kyranf
commented
7 years ago The intention of the healing factor was to represent personal shields (but weak ones) that were meant to recharge slowly between battles, and it kind of works but you are right it probably needs tuning.
There's an issue with the way the game is scaled too - because the technology of the player is independent of the biter evolution, a player can turtle/play it safe all the way until terminators and then unleash them on very un-evolved biters, and literally wipe the map before the evolution catches up to provide large biters/spitters and of course, behemoths and massive bases of large worms are the only real threat to terminators.
Because factorio is an unlimited resource game, at SOME point, the player will eventually get to the point where anything is 'cheap' and that they can mass produce so many terminators that they can sprinkle them like seasoning on a fine Italian pasta. So I guess we need to find the balance for mid-game and late-game tech, and somehow relate that to evolution %.
What some players get caught without their guard up is letting loose a whole bunch of battle droids and their evolution % cranks up significantly in response to the squads killing them, and then suddenly large biters/spitters rock up and trash the player's army instantly and then go steamroll the player's base because they were only dealing with small/mediums before they sent out the troops.
That's an interesting aspect to using the mod, and it's really hard to balance that. If I could do automated tests I could have a 'known' biter base at various % evolution and send known squads of known unit types and various levels of upgrades and try to plot the effectiveness and do some balancing on real data.
petergaultney
One thing that makes me enjoy mid-game Robot Army a little less is that the Terminator droids are just way too strong against biters. Whereas I can unleash two squads of 50 Battle Droids and they'll barely make it through two standard-sized biter colonies, a single squad of 25 Terminators will chew through 20-30 bases before being extinguished.
One change I've made in my own version is to turn their healing factor down to 0. It seems to me that the biters are unfairly deprived of nearly all the damage they've done, since the Terminator droids will pretty much heal all the way between battles. At least with a 0 healing factor, the biters can chip away at them over time.
In previous games, even the end game biters did nothing, really, to stop the march of my Terminators.
One of the things I like best about the idea of Robot Army is that it provides an automated method of keeping the biters at bay, while also providing a gameplay-enhancing resource sink and logistics issue (how do I keep droids flowing to my outposts along with repair packs, etc.?). But Terminators seem to me to wipe out all of that extra complexity by the midgame. Yes, they're super expensive. But by the time I can start using them, I should have enough economy to keep producing them consistently, if not quickly.