I've been playing space age with 0 evolution increase over time (killing bases still increments it). So I've been eager to work around biter bases and pentapods.
Biter spawners can all be blocked by a pattern like the image; surrounding them with walls or solar panels or pipes prevents spawning. (This is intended behavior.) What is not mentioned anywhere afaik is that this also seems to prevent biter expansion from that base.
The same is only partially true for pentapods! Small egg rafts only spawn wrigglers (at low evolution?), and it seems you can block them off as in the image above. I have yet to see one try to expand from a surrounded small spawner.
In both cases, surrounded spawners seem to absorb a small amount of pollution/spores, be unable to spawn anything, and sit passively. No attack triggered.
But (regular) egg rafts are different. They spawn stompers and strafers which can spawn and stand directly on top of the raft. I tried and failed to prevent this spawning by packing the space with spider-trons. Also, given enough time a surrounded egg raft will eventually expand (afaik, it seems to spawn a wriggler in a crevice which then attacks its way out. I've never seen it just spawn a wriggler).
Relatedly: Stompers and strafers can stand between tiled solar panels, but not walls. Stompers only damage buildings with each step if they are aggresive.
This is a nice idea that I've never thought of before and seems like it would be useful even on default settings, and even if it doesn't totally work for pentapods.
@Artisian@lemmy.world how difficult is it to get the player or bots close enough to build the walls without being attacked? When I'm anywhere near a nest it spawns biters constantly
A few notes on managing biters early game: Worms attack bots, so blueprint placing was a bad time without killing all the worms first. I had the easiest time doing this by placing a bunch of turrets filtered to only attack worms+biters. I think it should be possible to place a roboport close enough earlier in the game, and then carefully build 'from the inside out', only shooting down the biters when you've basically encased them.
On gleba, I had the mech-suit from fulgora with the upgraded roboport, so I just kite things around while doing the science. Everything de-agros if you get enough distance.
I wanted to add that surrounding a convenient bitter base seems like a good way to make the captive biter stuff less of a headache. You can save one well located base for when you reach gleba.