>>717211838
there's two different modes of biters as well as completely biterless.
If you turn off biter expansion, you can clear the map and won't have to deal with any biters once you have cleared a perimeter bigger than your pollution cloud.
If it's on, they can wander around, set up spawners in your cloud, get angry at it and attack your base.
But whatever you pick, they ALWAYS scale with you. Usually they plateau somewhere according to your military science progress.
In the base game, all you need is a nice cuckbox and some artillery. A tank works wonders for clearing out nests, once you have a good armor your can plop in automatic lasers to take care of them.
Or you go nuclear like me. In some expansions you get better options like nuking the fuckers from orbit, but the artillery trains are fun in their own right.
Basically, biter management is your ONE activity you can do apart from GROW, unless you're into very autistic pixel art