Proliferation

Proliferation

A machine faction that builds. Inspired by the Replicators from Stargate, some features are strong hints of that.

The Replicators function differently from standard enemies. They land on a matter node, put a pumpjack on it, and run an actual factory: extractors, chemical plants, assemblers, labs, belts, power, walls and turrets, all of it working the way yours does. The threat is of a different kind than regular spawners, as they use an actual economy to produce both their bases and themselves.

The mod is still in Beta, mostly because it may need balancing. First two base stages are a decent challenge for a new player. But leave them to grow and they turn into an actual threat. The threat becomes even more deadly if you have Space Age. Art is still WIP, not my strong suit, but I'll get it sorted out eventually.

What a base does

It mines matter and turns it into alloy, then components, then its own science pack, and then it researches its own technology tree out of that pack. What that also implies is that if you let too many bases live, all of them will research at once, potentially getting the infinite research they have (in their separate tech tree) to a high level, that actually makes them a threat. I tried to avoid using timers and script-based things, so most things happen naturally, down to actually building the waves.

Each technology that gets finished (or at least most of them) unlocks a build stage. Construction robots inside the base stamp the new buildings and revive them, and repair whatever you (or the biters!) damaged on your last visit.

Four stages: a bare production line, then a real factory, then a defended one, then a walled compound that can take you out with its railguns before you even see it. There's also something more starting with v0.34.0! See the next section.

There are three kinds of base now, rolled when the base lands: a railgun base, a tesla base and a rocket base. They grow through the same four stages of the same core, and at the last stage each one stands its own armament over it, with its own wall. Below that stage you tell them apart by what they do rather than by how they look: a railgun base would rather found a new base than fight you, a tesla base comes for you, and a rocket base goes hunting the biters.

A base also rolls how rich it is. Most land on a single matter node; some land on two or three, rarely four, and every node past the first carries a pod: a small factory of its own on its own node, with its own extractor, generator, turrets, roboport and lab. Rich bases research faster and field more walkers, and they take longer to clear. Pods are new and still a proof of concept, one design standing on three sides of the core; expect them to change.

Once the base has the resources and the tech, it builds walking machines (aka the replicators, but please bear with me till I figure out the art) and holds them in a deployer until its garrison is full. The walkers walk straight through their own base's walls, turrets and machines, the way a spidertron walks through yours, so a walled compound is no cage for them; they cannot walk through yours, or through water, cliffs or nests, and you cannot walk through theirs. Once a walker has cleared the ground around its deployer it stands still until something comes close or the wave leaves, so an idle garrison costs your frame rate nothing. The garrison cap is currently fixed per stage and grows alongside it. When it's full, the garrison marches. A wave picks an objective, and a wave that survives long enough lands on a matter node of its own and starts again. The objective is one of 3 things: build a new base, attack the nearest player structure, attack the nearest nest (Replicators are an enemy to all organic matter!)

A wave that beats one of your buildings down does not finish it. Only their walkers take buildings; their turrets destroy what they shoot, as they always did. At thirty percent of its health or below, if the Replicators have an equivalent (and they have one for nearly everything: assemblers, chemical plants, pumpjacks, chests, belts, inserters, poles, solar panels, accumulators, pipes, walls and every turret they have a match for), the building becomes theirs, at the health it had left. A captured gun turret keeps your ammunition and fires it at you. A captured laser turret stays on your grid and drinks your power until you cut the wire, which is the way to deal with a captured pocket: break the line, then shoot. They never take the lab, the roboport or the roboport's own robots, and a building they have no match for, a big pole, a splitter, anything another mod adds, just dies as it always did. A captured machine that stands idle, or a captured chest, comes apart into walkers five to fifteen minutes later, one walker per walker's worth of health it has left, plus one; kill it first and it drops their loot instead. For a chest, every item inside counts as a point of health, so a full chest of plates is a mine with a fuse, and the fuse is the time you have to reach it. Turrets, walls, poles and the rest of the pocket's infrastructure never come apart; they are theirs until you take them down.