Been trying out the rampant mod and anyone else find the factions just boring?

[Gorem]

Just finished a rampant run with factions, tried using armoured biters as well but I see the faction nests overwrote all normal nests so they didn't spawn.

But I am just a bit confused by the "factions" aspect, because it took 48 hours of inside the game time before I saw nests other then green or white. Then all that spawned was just fire and some spawner spitters. Both again, still couldn't get past a simple wall of just shotgun turrets, some laser turrets and flamethrowers. I didn't even need to use arsenals upgraded towers.

Like yes it required a huge setup of defence but I could literally afk making as much pollution as possible in my walls before sending the rocket off and never touching my defence line once. I just expected rampant to be harder but factions makes rampant too easy but the nests are so tanky that expanding just takes forever and tedious.

I have tried Natural evolution but that seems to take it to another extreme and you can die before you even manage to setup a small defence wall.

The balance just seems a bit... bad when trying to make the game harder. Rampant factions feels like it needs an update because as it stands, its just boring.

[Fel]

Balance for enemies in this game is incredibly hard to do because the "right" balance will end up being quite different for each player depending on how they play.
Some players want enemies that are so strong that they require quite a lot of investment into weaponry and military technologies, some just want the enemies to be a bit tougher than vanilla, some just want more variety so it's not the same old defense that always works for everything.


For Rampant, a lot of things are disabled by default and you need to go into the settings for the mod to change what the mod does.
It has a rather large amount of options, including enemies that can fly for example, but it isn't necessarily simple to know what you would want.

The basic idea behind rampant is to give a variety of tools to the player to tailor the enemies to what they prefer, including stuff like them trying to figure out weak spots in your defenses and such.
But it's not like it is necessarily the best mod for everyone, it's just the most extensive one that can fit a variety of players.

[Avloren]

Originally posted by Gorem:

I have tried Natural evolution but that seems to take it to another extreme and you can die before you even manage to setup a small defence wall.

I can't say much about Rampant, I tried it a couple times and was unimpressed - I much prefer the variety and challenge Natural Evolution offers. As for NE: if you otherwise like the mod and the only problem you have with it is getting past the early game, that's pretty easy to fix with the settings when you're starting a new game. Cranking up the 'starting area' setting will give you a nice breather in the beginning, you'll have hours to establish basic production and defenses before the biters find you. You may also want to reroll the map a few times until the preview shows oil nearby. Finally consider reducing the evolution rate slightly, if you find yourself surviving to the mid-game but the biter evolution is outpacing your tech progression (evolved biters get a lot nastier a lot faster in NE than vanilla).

[Hedning]

Sounds like they are evolving too slowly. Couldn't you just increase the evolution factor?
Or maybe it is the modded weapons that are op, you could try with only vanilla weapons.

[puschit]

As Fel said, you need to experiment with the settings of Rampant. You can enable and disable eacht biter faction individually and even set percentages for spawning probabilities.
And even then games can turn out that way or another. A faction might get killed off early on or be blocked by regular biters, but it might also have enough room to take over. And while some factions are just slight variations of the usual ones with different resistances, there are some that will put you on the hoop, for example those flying ones.

Another thing is that, as with vanilla biters, it's a game of thresholds. If you are good enough to keep a certain pace, biters will never be a problem. But once you fall behind, you'll start a downward spiral.
Last time I ran Rampant I more or less lost that race. Everything looked fine for quite some time but I was kindof lazy after securing oil and setting up flamethrowers, fiddled around too much, worked on planting trees with another mod, stuff like that. After a while attacks began to intensify. Nothing I couldn't deal with but when I wanted to scale things up, I found myself helmed in. I had trouble expanding beyond my first expansion, mostly because of one faction that expanded the most (those with the lightning like attacks, you can't dodge that). Dealing with attacks was getting more and more time consuming, clearing nests triggered huge waves of counterattacks (and with Rampant they might attack at different places). That tied me up, so everything slowed down even more. At some point I decided to rush for arty. The last save I have has the arty completed but it was too late - I just can't fire it without being overrun by counterattacks.
With better time management I might have prevailed, but I learned to respect Rampant.

[Gorem]

Doing a new run:

So I see turning factions off actually gives a much better experience. Bugs are able to finally destroy walls again which is nice, good balance. I have armoured biters now too showing up.

And then of course once you are strong enough that bugs are just an annoyance to expanding the factory the nests are not giant health tank pools that only die from ramming into them. Seems like the first faction needs buffs, and well the nests need to be nerfed.

[Skabonious]

The issue with Rampant is that it causes nests to not give any points in Wave Defense mode.

[Fel]

That could probably be changed by modding the wave defense mode itself, but for most mods they are meant to be used with freeplay and are neither tested nor balanced for other modes (unless they specifically mention it).