exact way pollution and evolution work?

[Name Lips]

Pollution hits a nest. It starts spawning biters to come attack me. Slowly it evolves and starts spawning tougher and tougher aliens.

Is it JUST that nest that's evolving? Do biter nests out of range of my pollution stay low-level, with simple, easy-to-kill biters?

What I'm trying to decide is if it's worth it to go out and kill the biter nests within my pollution cloud before they evolve, while they're still low-level and easy to destroy. Will that keep the higher-tier biters from ever attacking me?

[!?!]

Evolution is a global thing affected my many factors like global pollution created by your base, time and the number of biter nests you destroyed.

[Muffinman]

The nests absorb the pollution. The more pollution they absorb, the more it adds to the evolution factor. Destroying biters and nests also add to the evolution factor. If you do nothing, game time adds to the evolution factor.

Thus, you are working against the clock. Damn if you do, and damn if you don't.

If you do nothing, I rememeber it took 2.5 days or something of leaving the game running to get close to evolution factor 1. I forgot the formula though and is not in a place where I can look it up to compute the exact time.

[Name Lips]

I see. And pollution... does it spread out forever? I mean, for example, if my factory is a certain size and I don't build any more, does the pollution cloud grow to a certain size and then stop? Or would even a small factory eventually accumulate enough pollution to cover a huge area?

[Muffinman]

Land tiles absorbs pollution over time. So do trees. So your pollution will dissipate given time if you stop polluting. The amount absorbed is very small, a thousand times smaller than can be produced...well if you produce 1 per tick...you can produce much much more than that.

[Muh macht die Kuh]

i also have the feeling that the amount per attack-wave is increasing with time

[Muffinman]

That is because your pollution is encompassing more biter nests. They get more angry the higher the evolution factor. They produce more nests, which spawn more biters, which produce more nests, which absorbs more pollution. It's a positive feedback.

[Britty mitty]

In regatds to pollution it works roughly like this:

First it accumilates in a grid and once it hits a certain point, it spreads in a plus formation (basiclaly the grids to the left and right and top of bototm of a grid) and it will continue this cycle until obvously there isn't enough pollution to continue spreading.

Now as Muffinman also stated, tiles absorb pollution, but they do it at a differnet rate:

Water has the highest pollution absorpion, really slowing its spread down, next comes grass land with forests, which have a fairly decent rate of aborption, dirt type tiles are..meh reallly, and finally, desert tiles have the lowest absorption and thus you'll see it spread across a desert at a alarming rate.

2 side points, first, if you pave over a tile with stone or concrete, that tile will no longer absorb pollution.

Secondly, over time pollution will erode forests and grassland into desert tiles, which will cuase pollution to then spread more rapidly since less of it is being absorbed, i think its something like 5 hours or more before your grasstiles start turning, might have to go search this up.

[Kris]

What I find strange - I started my factory some 20 hours ago, build all the ovens for iron, stone copper, evolved to the second level(still running on coal). Had as well the steam generators.

So, I understand that creates a lot of pollution. Earlier industrial age pollution. BUT, yes a big BUT, then I go "green", have like 400 solar panel and 320 accumulators, running my entire factory green. All ovens now electric powered by solar power. How can it be that the pollution cloud is still spreading??

Seems not really realistic to me.

Then the aliens - I always thought if I kill the nests which are just not yet inside the pollution cloud it would be enough. What I read here it seems it is quiet useless what I am doing by killing this nests?!

Especially, sometimes you just need time in this game, production gets more and more complicated(e.g. try to implement the Research potion 3 but it needs tons of "ingridients" and my oil plant is far from the main base, no way to carry oil in big amounts by train(the proper car is missing for raw oil), so, creating things which needs oil and the side products is getting very complicated. AND then you need to fight off the biters.

Robots would help, but then again there is the oil and research problem. How do you guys play, have the settings that the biters never attack before you do not attack them(how does that work, is it just nest by nest or does it mean if I attack 1 nest from this time on all biters may attack me on sight??

Thanks! On some level this game starts to get very "micro managy"... In my opinion the pollution simply spreads to fast and should even to start to reduce once you go fully "green".

[Name Lips]

Kris, it sounds like what they're saying is that eventually your pollution cloud will stop, when it has encountered enough water/grass/trees to absorb it. But it's difficult to tell how far the spread will be for your particular factory.

You seem to be making green power, but smelters make a lot of pollution too, and they're hard to do without. Even assemblers make pollution.

So it's not much consolation... but your pollution cloud would be spreading even FURTHER if you also had dirty power. So while it might not be obvious, your efforts have probably reduced the speed at which the biters are evolving, giving you breathing room you aren't aware you have.

[Kris]

Hi, yes, I see it spreads slower but not sure if I hunt down now the surrounding nests and THEN try to solve my logistics problem or the other way around.

Would be great as well to have the ability to seed out wood so new pollution blocks could grow...

[Name Lips]

As far as nests in the pollution cloud go... there's pros and cons to cleaning them out. Obviously they're sending swarms at you, and the pollution they're sucking up is increasing the evolution rate. But killing them also increases the evolution rate. I'm not sure which is worse.

[Nellvan]

Another thing to consider : The amount of pollution from production depends on electricity consumption.

1 assembler full of speed modules (producing as fast as 3 assemblers without modules) : 6.84 pollution
Those 3 assembler without modules : 5.4 pollution
Put efficiency modules into those 3 : 1.08 pollution
(thats for lvl 3 assembler and modules)

So if you want to go green all the way, use more machines but put efficency modules into them.

[Muffinman]

It "should" take you no more than 5-6 hours to get up to speed on research and production to out pace the advancing evolution factor. If you are not and are behind, you can turret creep until factor 0.8, after which behemoths will be out in numbers and must be dealt with using fire. Laser will work but behemoths will usually out number your lasers or you might be having grid problem.

Truth be told, if it takes you longer than 12 hours to get the hang of things, you should play on peaceful until you master the game and can take some heat from the biters. Peaceful mode means they won't touch you unless you shoot them. They will still evolve from absorbing pollution but they will leave you alone.

Killing biters adds less to the evolution factor than killing nests. But you must kill nests eventually. There is no way around it. The devs had long ago floated the idea of you befriending the biters, but I highly doubt that idea will come around any time soon....maybe as a DLC.

[Kris]

@Nellvan: I went good till all the "blue" Research came up. I find blue Potions very complicated to produce, especially if fighting off biters and keep always an eye on the factory(miners, etc.). "Blue" seems overly complicated, especially I still have the classic factory with belts and on this level I think you start to need the resource robot logistics as well.

@Muffinman - see above. It went good so far, but with all green/red research done I am hitting some wall at the moment... don't really know how to "Tacle" that problem...

[Muffinman]

You can produce blue easily enough. It's just adding oil to the red/green production. Since you need oil any way, you should start using the flamer turret. They are very very good at keeping biters at bay.

You don't need robots to automate blue. It can be done neatly with belts.