Do biters get endlessly stronger

[Morendie91]

Title, im like 64 hours into a map and had a pretty strong defense I just spammed and would place artillery everywhere aswell to prevent them from making bases around me, and my defenses always had no trouble wiping out huge swarms, even behemoth biters. But man its like all the sudden they went up a few levels and randomly broke into my base, skipped half my base, darted to the nuclear reactors and made a boom lol.

[Jupiter3927]

Biters only spawn up to behemoth size with probabilities determined by the evolution factor, somewhere between 0 and 1.
You can view this and the probabilities by hovering your mouse over a biter/spitter spawner.

The size of their raiding party will grow with each raid.
This can put the squeeze on your defenses, but flamethrowers are an excellent counter.

Max strength but unlimited amount pretty much.

[Morendie91]

Ive been to behemoth size for a while and pretty large swarms, but its like there durability took a decent sudden upgrade, so my weapons dont seem to be doing as much damage

[Jupiter3927]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=923435963
Tanks are amazing until the big behemoth biters start showing up.
They're basically bullet sponges that hit really hard.

[Nonotorious]

Upgrade your flamethrowers, the fire patches do serious damage to groups.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Morendie91:

Ive been to behemoth size for a while and pretty large swarms, but its like there durability took a decent sudden upgrade, so my weapons dont seem to be doing as much damage

Once you're to behemoths they don't get any more durable. However, The size of an attack group can still increase. The more pollution they're absorbing, the larger attack groups get. A big enough attack group (Or repeated attacks in short intervals on the same place in the wall) will eventually punch a hole in your defenses.

The composition of the attack group also matters. Behemoth Spitters have 1500hp and 30% explosion resistance, but Behemoth Biters have 3000hp, 12/10% explosion resistance and 12/10% physical resistance- Making the behemoth biters FAR tankier than the behemoth spitters. So if you got a particularly biter heavy attack wave, your defenses would struggle as compared to an average wave or spitter heavy wave.

[Morendie91]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by Morendie91:

Ive been to behemoth size for a while and pretty large swarms, but its like there durability took a decent sudden upgrade, so my weapons dont seem to be doing as much damage

Once you're to behemoths they don't get any more durable. However, The size of an attack group can still increase. The more pollution they're absorbing, the larger attack groups get. A big enough attack group (Or repeated attacks in short intervals on the same place in the wall) will eventually punch a hole in your defenses.

The composition of the attack group also matters. Behemoth Spitters have 1500hp and 30% explosion resistance, but Behemoth Biters have 3000hp, 12/10% explosion resistance and 12/10% physical resistance- Making the behemoth biters FAR tankier than the behemoth spitters. So if you got a particularly biter heavy attack wave, your defenses would struggle as compared to an average wave or spitter heavy wave.

Oh I wonder if its the melee Behemoths that are causing me trouble. Been killing the spitter ones for a while, must be the swarming of the bulkier melee ones

[Morendie91]

Originally posted by Nonotorious:

Upgrade your flamethrowers, the fire patches do serious damage to groups.

I use bobs warefare and use mk2 laser turrets, 2 rows, and also use tesla coils from the RA2 tesla coil mob. THose and walls, zap the buggers before they hit the walls. Least until now. I have a uh very massive wide defense of them lol. Time to upgrade hahaha

[shadain597]

Originally posted by Morendie91:

Originally posted by Nonotorious:

Upgrade your flamethrowers, the fire patches do serious damage to groups.

I use bobs warefare and use mk2 laser turrets, 2 rows, and also use tesla coils from the RA2 tesla coil mob. THose and walls, zap the buggers before they hit the walls. Least until now. I have a uh very massive wide defense of them lol. Time to upgrade hahaha

Note that mods can change biter difficulty, including the upper limit for individual biter strength. The advice given by the above posters was based on the assumption you were playing vanilla.

Also, something that hasn't been mentioned yet is that there's a randomized timer for how long the aliens will wait and gather their forces before attacking. It could be that your defenses were more than adequate for an average wait time but not the maximum. Or another possibility is that you researched an artillery range increase and pulled a bunch of retaliatory attacks all at once.

[knighttemplar1960]

Flamethrower turrets are the workhorse of your defense. When you research flammables the bonus is applied to your flamethrower turrets twice once to the turret and once to the fuel (the first research increases damage by 20% but since it is multiplicative the actual bonus is 44%). The bonus is multiplicative rather than additive so the researches are well worthwhile.

Flame throwers do 3 types of damage, ignition damage, ground fire damage, and contact damage.

The vast majority of the damage done by flame throwers is done by ignition damage. When a bug is ignited the ignition damage persists for 30 seconds (or until the bug is dead). Base damage with crude oil is 100/sec so ignition damage will always kill even the toughest bug. The damage bonus just speeds up the eventual death of the ignited bug.

The 2nd damage type is ground fire damage. This is an AOE damage that builds up at the spot where ignition damage is happening. Base ground fire damage is 13/sec and lasts 2 seconds by default but as long as the turret targets that particular spot the fire grows and the damage increases to a maximum of 6 times the base damage and a maximum duration of 30 seconds (it takes roughly 15 seconds of continuous fire on that spot to reach that damage level). Multiple flamethrower turrets firing on a single spot do not increase the ground fire damage. Only the turret that has fired the longest on that spot is calculated for damage.

The third type of damage is contact damage. This does 3 damage each time a bug makes contact with a fire (its not a per tick amount its a per contact amount so this damage is minimal.)

Flame thrower turrets target the nearest un-ignited bug first until all bugs in range are ignited and then it targets the nearest ignited bug until that bug is dead (this is what builds up the ground fire damage). The more damage bonuses you have the faster ignition damage kills the bugs and the lower your ground fire damage will be. This means that there may be 2 different optimal ways to set out your flamethrower turrets. You can space them out which will generate higher amounts of ground fire damage or you can put several of them directly adjacent to each other to increase the speed at which the bugs become ignited. Many players use a "dragons teeth" set up for their walls. This spreads out the ground fire and keeps ground fire damage lower but the bugs take more time pathing around the dragons teeth which allows the ignition damage more time to work before the bugs reach an inside wall or other object to attack. With a high enough ignition damage and long enough path the bugs will never damage any part of your walls (or base) because the ignition damage will kill them before they are in range to make a melee attack.

Layering flame thrower turrets, laser turrets, and gun turrets will hasten their demise but with a proper set up and enough damage research you can defend your base with nothing but flamethrower turrets. Happily flame thrower turrets do more damage per amount of resource consumed than any other type of turret. Your defenses should be focused around your flamethrower turrets with a few other turrets added to finish off bugs quickly.

[bigulator]

They don't, but they can if you use Schall's Endgame Evolution mod.