I imagine I’m far from the only person with fungus turned off because it’s just too much of a damned pain in the ass to keep the weeds under control constantly.
I’ve been thinking about why. I love the fungus as an enemy type. It’s just that they replicate so rapidly, and a single fungaloid can spread so much so quickly, that it’s essentially impossible to keep them controlled reasonably. They always come back. To add insult to injury, or maybe injury to insult, they also completely destroy the game world wherever they exist, and maybe worst of all, kill framerate - a sad meta effect that just takes the fun out.
I’ve seen a lot of suggestions for complex ways to reprogram the fungal horde to keep the numbers up while reducing the spread, but looking over the JSON files I wonder if this might be a simpler solution available with about half an hour of json writing:
- Change fungal spores to spawn multiple enemy types, not just fungaloids
- Make a new fungal subtype, a fungaloid that doesn’t create spores. Add this to possible spawns from spores, more common than fungaloids. More aggressive than fungaloids although still peaceful until pestered. Make these much more common to spread from spores, with fungaloids something like 1/5 of the spawns.
- Increase spore production rates from fungal towers and other central spawns (queens, etc) so that they still crank out fungaloids in the local area. Consider making spores from fungal towers themselves a separate spore type that produces fungaloids more
This would make the central structure more important to the spread. Fungaloids would still spread out and grow the mycus, but much of the geometric growth would be slowed. Destroying the spore tower would become a much more important mission to stopping the fungal spread, because fungaloids would spew from it much faster than they would from fungal sources in the wild. Spore towers themselves would become more threatening, putting out spores and fungaloids even faster.
What do folks think of this?
