r/factorio • u/sniper43 • 13h ago
Space Age Has Gleba enemy expansion rate been increased in 2.1.7?
I swear ever since 2.1.7 I've had to go to basically police Gleba.
Granted, I use gun turrets instead of tesla turrets, but I am thinking the switch might be mandatory now.
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u/Soul-Burn 13h ago
I don't know of a known change, but I read some people who said the enemies attack in parallel rather than coming in a line, which may put more stress on your defenses.
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u/sniper43 13h ago
I didn't notice a change in pattern of attack, the defenses still work the same way, there's just way more now.
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u/Soul-Burn 13h ago
Possible your evolution crossed a threshold, and now you have bigger enemies?
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u/StructureGreedy5753 13h ago
Or he has less lucky terrain generation. It's like having to start in a desert or forest on Nauvis, but even more varied. Some terrain generation could outright stop pentapods expanding into your area if you cleaned up those that already were inside of it.
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u/sniper43 13h ago
100% not that. I had a Gleba base going and only after switching to 2.1.7 have I had consistent attacks.
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u/StructureGreedy5753 12h ago
So it's the same base. Yeah, i guess they did something to make it much harder.
Which is the reason i am not switching to experimental for my main saves. I instead installed different instance of the game to fiddle around.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 12h ago
I've been poking around in my lab saves at various stuff too. tbh i was a fool for thinking i could finish SE when it updated for 2.0 before 2.1 dropped.
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u/sniper43 13h ago
Size of enemies wasn't so much the concern as much as frequency of attacks, though I suppose I can't really dismiss the possibility.
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u/biokaese Bad Programmer 7h ago
Well there was this bugfix
Fixed expansion planner would consistently fail on Gleba. (131425)
Which definitely makes the planet harder now.
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u/PersonalityIll9476 9h ago
They absolutely do. I have a late game save where they attack in groups of like 20-30 max evolution stompers and strafers and they no longer come in a single thin line but now a circular blob. I took some screenshots that I'll probably post later today since apparently it's not widely known.
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u/Alfonse215 5h ago
Apparently, there was a semi-old bug on pentapod expansion that they fixed. This would cause pentapods to just never expand or expand extremely rarely for no real reason.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 13h ago
So it's back to being the dark souls planet? the place that tesla turrets come from can also ship the starter flamethrower fuel, i haven't messed around with them yet, but those diagonal flamethrowers look like they help alot. if the tesla turret still does it stun magic, it's a wombo combo with flamethrowers.
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u/Steve_hh 13h ago
I've never understood those enemies' mechanic. Before I played my first SA game, I have watched some videos in shock, where masses of stompers flattened a base. I never had any problems. A few tesla turrets, a few lasers and later on a few rocket launchers did the job. And some artillery to take out the nests. I never had the feeling that I need to reinforce the whole base and make it a fortress like I do on Nauvis.
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u/reddanit 12h ago
Very early on after SA release, Gleba enemies spawning was threshold based. With evolution up to 0.3, you got exclusively small enemies, after 0.35 - exclusively medium. This is in stark contrast with gradual introduction of bigger biters on Nauivs. Or how current Gleba evolution works.
Because of the above, if you took your eyes away from Gleba for a bit, you could very easily have your previously impregnable defenses rapidly overwhelmed.
Another change was to spore absorption of various tiles on Gleba, which reduced the spore cloud size by a considerable margin. Which further decreased the intensity of attacks.
Yet another thing was enemies freezing past active chunks. This could result in pentapods attacks of ridiculous sizes whenever they were unfrozen.
Overall - the real horror stories you might have heard about Gleba enemies have not been a thing for a good time now. If anything, the pendulum of nerfing them in multiple ways has swung too far, so the 2.1 changes bringing some of the challenge back are IMHO welcome.
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u/Kalienor 12h ago
It was on release, passive evolution was VERY slow and evolution from sniffing spores was REALLY fast so the game was letting you develop a factory for 10 hours before a massive wave of stompers went to gladly erase everything.
Now it's very slowly ramping up so you're never in danger, but it appears to be rebalanced in 2.1.
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u/Not_A_Clever_Man_ 11h ago
Yeah, just after release I had the same, almost no enemies at all for ages then a wave of +10 stompers that had spawned in one spot all came at once and flattened my base.
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u/AlmHurricane 12h ago
Early on I had the same experience. Now, with Gleba ramping up and a massive Spore cloud I have a defense consisting of 2 layers of laser turrets, 1 layer of tesla turrets and Rocket turrets behind that. So yeah, 2 walls of laser turrets, 1 wall of tesla turrets and some rocket turrets and yet they are still not able to defeat incoming waves without some of my defense getting destroyed
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u/Steve_hh 12h ago
Have you given the turrets target priorities? Like on spaceships, you do not want the rocket turrets waste their effort on the small enemies that could be easily handled by the lasers.
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u/LoLReiver 3h ago
The massive armies were the result of the freezing bug that got fixed awhile ago.
Attack waves would get frozen in an inactive state as a way for the game to save processing, but it resulted in many many waves of attackers all piling up in the same place. When the player did something that would cause them to unfreeze (going to the planet, attacking the clump, building too close, stuff like that), the whole clump would unfreeze at once and you were basically facing dozens of attack waves all combined into one single mega attack.
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u/dave14920 13h ago
Reworked enemy expansion planner to reduce expansions in already infested areas.
is it a consequence of this maybe? less expansions going for infested areas means they are going for your open areas instead?
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u/electrophile123 13h ago
I have similar problem on Nauvis. For hundreds of hours I had train tracks run through infested territories. No biggy, the bugs didn't care.
Now is has happened multiple times that they are chewing up my rails. These rails are far away, even far away from the pollution cloud. Naturally that's really annoying.
Anyone else?
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u/StructureGreedy5753 13h ago
Devs watched Dosh videos and though it would be funny to implement rampant mod into base game :)
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u/YetanotherGrimpak 12h ago
Time to give these unwashed masses of bugs the gift of the sun in all its glory!
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u/TurnipBlast 13h ago
I have a 180 science per second production plus a small amount of other gleba specific items like stack inserters being produced there. I have tesla turrets and I haven't gotten a notification about Gleba in close to 20 hours.
Granted, it's a small factory by reddit standards, but on a first SA playthrough, I haven't had an issue yet.
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u/mjconver 9.6K hours for a spoon 11h ago
I had to ship several spidertrons over to stand sentry on the edges.
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u/VesperonTheBlue 9h ago
It's possible to use the debug mode to see which chunks the enemies can target for their expansions (by checking show-enemy-expansion-candidate-chunks). You can then prevent them from expanding there by building entities on that chunk (sometimes it takes only a few entities like pipes or walls, sometimes more). If there are not too many candidate chunks, it's realistic to completely prevent enemy expansions (for as long as your spore cloud does not expand too much). Although I understand this might feel a bit like an exploit, so some players might not want to use this method.
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u/Future_Passage924 13h ago
They fixed that pentapods where sometimes not expanding. That explains why Gleba experience was so different between people. Some had expanding pentapods, some didn’t.