Enemy "Genetics"

[Aivaria]

Hello,

i realy love the idea of having the enemys evolving. I learned a bit about genetic programming, and well.. i think such a system would fit perfectly in here. There would be some wildlife, starting with some randome genes, and slowly living for itself, dieing by age or other animals, so mostly the strongest survive. This would "purify" the gene pool. Now the Pollution would, by increasing the mutation chance, increase the chance for creating more dangerous animals.
Also this system would be interesting for plants. Maybe the vegetation starts by only having bushes it would slowly evolve into trees.. or maybe, caused by pollution or wood cutting, into more resistense wood (or maybe mushrooms, using spores to defend themself?)

i know my explanation is pretty bad, as my english isnt this good and im not that kind of person explaining stuff, but im willed to answer any question

[Coolthulhu]

At the moment biters "evolve" with pollution, but it's very linear (small->medium->big).

I can kinda see an application of genetic algorithm styled evolution here. Biters could have a separate difficulty and stat distribution attributes. Difficulty would determine sum of stats and increase like it does now.
Stat distribution could change things like HP, resistances, damage, speed and range. This would result in different sets of biters at same difficulty - runners, tanks, hitters etc.
Fitness function could be average damage dealt by swarm. That way swarms of runner tanks vs slow hitters would be selected over swarms of mediocre nobodies.
The result would be biters adapting to player's current defenses. If player relies too much on walls, bruisers would get promoted. If player has a lot of turrets, runners would get more priority. Too thin walls would cause more long legged "reachers" to strike over them (turrets have less resistance, so each hit is more damage and thus better fitness).
More pollution -> wider stat distribution -> more specialized biters instead of homogeneous groups of jacks of all trades

[Aivaria]

sounds even better then i had in mind

[ssilk]

This is nice.
When we follow that idea https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 456#p15420 and combine it with the above we have biters, which are resistant to lasers, if the player prefers laser for defence.

[Plop and run]

maybe, their behavior can also be in their genes, so we can domesticate some biters for ourselves