In the latest experimental I’ve tried fighting some whale wasps and alpha bees.
They seem too slow to be able to catch up to a 110 base speed fleet-footed character in the field (assuming no speed penalties). They also lack any ranged attacks.
So what ends up happening is you can just poke them with a spear (or any weapon with reach) for as long as it takes to kill them. At which point they can be butchered for ludicrous amounts of materials.
Am I missing something here? Aren’t they supposed to be actually dangerous?
But why keep them around at all? Just keep only the fast wasps.
It doesn’t even make sense from the hive’s perspective: why waste 10x+ the biomass on an organism that performs no obvious useful function?
afaik the whale wasps aren’t even base game (unless they were added recently.) they’re meant to be found -inside- wasp nests, surrounded by other giant wasps… assumedly they’d be the ‘queen’ of the wasp nest, so you’d only come into contact with them after ripping open a nest, at which point you’d be in close contact with them
… that said, they’re easy to get away from and its not like they grab you.
not everything has to be super dangerous or have an explicit purpose.
Mega insects all suffer from a low speed, which nerfs their attack potential severely. I’m redoing all insect species one by one, so they will get their update down the line (will definitely be post 0F). I have an issue open on git ( #45030 ) to this effect, if you want to check out and discuss the current ideas.
In the meantime a bandaid fix would be to just slap a lower attack cost on them, but to be honest I don’t want to have to balance them twice. They got a bit of buff from the venom rework in any case.
Again, not the case. I’ve seen wasp nests where practically all wasps “patrolling” around it were whale wasps.
This logic does not really work well for slow melee-only enemies with huge hit-point pools. If nothing else, they directly benefit the player by being used as a distraction against the zombies.
I completely see why a insect of this size would be super slow. Insects that never evolved to reach such huge sizes. Even with the blob mutating them heavely to overcome some of these problems there should still be a limit to how big the blob could make them. The blob largely relies on reinterpreting genes and the fact that gaint insect are still living creatures that need to find their own food and have a funtioning metabolism limits the amount and types of mutation that the blob can preform. As some mutations that might be possible for zomies would be to detrimental or outright crippeling/fatal to gaint insect.
The biggest insects are probably the largest that the blob can make them without outright killing or completely crippeling them. But they are already pushing it in the size department and are very slowed down by their own mass as a result. Atleast that is how I interpredt their slow speed as a sign that blob mutation can have limits and might not nessecerely be benificial.
You could just down scale the biggest versions of insects size wise to make them less like chitin phinatas. Then give them only a moderate reduction in speed or cut speed in halve for very fast insect compared to their normal counterparts, reduce their armor, HP and damage a bit from what it is now. You should end up with a insect that doesn’t seem more plausable (door/small cow/pony sized instead of small car sized) but would be a lot nastier than the current ones.
Logically speaking, if they are that large and fly then I don’t care what is in the ‘gas sacs’ they can’t have armour worth a damn. It would just weigh too much. So making them drop far less chitin would be quite sensible, IMO.
You can’t make a tank float by filling it with helium balloons.
the blobs purpose is to move in on our planet and make it more habitable right? and they can only live in specific enviroments (inside the bodies of other things), thats why i assumed they always attempt to make anything as large as possible, like skeletal juggernauts, even if its detrimental to its killing capacity.
also, the reason i said that as far as i know the giant bug enemy types arent base game is that they’re in the experimental version, yes, but they arent on the wiki, and assumedly -someone- on the team put them in… so is likely still working on balancing them as an enemy type.
There doesn’t have to be a why. It could also be a mistake of the blob taking a mutation (such as size) to far and becoming detrimental to a creature (some mutations from mutagens come to mind). But that doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t happen too often.
But I can think of a few uses that they might have. For the social incest (bees, wasps and ants) such huge members would be useful around their hives since they could very effectively confront and pin down an aggressive and determined enemy (aka zombies) giving the smaller members time to reinforce and overwhelm the enemy with numbers.
Huge insects that are slow but also powerful, tanky and have a lot of armor would have no chance catching normal prey that just runs away when they see them. They would however have a very easy time preying on the many reanimated corpses that run around after the cataclysm. So, they would have an ecological niche all to themselves in acting as the zombie cleanup crew of the after-cataclysm ecosystem (The blob probably didn’t think it all the way through).
