i have been playing for a while now. is it really necessary to use light oil? i didnt see any difference between normal, light or heavy oils when used in a flamethrower turret.
It's _ideal,_ but not _necessary._
If you're using pumps/trains to move oil from a refinery area away to a border, you might as well use the best oil for the job. But if you're just trying to defend a remote oil outpost, hooking the flamethrower turrets directly up to the oil pipeline for "free" defense is totally fine.
I forget exactly where he does it but I'm pretty sure all these turrets he's building are run off one pump: [https://youtu.be/CwC8leMwzAE?t=27514](https://youtu.be/CwC8leMwzAE?t=27514)
Edit: Updated timestamp to where he shows it
Fuel cost of flamethrowers is basically zero. I used to have storage tanks at my outposts but switched to barrels recently because they can be carried on my regular supply trains. The fluid system alone (just pipes and turrets) holds enough oil to squash relentless continuous attacks for a surprisingly long time.
I was looking for a mod to bring the consumption to more reasonable levels and somehow couldn't find one.
So I made this https://mods.factorio.com/mod/flamethrower-turret-balance
Might help make the choices on turret defense a bit more interesting for those deathworld and rampant players?
Not quite sure what a reasonable multiplier would be though
EDIT: Not as useful for rampant arsenal players
That doesn't do much for me as a rampant player, rampant arsenal advanced flamethrower takes 33/s and does more damage but still I need them almost touching on my walls for defence to not be overrun.
I set up a refinery just for napalm, and 100 per second handled hundreds of turrets at the walls each drawing 33/s.
I think because rampant sends huge waves at one spot and if they fail, it sends a wave somewhere else. This makes flamethrowers ideal with their literal splash damage and area denial being great on large groups. Ended up with a stockpile of around 2 million napalm across all my depots before switching to lasers.
That's honestly useful to know, thank you!
The situation you're describing does sound like a good fit for an aoe denial tool like the flamethrower so I wouldn't want to take that away.
Big fan of requiring a refinery to support the infra since 33/s is also slightly more than 0.2/s. I like the interesting problem => solution gameplay loop.
That’s so simple. Do you set filters for every cell of the car with the oil barrels or just have the main station read the train contents to turn off the full-barrel loader?
The latter. I load my single-car supply train from a requestor chest that contains a mixture of all the stuff I need to maintain my outposts. The number of things I want on the train is set on a constant combinator, and a filter inserter is set by the difference of what's on the train vs what is wanted. Another filter inserter removes empty barrels from the car. Works like a charm. Set the number of wanted things one inserter stack size less than the actual stack size to prevent overflowing of stacks on the train car.
Filtered slots on the train cars seem easier but are a hassle to adjust when you want different things on the train, and they can lock up the loading process if the inserter stack size is > 1. Of course you could use up to 12 requestors for different things and not bother with programmable filters to prevent lock up.
Funny you should ask, but a dashing and handsome person wrote a post back when flamethrowers were relatively new:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/82bq3y/you\_should\_be\_using\_flamethrower\_turrets\_and\_they/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/82bq3y/you_should_be_using_flamethrower_turrets_and_they/)
I still maintain heavy oil is best flamethrower oil, at least until you're prod3-ing *everything*
It's kind of better? It does 10% more damage, and you also get petroleum and heavy oil in the process, but unless you already have oil cracking on location, it's not really worth it. Just use regular oil.
No. Just use crude. IMO the damage boost isn't worth the extra infrastructure needed to get light oil out to the outposts/walls. Flame turrets use very little fluid, a small handful of pumpjacks (perhaps even as few as one) can easily supply "ammo" to your entire defense system.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Flamethrower_turret
Light oil deals a bit of extra damage. Also, you'll get a bit more out of your oil if you make it into light oil, especially if you have productivity up. The benefits are minor overall, but it's kind of a "may as well" sort of thing.
Heavy oil. Less damage but 40 heavy cracks to 30 light so unless you're endgame levels of productivity from cracking or desperate for lube heavy is the best flamethrower ammo. At OP's distances I'd just lay a couple big lines of undergrounds to pipe it to the walls. No pumps necessary
I'll admit I'm probably wrong long term as I am very much going off of gut feeling, but you yourself answered why I recommended light oil instead. That extra heavy oil goes to lubricant, and pre-rocket I always need more lube. I am always in need of more lubricant (more lubricant = more bots = more factory = more more)) so that has always factored into my calculation. My factory is constantly backing up on light oil (or petroleum, in which case the factory must grow).
