Many mega insects seem to be unreasonably tough. With some like supersoldier ants being able to survive a good hit from a cannonball!! Many other gaint insects are also way to tough including collossal crayfish, deathtrap spider, alpha bee, frigate fly and many more. They generaly simply a pain to deal with given how much effort they take to kill or the amount of ammunition they take to kill.
This also seem to insonsistent with the lore. Many are alive and about the size of cows but have HP valua´s higher than skeletal juggernauts and hulks dispite that these are supposed to be undead much more mutated ¨tank¨ enemies. Normal animals of this size seem to have about 90 (horse) to 120 (moose) HP which might actually be a bit low with a standart human 80 HP. I would have expected these animals to have actually double the HP the currenty do.
I can agree with this, got jumped by a deathtrap spider recently and turns out it had 220 more HP than a hulk. the good thing is that it couldn’t get through windows, so maybe reach weapon window cheese would be effective against that type of enemy
Colossal insects are the enemies of the late game. you don’T have to try to kill them. if you see them, you can still escape (except funnel spiders. but I already had an idea how to redo them).
and I think it’s good.
most of the zombies are weak, slow creatures of which there are just a LOT. the strongest zombies are the hulk, because they hurt and they are very armored. but wasps can kill the Hulk, as wasps are dodgy creatures that attack quickly.
Huge insects for me are “one man army”, strong, solitary (ironically not) creatures that can make me worry about how to survive.
If I don’t go to the city, I’m safe. If I don’t get into the lab, it’s the same. insects make the WHOLE WORLD dangerous. this well reflects the hopelessness of our struggle with the cataclysm (unless of course you mutate into mycus, even after a bunch of changes, it is incredibly dangerous for all living things. ironically, this is the only FACTION that is ready to accept you into itself)
Mega insect being late game enemies is all well and good but it doesn´t justify just surviving a hit from a cannonball or just tanking a few 50. cal bullets. I might be willing to believe that a hulk or heavely armoured skeletal juggernaut is capable taking one or two 50. cal bullets given that they are both undead (need less vital systems like lungs) and are effectively bioweapons build for durability by the blob but even they aren´t surviving a cannonball. Mega insects are ALIVE and only about the size of a cow but can somehow survive a good hit form a 50. cal or even a cannonball. In the former they should either drop instantly or bleed to death or very near too it and in the latter they should be a horrificly mangled mess. Surviving a cannonball should only be possible for things like the beetle the size of a armoured personeel carrier or the train sized centipiede.
insects, because of their structure, are often not so susceptible to such things. spiders have most of the vital organs in their abdomen-and therefore a direct blow to their head with something strong will not kill them as easily as a person, bullets can mace pain, but mutated insects chitin can be more hard than we think. plus spiders are very tenacious creatures that can even regenerate limbs after molting. Plus, there is a problem here, a very strong problem of elaboration. to put it bluntly-you and the NPCs have hp of all body parts, while monsters have a common HP for all this. when killing a person with 1 shot in the arm is impossible, since this is not damage to the torso, it will work with a monster. there will be no more logical killing of very tenacious insects until we develop a system at least a little more thoughtful than the current one. For this reason, huge insects are so tenacious.
Now, insects, robots, shogoths (noone monster can kill them. NO ONE.) and razorclaws-most powerful single creatures in the game, insects simplu unbalanced, robots can make some holes in your head, shogoths have 50 HP per sec regeneration, and razorclaws can debuff everyone in medium radius, slow theit move speed (and attack speed) (they have player move speed, if they scream and debuff you-you cant escape.), also razorclaws live up to 30 heads in 1 place, they can literaly clean cities.
To continue your logic, insects, due to their structure- and this thing called the mass cubed law- they are small. They cannot be large. There’s an upper limit that makes it hard for their circulatory system to function or impossible for them to move with chitin scaled up as size scales up.
Let’s examine realism here. For “mega insects” to exist they’re going to either be very flimsy or decidedly not an insect any longer (like it won’t be even close). So what are our options here? Well we can lean into the fantastical elements and just say “well it’s a game” at which point if most people are complaining about the tedious aspect of it then it should likely be removed as it is not only unrealistic, but does not enrich the game.
This is something I agree with. The mega mantis is ridiculous. The super soldier ants are WAY to plentiful to be a terrifying chance mutation. Unless we give the player a more viable way to hard counter them- like insecticide being made available in large quantities at landscaping and hardware stores- then they are simply something to not engage with.
This is the case. They are supposed to be mutated to be internally much more like mammals. This can be seen in the descriptions that you get from butchering them and the fact that they give lungs when butchered.
Super soldier ants might be the worst offender. The mega mantis was at least supposed to be a boss monster but the ants simply are way to plentiful and have one of the highest HP pools in the game.
About that… It seems that whomever made these insects scaled thier HP directly with their volume increase. So if a spider became 10 times more volumes their HP would increase 10 fold. Some even 20 fold.
