Suggestions for enemy settings for a noob

[Boehmann]

Hi folks! I am fairly new to factorio. Even though I have about 50 hrs ingame, a lot of it is idling time, and I had a few restarts, so I haven´t got deep inside the game yet. I am trying to figure out a beginner friendly setting about enemies but the options does confuse me a bit. I would like to have a setting where biters will be active and will attack me, but the default settings are a bit to frustrating for me at the moment, as I am still learning basics. I don´t want to go peaceful mode and I dont want to turn anything off completely. So, does anybody have a suggestion for settings that will allow me to experience biter attacks but in a pace were I still have time to actually figure out designs and (trying to) build my factory? I know that personal choices matters, and I dont expect a 100% recipie, but just some suggestions to what I should change to make challenge with enemies a bit easier without missing anything

[Fel]

Disable expansion and divide by 2 the amount and frequency of nests, on top of making the starting area as big as possible.
This will give you a lot of room for the early game without attacks, there will be less (and smaller) nests and they will not expand so when you destroy one it's one spawner for good.

[Boehmann]

Thank you - I will try that

[luziferius]

Disabling biter expansion has one drawback: Once you cleared enough land, you basically don’t need defenses. Just some turrets at ore mines to defend against pollution-triggered attachs, but no large perimeter defense is needed.

As an alternative, you can tweak some other settings than the already suggested ones:
For example, increase pollution absorbtion by trees, ground tiles and water and decrease the pollution spreading. This will reduce the number of pollution-triggered attacks, as more is absorbed and less is spread out to biter nests.

Increase the minimal time between enemy expansions and reduce the expansion range. This will slow down the biter spreading and cause them to advance less towards your base.

Reduce the expansion group size, so that expansion groups themselves are easier to defeat.

Decrease the evolution factors a bit. Reducing the time factor gives you more time to idle around. Reducing the evolution by nest destruction lets you kill more nests before they grow bigger. Reducing evolution by pollution causes them to absorb more pollution before growing bigger.

But don’t disable evolution, as that makes biters too easy after the first few military techs.

[Boehmann]

Thank you so very much for your very detailed suggestions. I will fiddle around some more with the settings based on your suggestions. I am a little in doubt about the biter expansion as there is some good argumentation from all of you, but I will make a choice eventually :).

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

Assuming you want achievements enabled, disabling expansion, disabling pollution, put all the sliders to thminimum. I think you can even totally turn biters off so they dont even appear on the map. But that disables many achievements.

[Fel]

That depends on the achievement you want too, the timed achievements ask that you do not lower any of the enemy-related setting or pollution (there was a flaw where you could disable pollution spread and still get all achievements, not sure if it's still there or not).