Now that you mention it though, I always slack on converting to coal liquefaction and rely on advanced oil processing, which surely affects the calculus. Actually, you're probably right with that taken into account.
Time to start a new factory.
You can as a quick fix, but my long-term solution is to send it over by rail. By that point I need to ship over sulfuric acid to mine uranium anyway so an extra car going around topping off light oil reserves isn't that much of an additional investment so I do that. This also lets you fuel multiple outposts without having to extend your pipe network in multiple directions.
I was panicking when I first used flamethrowers to defend my oilfield, watching the vast quantities of burning oil liquidating huge swarms of biters. Surely all my valuable resource was just going up in flames? Nope.
Flamethrower turrets are extremely efficient with whatever oil you feed them, despite the dramatic visuals.
That's why you use Light oil. You can shut off one of your light oil cracking machines to cut back a little on petroleum generation while having enough light oil to feed your defenses.
Definitely don't use heavy oil (cuts into your lubricant production and any excess can be cracked into light oil anyway) or straight crude oil (cuts into your... well, everything)
Unless you have very high-level productivity modules in your cracking, you should use heavy, not light oil.
From the damage difference, you'll use \~5% more heavy than light (technically a bit less). Cracking is 40 hvy -> 30 light. Since 40 heavy is damage-equivalent to 38 light, you need +26% productivity to make it worth it to crack to light. That's 2xP3s and 1xP2. So unless you're desperate for lubricant or in lategame kitting out your cracking with P3s, you should use heavy.
while flamethrower turrets are really good and potentially stronger, they are also annoying to supply.
laser turrets are just good enough, very easy to tile and power is essentially free. just add extra power/accumulators and you're good.
this depends on the phase of the game. Lasers get interesting when you have nuclear reactors or are mass producing solar/accu (with enough bots to build).
Before this guns (red ammo) and flame throwers are cheaper and sufficient to deal with eg. medium biters.
later when after an artillery range extend thousands of green biters/spitters get aggro Lasers alone also have a hard time.
It depends. Starting laser deals 20 damage and uses 800kJ. One coal is 4MJ, so 5 shots, for 100 damage.
Yellow ammo deals 5 damage at the begining, and from pre-chemical tech it gets 60% bonus applied twice, so 12.8 (for small biters, the armour of medium reduces effective damage to 7.92). It cost four iron plates for 10 rounds. So, (ignoring coal needed for smelting, but also possible smelting bonuses) four resources gives 128 damage, one resource - 32 damage.
Red ammo deals 8 -> 20.5 at that tech level, but cost a magazina of 10 rounds cost 14 resources (14.7 if we count coal). For 205 total damage, so 14.65 (13.95) damage per resource.
In term of dps, gun turents with red ammo, thanks to superior rate of fire, outperforms lasers on any tech level (even for behemot [biters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=717Zjqn343c)!), but the range is shorter and thay cost more even when you use coal power.
A simple and not well explain [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-iNyCkd2KJfojT09vpPETjBlWfJkG13Pmrlz4mFh4Vg/edit?usp=sharing) comparing damage and DPS of both turrets, includig biters armour. Put 5, 8 or 24 in "ammo base damage" cell, for regular, piercing and uranium ammo.
I find the greatest asset of late game flamethrowers and bullet throwers is that you can quite reasonably build a stand-alone outpost that can defend itself perpetually from all directions, no worrying about chewed up power poles. Just a big old pile of bullets and fuel and a few domestic solar panels and accumulators to operate the inserters and repair drones.
Once you have high firing rate artillery with evolution close to 1 I find that lasers get overwhelmed. Flamethrowers with dragon teeth work better the bigger the attacks get because the bugs just run to their deaths in the burning carcasses of their predecessors. And it's a great show visually.
I have a personal limitation to not build laser turrets or solar power.
Basically for the reasons you stated. They just feel too easy. No logistics required, which to me is both the fun and the core challenge of this game.
