger of an ending
This is absurd and I love it. Thou hath earned thy self a sub!
If they would just ask nicely, we would expand even more.
One thing's for sure.. The factory must grow.
I always thought that the biter behavior was tied to forest fires. With the state of the planet before our arrival, forest fires are the closest thing to the conditions that induce biter attacks. So I assumed that biter attacks are a behavior that has evolved to halt and extinguish forest fires. When they breach the walls, they simply try to get to the burning trees; and when they attack the assemblers, they just try to unearth the smoldering tree trunks.
I haven't figured out why needing to react to forest fires would make the biters evolve, though. And why evolving makes the biters much less susceptible to bullet wounds, but only marginally less susceptible to fire.
You misunderstood we are doing the RDA 2's landing on Pandora in Avatar the way of the water, wipping an circle around our landing spot something goes wrong we crush and wake up after some time as the Biters have already taken some ground back from the cricle but at less evolved state.
Please warn for 2.0 spoilers, I skipped the new enemy FFF because I didn’t want to know…
For less than 500 subs, this is very high quality. Excited to see what you make in the future mate 🤙
I enjoyed that plot twist but would have loved some looking at the behaviour from the code side of things. Like were those bases upgraded because you revealed them and the general biter difficulty increased (i presume thats how it would work) or do all biter bases upgrade to a general difficulty?
Surprisingly comprehensive
"Why do biters always lose?"
"Why do the planes that come back from the war have so many bullet holes in the wings?"
"Why do the biters always lose?"
Because of the indomitable human spirit
@@ViolaDragon621yes, humanity first!
I strongly agree with the video conclusion. From a game design perspective, the biters also represent a way for the developers to induce motivation in the player to expand, since escalating attacks require escalating production and research as you described!
This is a ridiculously hilarious take on Factorio! Love it!
Great scott what a video! My mind is blown...
As someone currently going thru the tutorial, they do NOT always lose 😭
My dream game is Factorio with different planets that have different kind of threats in them. Like biters, or an evolving flesh hivemind or a rival faction of factory builders or an Automaton Super AI that requires you to be quick and change up your defense often.
Factorio is getring a dlc very soon with different planets with crazy things on them.
Yeah. See the nightmare sequence at around 4mins for an example.
Sun Tzu references in Factorio? I would never have thought about it.
was hoping at some point you would go the "planet has a anti reaction like a immune system, and the biters react to the toxic intruder and his signals, so you and the pollution. (therefore all are evolving equally since they all are just the planets way of dealing with intrusion)" route, but this is quite the theory as well.
This explains everything, where is my cork board mod,… I’m going to need an entire factory devoted to producing red string
mmm, saffron, my favorite flavor of string
This is my new favorite fan theory.
This video is unhinged, and I am extremely down for it.
":The Factory must grow." - Some Biter, probably
What a nice idea. Really enjoyed it. Everyone plays into each others addiction. :P
On a side note: If you are actually bored of the vanilla-behaviour of biters, check the modpage of Factorio. There are tools, that will make your life a living hell: Varying resistances for biters. No more wall of napalm death, laser immune once, ect. Introducing new attack patterns to the biter AI. There are ways.
And thats why all the fish serve as spidertrons.
Finally. Now it all makes sense
with enemy expansion turned on, biters can actually expand their territory right next to your wall, spawning a behemoth worm that outranges your defences. This is more common on deathworlds however, but that could be considered offensive artillery.
"so long and thanks for all the fish" were, if I remember correctly, the last words of the dolphins who repeatedly tried to warn us about the upcoming apocalypse before finally leaving the planet. (HHGTTG)
this is an awesome perspective. you sir have earned my subscription
To answer the title's question, flame turrets. Those things are godly
Half the time most of the biters are dead from the lasers and uranium bullets before the flames even hit the ground. Its only the absolutely massive attacks where they properly get used
@@24thcenturygamer Oh yeah sorry I was mostly just joking lol, video is much more interesting than my joke reply.
I think it's a hat tip to this amazing xenobiology sci-fi scenario:
Unintelligent alien planet fauna with a unique evolutionary defensive mechanism exists in the form of harmless (or low-harmful) creatures, that usually form a symbiotic relationship with each other or even an entire hivemind. However, as soon as a threat that risks changing their preferred environmental balance emerges (e.g.: external species invades and tries to dominate over it) the local fauna collectively reacts by rapidly evolving and complicating itself until reaching the state that can eliminate such a threat. It does not just mean getting stronger and tougher but also means becoming more complex and even sapient. Only when the threat is erased, does the fauna shift back to its usual weak and unconscious state. Until then, it won’t stop the rise to its apex form.
