Enemy difficulty and evolution, how difficult does it get?

[BoogieMan]

I'm new to the game, and I'm having fun, but I have some questions about the enemies.

I'm about 16 hours in on my first map, and the bugs haven't been much a problem. There is a large forest on the side of my base and I swapped to full solar/accumulator early on which is probably part of why it hasn't been difficult. I know they evolve as they consume pollution and time passes, but on the default settings on what rough time table do they become more dangerous?

I know the focus of the game is building, but I do like the extra need to focus on the defense and offense. There are a lot of goodies still to research that appear focused on dealing with the bugs, but even at 16 hours in, there haven't been any attacks that weren't immediately cut down.

Can anyone suggest some tweaks to the enemy settings that might be more along what I am looking for, assuming that the default settings won't get crazy more difficult later on that gives you a bit more pressure, but doesn't make them zerg rush you?

[FourGreenFields]

According to the Wiki it's actually just the global polution, no matter whether it reaches their spawners or not.

If you're playing on default settings and want stronger bugs, go level their spawners. Because by default killing their spawners gives them a pretty noticable evolution boost.

[Purpleganja]

It's hard to gauge, because it depends on many factors like the map (forest, water, choke points etc) and your speed and efficiency in the game.

You can get punished if you try to grow your base too big faster than developing defenses.

There are also difficulty steps that can surprise you like when behemoths start to appear when you were not expecting them.

I would suggest you to try at least deathworld if you like the combat aspect of the game. Default will get ridiculously easy once you teched up. biters will cease to evolve at a point while you can keep teching up infinitely after launching rockets.

My current tweak that i like is a "wetland" with ressources set to railworld on deathworld marathon and swap time evolution with pollution evolution and set ennemy pollution absorbtion to 25%. This makes you think twice about what you really need and forces heavy use of low tech. It takes a lot of time before doing anything big so patience is required.

[Fel]

The best resource as a basis for answering is this page:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies

Evolution goes from 0 to 1 (or 0% to 100% if you prefer percentages).
It goes up by 0.000004 per second (with default settings and assuming 30 UPS), 0.0000009 per pollution your factory produced and by 0.002 per spawner destroyed.
Which factor is going to matter more depends on your map and on how you play, which also means that the time it takes to reach the maximum value varies greatly as well (with a factory that makes a lot of pollution and a player that hunts a lot of spawners it can go up ridiculously fast).

Evolution controls what enemies can be spawned by spawners, from 0 to 0.2 you will only see small bitters, but after that you wil start to also see some medium bitters and small spitters, then the small will decrease in proportion and the medium will be more numerous, large bitters and medium spitters will start showing up, and it will continue until you reach the maximum value and you will see some medium bitters/spitters, a lot of large and a decent amount of behemot.


How difficult it gets also depends a lot on you, if you research the military technologies you can even outspeed their evolution and get fully geared into a nearly invincible state and defenses that can hold off massive waves of enemies, but if you started the map with a lot more nests and/or didn't really keep up in term of military research you can quickly get overwhelmed when medium spitters start showing up.

If you want to be challenged by the enemies a lot, you can look at how the "death world" preset is made, with higher frequency and size for enemy bases, smaller starting area and higher values for time and pollution factors, any of these can increase the threat.
If you are playing in 0.17, you can also tweak enemy expansion, longer distance, bigger groups, smaller cooldown, all of those will mean a lot more potential bases (or bigger ones for the group size) that can creep up towards your base and end up in your pollution cloud, sending waves to destroy you.

The funny thing is that usually new players end up asking the exact opposite, "they are attacking nonstop and I can't keep up, they just started sending blue ones and the red ones are also more and more numerous, how do you not die from the constant waves that destroy your walls and turrets?"