The Flier - Spitter of the skies

Just because you have walls, cliffs, and water, it doesn't mean you are safe.

The Flier is a new enemy type that come to invade the world of Nauvis. As the name implies, it has the ability to fly over the terrain and obstacles to attack players and structures. It comes in four variations of the small, medium, big and behemoth sizes with the larger sizes being able to spew forth fire. This creature spawn from the spitter spawner once the evolution level reaches 10% and from their they will evolve and become more powerful as the evolution factor increases. The graph in the gallery more or less depicts the spawning chances of the evolution factor. Though it's not accurate due to it sharing the spawns of spitters as well and the mod settings.

Mod Settings

There are a few different configuration settings implemented to adjust how they spawn and what they attack with.

Mainly the ability to change how often they spawn compared to spitters on the spawner. The higher the chance the higher the odds of it spawning with even higher spawns making them more likely to spawn over spitters. By default it's set to 75%.

The second is the ability of the them to spew forth fire or acid. Due to how fire damage works in Factorio, fire damage is extremely deadly to the players structures that don't have immunity and even a small swarm can cause massive amounts of damage even to something like a spidertron. Though as long as you keep moving you should be fine, but at the same time, they tend to cause a bit of friendly fire to fellow bugs....

However, if you want them to not be as powerful you have the option to change it to a spitter like acid attack that isn't as insane in it's damage output compared to fire.

By default, the Small and Medium Fliers spew acid, and Big, Behemoths and Ultras spew forth fire.

Compatibility

Armoured Biters

I've tested it with Armoured Biters and Armoured Biters are fine as it doesn't mess with spitter spawner code.

Enemy Race Manager

NOTE: With Factorio 2.0 released Enemy Race Manager will be updated in the future! So for now expect issues while running ERM.

Added compatibility to ERM so they can now spawn while that mod is installed. They will still be apart of the biter race and spawn from the spitter spawners, but they also grow stronger as with the rest of the enemies. They will also pathfind over water and encouraged to move over water on their own compared to without.

They fly over water fine, but in the base game they follow ground biters in groups and will only fly over terrain on their own if moving between different spawners or chasing a target. With ERM I gaves them actual Flying Squads so they they can prepare attacks on their own and attack in waves without requiring a valid pathway.

Rampant

Rampant technically causes some issues. Since rampant replaces the vanilla spitter spawners with their own after a bit, the fliers wont be able to spawn most of the time if at all, you might occasionally see some due to them spawning before the spawners got replaced, but in terms of errors or crashes there doesn't seem to be any with the mod, just don't be surprised if Fliers aren't common. (I might resolve this in the future, but for now I'm going to leave it as is)

First mod upload yippee!

FAQ

Space Age Compatibility? Yes! Currently it is able to work out of the box for Space Age. The Fliers still follow the logic for the spitter spawner, so you will only see them on Nauvis for now (ooh, a hint at an update??)

What do you mean, "They don't fly over water normally and ERM changes it?" Enemy Race Manager has proper AI for enemies that are considered "Flying" by the game and uses custom logic for the enemies in the mod. The base game has this logic system too, but Wube never has an enemy that flies over terrain so there isn't anything regarding that situation. Due to this, the Fliers follow the basic rules for Biters/Spitters. They will form groups and make a path along the terrain to the target area and will follow it. However when aggro'd they don't follow the exact system and instead will just charge at their target. It's the reason why the Fliers will stick in a "group" with the grounded biters and spitters and wont try to path over lakes and rivers. You may occasionally see a Flier go over the water randomly, but this is due to them pathing from one nest to another, and it doesn't calculate a path because it doesn't get stuck on anything so it just beelines it to the other nest.

Does it work with....? Rampant - Yes but there's bugs. They will spawn briefly before the vanilla spawners get replaced by the Rampant spawners, but they do not spawn on Rampant spawners. Enemy Race Manager - Unknown. As ERM has not been updated yet to 2.0, and this mod uses ERM's old compatibility code if ERM makes changes to it's codebase this mod may or may not have issues. Armoured Biters - Yes! They compliment well. Big Monsters - Unknown. No Crashes though.