Pollution doesn’t cause the "mutations" of the hivers. Surely, it is an aggravator, that forces locals to attack its sources (because bugs literally “don’t like it”), but the real cause for their rapid evolution is your turrets that kill their numbers. Correct, the more biters die, the more resources and attention to the threat the hivemind pays (the Earth ants have a similar instinct: when one of them suddenly dies, its body starts producing special pheromones that naturally draw even more ants to the area to deal with a potential threat). Hence, when the hivemind realizes you are not just a common roaming predator but rather a dangerous "competitor" and a potential environmental crisis, it keeps progressing and evolving on a broader scale activating all its nexuses around the planet to focus on your demise by spamming the caste of constantly upgrading heavy warriors, which would never be created if you didn't show up.
Such an amazing speculative biology feature may be found in these books and movies:
Harry Harrison - Deathworld
Clifford D. Simak - The World That Couldn't Be
Alan Dean Foster - Sentenced to Prism
Cameron's "Avatar" movie (was partially based on “Harry Harrison - Deathworld”)
The "Hive" episode in "Love, Death & Robots” series.
My theory is that all the nests are connected to each other under ground like mold it's why they all simultaneously have the same evolution and why the nests seem to just pop out of the ground a certain distance from other nests without anything having to go there and build it.
Biters: The Factory must grow!
Player: The Factory must grow!
The Factory: ...
what is the name of the mod in 4:12 ?
I regret to inform you that this is part of the upcoming DLC. We’re all doomed.
@@24thcenturygamer No way ;-;. ig devs want us to take more serious against the enemy in DLC ig..
Engineer: So long and thanks for the fish.
While the Bitter get closer to your Factory, the drugs intensity is higher than ever, so they need to come closer and munch on anything that stays on their way.
I always just use an army of spidertrons to clear them out, and never make any turrets or walls
"Jesse, we need to grow the factory."
If we could understand biter language, we'd hear them saying, "Hey man, spare some change?"
I take exception to your comment about the tank not being useful. It is a super weapon in the early game. But yeah once you get to later game, the spider with legs and shields mixed with your personal lasers in your suit is basically invincible.
Damn. This is some real deep shit
After finishing the video, i now understand the British and Chinese references, it was genius
You've never seen me play with biters on
"Stop quoting me!" ~Sun Tzu
It's quite simple really - God made MAN in HIS image, not biters
Haig's blunder was that he and Sun Tzu never really understood the concept of force multipliers.†
Sun Tzu is forgivable because Art of War was written at a time when differential equations, the number zero and negative numbers hadn't been invented yet.‡
Haig's is less forgivable. He did have advisers who understood the mathematics of war. Yet Haig's strategy in the Somme amounted to little better than that of a Stone Age general from the caves of Cro-Magnon: "big army big, small army small, big army win, what be machine gun?"
† - No. 21st century reinterpretations of the Art of War do not count. If he didn't say force multipliers, he didn't talk about force multipliers.
‡ - [dubious - discuss]. The ancient Chinese Maths textbook "Nine chapters on mathematical art" dates to the 2nd Century AD, i.e. 600 years after Sun Tzu. But the Nine chapters incorporates knowledge of Chinese maths dating back to 1000 BC. And chinese abacuses existed contemporary to Sun Tzu (just). You need zero to understand them[citation needed].
It makes sense they are bad at war since it doesent seem like they have any other enemies on the planet, when we get there the little bitters arent even combat ready, they look like they gnaw on trees
Well, this was quality content!
i always wondered about that, this makes sense.
The main reason trench warfare was so brutal was because until the introduction of tanks, the only way to win trench warfare was to attack your enemy with as much force before they dug in further. If the Biters were true WW1 enthusiasts, they should make a beeline to the crashed ship with as much force as soon as possible to defeat you before you dig in and fortify your position. However, once you are dug in they still have to keep the pressure up with mass assaults that are likely to prove ineffective, as while they may lack offensive capability the player certainly won't for long. The Biters cannot afford to just fortify their position around the player's base as not only does that allow the player to get stronger, but the player's pollution will reach the Biters regardless of how well fortified a wall of Biter nests are
If you dont expand fast enough though, they DO destroy your factory to the last furnace. The evolution further out could be explained by supposing biters are divided into factions and the nests do infight, we just dont see it, therefore tye evolved biters spread outwards and dominate the small ones due to natural selection.
Amazing content! keep it up!
"why the biters always lose in factorio" man i must be a biter
My eyes are opened and my belts are spaghettied
I want a mod scenario thats similar to Brave New World, but you play as biters trying to take out the factory builder instead of Sentient Robots, where you outpace the factory builder by absorbing as much pollution as possible to evolve faster.
I fully expect to see a space age version of this or i will be let down.