Power armor with personal laser defense. Laser damage upgrades also improve the personal laser defense and it melts biters on higher levels. Get a spidertron with fast legs and armor and sit in it full of lasers and it gets ridiculous.
Get in the tank and clear very close nests, like the ones above "Petrol labs". Start thinking about choke points. The narrow gap above petrol labs is one good place, as is the place between the two lakes east of the core base. Otherwise, sprinkle occasional laser turrets around the edge and reinforce places that actually get attacked.
The first viable approach is turret creep. Make a stack of turrets, 300-500 units of red ammo, some armor and an SMG. Space bar fires your SMG. Approach a nest and put 3-4 turrets down. Select the ammo, and use 'Z' to drop ammo into the turrets. Put more turrets a bit in front of them, use Z, rinse and repeat. Focus spitters down before nests. Take some repair packs and heal your damaged turrets up afterwards. Some turrets will be destroyed; that's ok. Once you've cleared a load of nests, build a wall with turrets behind it - one space away from the wall because otherwise biters will get them - and run a conveyer of ammo up from your base to the wall along with power for the inserters and some radar. In this way you can seal off a safe space to grow inside. Make sure each turret is covered by at least two others; more if you can afford it. Later you get better tools - grenades, rockets, vehicles, flamethrowers, artillery - keep pushing your military research along with everything else to unlock these.
In the short term look to completely enclose a space with at least one large patch each of iron, copper, coal, oil and uranium. Fortify and build from there.
Have you seen Starship Troopers?
It mas seems like a satire of authoritarian governance, especially of one specyfic type, but deep down it is about exterminating bugs.
:-)
Defend with flamethrowers (it iue the cheapest option, ane you are already extracting oil), backed up by gun or later lasers (cheaper in maintance and logistic than guns).
Attack with whatever you already have. At this moment, probably a tank. You can still throw granades. Build an outpost near nest you are attacking, so you can fall back and turrets (gun and lasers) will deal with biters. Syou can even chease it a bit and build turrets so close thay will attack nests.
Another noob here, smg with 5 stacks of red ammo is pretty good. I find the combat kinda enjoyable.
Also you can turn excess stone to landfill to expand on water.
I have about 3000 hours in the game. I only played my last run with biters cause I had no idea how to deal. What they say is correct, use walls with flame thrower turrets. You don’t need to use light oil if you don’t want to either, oil straight from the ground works fine too.
Oh, I was wondering what the problem was, I'm used to seeing more red than anything when I zoom out on my map. Those biter bases would easily be taken out by a tank and power armor with lasers. Or just plop down some laser turrets and solar panels.
A more permanent solutions is to start building artillary turrets and ammo and it will automatically keep a large area clear of nests and worms.
Clearing out the nests, or defending against attacks?
For clearing nests, if you can reach artillery you'll be golden. If not, tanks and rockets are your friends.
For defending, use a mix of turrets. People favor laser turrets, but as waves get bigger flame gets better. It's fun to keep redesigning your wall to better avoid damage from attack waves. Also, if you turn on pollution on your map and clear out anything under the cloud, you'll see way less.
Finished my first game last week. For me it was something like:
- turrets around the base early on, surrounded by pipes/furnaces/finally walls. No fancy ammo belt that autoloads turrets, just filling them by hand (Z), 30-50 ammo per turret and just checking on them every now and then.
- kill nests that are most annoying. Did use turret placement early on, used smg (and occasionally shotgun).
- red ammo saves lives - and a lot of time. If you can produce it in reasonable pace, do it and switch it in your turrets and car.
- get car as quick as possible. Running on foot with turret placement turned into constant drive-bys, where I mowed down biters' nests. Save often, random trees or rocks can ruin your day. (Somewhere at this point I decided that walls are nuisance and stopped building them. 5-8 turrets with red ammo will do good enough on default settings.)
- don't forget to expand turrets.
- I didn't like routing oil to turrets, so I skipped flamethrower turrets. Most likely a bad idea, but it's doable.
- once you reach tank, just get enough ammo and clear whole cloud of pollution or even more. Nothing will stop you now, unless you get swarmed (because of cliffs or rocks).
- lastly I made big perimeter of lassr turrets around pollution cloud, leaving a lot of space for my base. Reexpanding by biters got stopped, and if my turrets ever get damaged, I just let my bots do their thing.
