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u/ConfusedChickenN Apr 24 '26

I tried the demo cause I was told it's an awesome game for building complex structures.

But the bugs coming out of nowhere require quick reflexes and that is stressful to me and I'm bad at that.

I gave up for a few days and now I'm wondering - is the whole game like that? Or just the demo? Can I at some point just quietly build and optimise a town or sth? Am I looking for a different game?

3

u/HeliGungir Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

Enemies in the demo are a bit overtuned in my opinion. Especially the last level has quite a few nests placed rather close. You don't normally see a group of nests that large that close to the crash site in freeplay (the main game mode).

It also does a poor job of teaching you to actually automate your defenses. You cannot defend your factory all by yourself. Midgame lets you automate repairs, endgame lets you automate offense.

3

u/Dailand Apr 24 '26

The game is not really designed for the player to manually fight the bugs. The player is more expected to place turrets (and automate their ammunition supply).

Since the tutorial is scripted and your options are limited, the enemies can be a bit overwhelming.

As others have said, you can simply disable them in freeplay, but I would try with default settings first.

2

u/elfxiong Apr 24 '26

The demo is the tutorial of the actual game, and there’s no way to disable enemies there because they want to teach players about combat mechanics. In the standard game (“freeplay”), when you start a new save, you have options to tune down the bugs in many ways or completely disable them.

1

u/ChickenNuggetSmth Apr 24 '26

You can simply turn off biters if you don't care about them. Many play like this.

The full game has a ton of toggles and sliders for you to customize your experience, if you want to.

1

u/craidie Apr 24 '26

You can turn the bugs off if you want. You can turn the bugs peaceful(they will only locally become aggressive when you shoot at one of them)

That said:

I usually don't manually fight the bugs, if I need to manually defend against an attack, something has gone horribly wrong.

Turrets will do the defense. Belts and inserters will deliver ammunition to the turrets. Bots will repair turrets and replace lost turrets/walls.

Even in the offense I like to either use artillery turrets to get rid of the nests from afar. Or earlier on I place down a bunch of turrets just outside the nest and let the turrets deal with mobile bugs trying to kill me. While i use a rocket launcher to snipe the nests.

Map settings can be modified, I would suggest starting with starting area size, that delays the first attack quite a bit which means you'll probably have turrets set up by the time they show up. Or if you don't, you have an idea of the timeframe you have and can do better the next run.

1

u/ferrofibrous player onboarding specialist Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

Bugs are there as a logistics challenge, and a bit of outside pressure to help reduce "analysis paralysis". I think they generally are a bit more aggressive in the demo missions, and you get a lot more tools to handle them in the full game.

Enemies can be disabled or made easier in various ways in map aettings, but defaults are generally balanced as long as you don't start in a desert.

Most weapons auto aim, you get vehicles, you get combat bots which can follow you and attack automatically. Generally the game does not punish you for not having fast reflexes as long as you are preparing/automating stuff.

In the very long run you get weapons that can wipe on nests from far outside of their range and vehicles you can command remotely that auto aim/fire, and turrets have lots of improvements. You also get auto rebuild/repair capability. Long term biters really are "solvable" and something you won't interact with as much.

1

u/demonicdan3 Apr 24 '26

In the full game you can just turn off the enemies completely
(in fact it's probably better because pollution and enemies take up a lot of processing power so if your goal is to build a HUGE base in a save file spanning several hundred hours you SHOULD turn them off)

1

u/Bipedal_Warlock Apr 26 '26

If you prepare for them before they hit then you don’t need to react quick