Again- while they may have lungs and a heart they certainly should have chitin in proportion to their size. This is really well characterized that larger body plans with less dynamic and light integument (skin) would be crushed under the weight. It’s why we can have elephants, rhinos and blue whales, but not giant enemy crabs.
If they are supposed to be bosses then why are they simply treated as a general enemy. I would much prefer them utilized like the unique Merged Security monster at the end of the trans-coastal logistics map special. Currently they are all walking in fields. If they were protecting some ingame region or resource or were part of a handful of missions. Maybe an entomologist could be produced after a couple of the refugee Doctor’s missions (or the university whenever that becomes a thing). These could give insight into how this shit is possible at all. It isn’t really clear with a hobo wielding a scalpal and a proficiency in “biology”.
I think in addition to the mega insects the ladybug is WAY too beefy and prevalent for day 1. This could be curbed if it’s line of sight were reduced or it primarily hunted aphids unless provoked.
Do not forget that insects mutated because of a blob, a miraculous substance that can in an unrealistically short time make a human being barely similar to human, mutate the body as possible and accelerate their capabilities to unreal volumes (the queen of ants, given her speed of creating eggs in 1 turn, and an ant every turn, is capable of to give birth to more than 84 thousand ants a day), and the fact that these creatures have already mutated internally. We should thank the blob that it has not yet begun the process of merging insects, or their incredible mutations, super-species. a simple increase in size is nothing. what would happen to the world if wasps capable of weaving or spitting cobwebs and multiplying like ants appeared in the city?
or did a dermatix the size of a car infect zombie hulks, and they would literally explode because of the overflow of maggots? at the moment, insects are dangerous, but it could have been MUCH worse
Our worst nightmare will be the “death train”, a centipede the size and length of an entire train that can move at the speed of a car, and at the same time break every building. and in theory it is possible, but with reservations
The main problems for huge insects would be only breathing difficulties (they have a different respiratory system), and the difficulty of constantly building up a huge exoskeletal cover due to molts. But the blob bypassed the breathing problem, even above it was said that when they were cut up, the descriptions say that they have changed like in mammals. The problem with the exoskeleton could be solved by the fact that insects learned to eat and assimilate it, which made it much easier for them to build it up.
Blob is capable of it, and he did it. just like he gave the flying insects bags of gas.
as for the question of health, we must not forget that this is a game in which interesting gameplay is important about how the world is slowly and irrevocably, it only becomes more dangerous every day, and huge insects are enemies of the late game, which do not even have to be killed, since there is no rare loot from them. We have to solve logical problems like the unrealistic rapid movement of swarms of tunneling spiders underground, since the rest is not such a big problem
Mutant insects work however they work, but by fiat, they do work, so that line of argument is unfruitful.
A line of discussion that might actually lead to some kind of outcome would be:
How thick is the chitin?
How tough is the chitin and how much does it slow down a bullet?
What kind of impact to do bullets have on on insect style tissues et cetera.
From a game balance point of view there’s also nothing compelling presented here. “They’re really tough they’re really common” is hard countered by “you can just run away because they’re not particularly aggressive”.
If giant insects do nothing but establish no-go areas until the player has late game resources, that’s an ok outcome.
I think making them less common early into the game would be much better. Unless that’s already been addressed.
I maintain that thick chitin would make them unable to move unless we are handwaving a lot. Furthermore, chitin is not particularly good at slowing down bullets (shooting a tortoise or other shelled animal is pretty effective). The basis for this is an insect physiology class and my girlfriend who is an entomologist. That said if they are decidedly THAT mutated then it really wouldn’t matter.
Arthropods tend to have a couple different types of issues that limit their size. Technically with movement controlled by blood pressure (like spiders) they could have very thick chitin, but like spiders as well, once that’s punctured they curl up and die. To my knowledge, bullet travel through insect muscle tissue should not differ too much from how it travels through other animals. For info on tissue pathways see Emergency War Surgery Chapter 1 [https://medcoe.army.mil/borden-tb-ews].
I mean, I’m perfectly happy to see them, but if they were utilized more as bosses in specific zones of interest then I’d at least be more willing to engage with this obstacle put into the game rather than simply avoid it and refuse to think about it again. It’s kind of a shame to add anything to the game and have no player’s experience it because it’s too dangerous, tedious, or whatever.
Is there a place for a post apocalypse entomologist in the world? I mean insects represent an entire faction of enemies you can encounter, fairly commonly, with arguably the least available lore surrounding them outside a couple of lab logs.
The cube-square law is more than just respiration. Circulation was mentioned, but also the attachment of the body to the inside of the exoskeleton is a problem. Body mass increases cubically, but the surface where it’s attached to the exoskeleton is 2d, and increases according to the square. You can delay the problem by warping the inside of the exoskeleton to give it more surface area, but at a certain point the increase in weight outstrips the connective tissue’s grip and the muscles and organs tear away, leaving you with a can of immobile, dying flesh in the bottom.
If I remember the bullet resistence of chitin was determined when someone gave bullet resistance to chitin plating mutation. This was before integrated armours however so might take some digging to get at.