Aside from chopping too many trees, that’s already how the game works. I don’t remember where exactly it is but there’s a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there’s likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn’t already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they’ll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There’s even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn’t have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
They do indeed, that being said in a roundabout way and assuming normal gameplay. Technically speaking if you weren’t producing any pollution then you could destroy every tree on the map and wouldn’t prompt the aliens to attack until you got to the trees close to their bases. Destroying trees in the base game simply allows for less pollution to be absorbed before it slowly creeps towards alien bases.
The amount they absorb is already small enough that it can easily be overcome hence why pollution can escape forests and why you can receive attacks from aliens in the forests, but it’s still larger than the terrain pollution generation and those small amounts add up as spreads farther.
My suggestion was more about creating a more direct response from the aliens. Instead of allowing a little more pollution to spread potentially towards them, it would create more pollution thus bring able to directly prompt an attack if too many trees are destroyed.
The only thing I’m not certain about is I believe pollution has data about where it came from and I believe aliens target the biggest source of the pollution that prompted their attack. If this is how they work and you then added destroying trees to this list of potential sources of pollution then the aliens would be prompted to attack a clearing a trees with nothing in it. Presumably assuming normal gameplay the player would be destroying these trees so they could make way for something they’d be building there, so those buildings could be attacked, but still it would then be theoretically possible to have them scramble to attack nothing. And you could also prompt these attacks remotely with artillery.
Aside from chopping too many trees, that’s already how the game works. I don’t remember where exactly it is but there’s a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there’s likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn’t already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they’ll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There’s even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn’t have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
Don’t the trees already help by absorbing some amount of pollution? If tree is gone, it stops absorbing, thus pollution rises.
They do indeed, that being said in a roundabout way and assuming normal gameplay. Technically speaking if you weren’t producing any pollution then you could destroy every tree on the map and wouldn’t prompt the aliens to attack until you got to the trees close to their bases. Destroying trees in the base game simply allows for less pollution to be absorbed before it slowly creeps towards alien bases.
The amount they absorb is already small enough that it can easily be overcome hence why pollution can escape forests and why you can receive attacks from aliens in the forests, but it’s still larger than the terrain pollution generation and those small amounts add up as spreads farther.
My suggestion was more about creating a more direct response from the aliens. Instead of allowing a little more pollution to spread potentially towards them, it would create more pollution thus bring able to directly prompt an attack if too many trees are destroyed.
The only thing I’m not certain about is I believe pollution has data about where it came from and I believe aliens target the biggest source of the pollution that prompted their attack. If this is how they work and you then added destroying trees to this list of potential sources of pollution then the aliens would be prompted to attack a clearing a trees with nothing in it. Presumably assuming normal gameplay the player would be destroying these trees so they could make way for something they’d be building there, so those buildings could be attacked, but still it would then be theoretically possible to have them scramble to attack nothing. And you could also prompt these attacks remotely with artillery.