Seige worms wont spawn

[Question]

How do you get them to spawn for the quest? It wants me to kill a seige worm...okay...but there is no seige worm to kill...and its often impossible to use the level 4 covert ops to get one...

 

[HughFran]

From my experience playing BE, this quest becomes active after the first siege worm appears in the game (it will either appear near your land or one of your explorers might find one far away from you). So you might spot a siege worm way over on the other side of the map but none spawn near enough to you to kill. It's pretty random. In my most recent game I had THREE siege worms on my borders which proceeded to pillage all of my improvements - took ages to kill them!

 

[Question]

The question is, WHAT causes seige worms to spawn? Yes i know the quest activates when you spot your first seige worm, but this is almost always early enough that you have no way to kill the seige worm.

After you get the tech to kill the seige worm though...NONE appears! Oh sure theres still plenty of nests and raptors/manticores/whatever around, but worms dont spawn...

Is there some kind of requirement? I can't find anything in the XML files that control the spawning either...

 

[Ryika]

Siege Worms spawn on random after a Minimum Turn (20 in BE, 36 in RT). There is no "trigger", they are spawned and maintained as a ratio to normal Alien Units.

Siege Worms do not require Nests to spawn, they can spawn anywhere on the map.

 

[Question]

I regularly go 150+ turns without seeing any seige worms spawn...meanwhile i have killed dozens of regular alien units. Something seems very odd here...any idea where i can check the ratio?

 

[Ryika]

Alien spawns are handled in Aliens.lua (make sure to use the one in the DLC-Folder if you're using Rising Tide), the variables themselves are in GlobalDefines.xml

 

[Question]

Thanks, looking at aliens.lua, theres :

local LAND_UNIT_SPAWN_TABLE : table = {

Which contains several tables with the usual alien land units that seem to spawn from nests. Siege worms are not in those tables, which would explain why i dont see them spawning from nests.

Then theres :

local COLOSSAL_LAND_UNIT_RATIOS : table = {
[0.0] = 32,
[0.35] = 26,
[0.65] = 20,
};

This is confusing. 0.0, 0.35 and 0.65 are related to affinities, but im not sure what the 32, 26 and 20 numbers are.

-- Rules:
-- Colossal units are maintained as a sliding ratio of
-- num units to total normal units active.

local numNormalUnits : number = ALIENS.GetNumNormalUnits(DomainTypes.DOMAIN_LAND);
local numColossalUnits : number = ALIENS.GetNumColossalUnits(DomainTypes.DOMAIN_LAND);

local currentRatio : number = ZeroSafeRatio(numNormalUnits, numColossalUnits);

if (currentRatio > idealRatio) then
return UNIT_SIEGE_WORM.ID;
end

If im reading this correctly, then siege worms only spawn if there are sufficient alien normal units around? I dont know how that formulae works ( ZeroSafeRatio(numNormalUnits, numColossalUnits)) just makes no sense to me.

 

[Ryika]

local COLOSSAL_LAND_UNIT_RATIOS : table = {
[0.0] = 32,
[0.35] = 26,
[0.65] = 20,
};

This is confusing. 0.0, 0.35 and 0.65 are related to affinities, but im not sure what the 32, 26 and 20 numbers are.

It's average Affinity progress in Percent (towards maximum Affinity).

However, unless they've fixed that in the last patch that whole system does not even work because Game.GetAverageDominantAffinityProgress() always returns exactly 0 for some reason.

Which means you can ignore all numbers that aren't indexed as 0.0.

ZeroSafeRatio is just a function that compares two numbers:

function ZeroSafeRatio(a, b)
	if b == 0 then
		-- treat a zero divisor as 1
		return a;
	else
		return a / b;
	end
end

Only reason it's put into an extra function is to make sure the game doesn't divide by 0.

Ergo:
- The game tries to maintain 1 Siege Worm per 32 Alien Units.

 

[Question]

Well the dumb thing is that there are more alien units at the beginning of the game, since in the late game the AI (and you probably, since pillaging nests can give you artifacts) has killed off most of the aliens...

Siege worms should be more common the less normal alien units there are, not less common.

 

[Ryika]

Well, then you'd get punished for clearing aliens. Getting rid of Aliens just to then have tons of Siege Worms spawn would be silly.

The real problem I see is that Aliens can be killed and removed from the game way too easily.

Either way... the Siege Worm Quest is a weak quest to do later in the game anyway. The rewards don't scale well, so if you can't finish it early the easiest solution is to simply ignore it.

 

[DWilson]

I feel like harmony should have a (possibly unique) improvement: colossal nest. I can imagine building it causes a colossal unit to appear x turns, and it either being a normal alien or a pre-leashed alien (I could see it argued either way). I would imagine it costs at least as much as a terrascape in maintenance, requiring miasma, and having pretty crappy yields.

Perhaps supremacy could have a similar improvement which produces units (at a similar turn to strength ratio), and the colossal units coming pre-leashed for the harmony units. Meanwhile, terrascape would be boosted for purity.

 

[HughFran]

This quest isn't really that big a deal anyway, you get a one-off boost which isn't massive. I agree with DWilson in that it'd be nice to have some way of manipulating Siege Worms if you are playing Harmony (think of Atreides in Dune and how his men could ride on top of them). I also wish it wasn't so easy to get rid of aliens, they are very weak. Even the ones introduced in RT aren't that great. I'd love to see massive hives that are difficult to remove but will not harm you if you don't harm them.

 

[Callonia]

If I remember correctly there's a city operation that summons siege worms to attack a city?

 

[HughFran]

If I remember correctly there's a city operation that summons siege worms to attack a city?

That's correct. Although, I've never successfully been able to do this - I rarely see a city intrigue going high enough to attempt this. Plus, Covert Ops is one of the things I don't like in BE so I rarely use it