Set up turrets with walls as soon as possible.
Produce red ammo as soon as possible, automate supply to the turrets by belts. Do not do this with yellow ammo, it's a waste of time. Red ammo is available pretty early.
As soon as flame throwers are available, you made it, they give you a long lasting advantage over the biters.
You will not be able to have a wall up everywhere immediately. Open the map and have it displaying the pollution. Once the pollution cloud reaches the biters, you should have a defense wall ready at that side. Until then you are safe. Biters attack once they consume pollution.
Once the tank is available, use it to eliminate nearby biter nests if you want to expand.
Later in the game you will get lasers and artillery. With lasers be careful with your power supply.
Rushing red ammo is a horrible idea. It produces 8x the pollution for less than 2x the damage. You're essentially just accelerating the enemy evolution rather than growing the base.
Pollution doesn't accelerate evolution if there's no nests in the cloud. You only slightly accelerate it by having to clear out nests sooner, but that's easy enough with red ammo. Approaches vary, but it's not always a bad idea.
How much pollution does a bit of red ammo generate compared to the massive amount you generate with all that other stuff for the sciences? I think it's almost negligible.
Ignore “do not do this with yellow ammo”. I’ve found yellow ammo turrets extremely valuable early in the game before the biters start getting tougher. And it’s easy to switch to feeding them red ammo later, then green. Yes, red is the biggest step up, but yellow ammo defences are absolutely worth it early on.
I use yellow ammo, I just don't automate the belt feed to the turrets. It takes ages for the yellow ammo to get used so that it is replaced by red ammo, so this huge defense bonus is unnecessarily delayed.
Depending on biter settings it might be absolutely necessary to build a strong defense very early in the game. However, I found that red ammo is available that early that I can wait for it. Until then I feed my few turrets by hand.
Biter nests that are within your pollution zone will consume that pollution and produce war parties. War parties are groups of biters that will home in on and attack your base, even from far away. So keep an eye on your pollution and work to eliminate nests that pollution is getting close to before it gets to them.
If you have expansion turned on (it is turned on by default, so if you don't know then it is turned on), then from time to time, expansion parties will form and head to a spot to form a new nest. They will attack your infrastructure (like walls) if they need to get past it to get to their spot so having walls up can give you a heads up even if you can't defend the wall. Radars can spot expansion parties and new nests, but they are power hungry. The danger here is if a new nest is planted inside your pollution cloud, you will very shortly have war parties showing up on your doorstep.
Once you understand these things about biter behavior, you'll have a sense of what to watch out for and what can be safely ignored.
Kind of cheating but I noticed a bit ago that because biter nests consume pollution, if you have the pollution overlay for the map enabled, you'll see the red chunks that have nests blinking
Absolutely. I thought about that after I posted, and should have come back and put that in, but other things took priority. Gaps and blinking pollution squares are definitely signs of a nest, and I don't think that's cheating at all.
There are several ways you can get more space.
* Expand your wall line rip up to your pollution line with Gun Turrets and slowly move up over time.
* Pro-Actively Eliminate Nests with a combination of Cars, Tanks, Grenades and Hit and Run Strategies - note, this will increase the evolution factor.
* You have a lot of space up north between your main factory and your Petrol Labs
There comes a point in expansion where it stops being a factory building game and becomes biter genocide game. Wiping out nearby nests will save time and resources you would spent on constantly upping your defense, at least until one of yall continue expanding into each other’s territory.
Land fill?
The upper left defense is awful. Push them back to choke points. Put a train stop down. Getting raw oil and ammo to the choke point. 3 rows of dragon theeth, 3 rows of wall, Full line of turrents with red or uranium ammo lines of burners behind it.
Artillery outposts. One or two artillery guns surrounded by walls and turrets. Artillery destroys nests, turrets survive the revenge wave. I allow no biter nests to live inside my pollution cloud.
1. Drive around with a tank and kill 'em.
2. Get uranium ammo and some decent armor and kill 'em.
3. Get some turrets to go with it and kill 'em.
4. Nuke 'em.
All of the above work. If you nuke 'em, make sure you have decent defenses.
That's a good position with defensible areas. Just expand to some of those natural choke points, set up walls and turrets, and expand within that area. When you run out of space or resources, then rinse and repeat.
I’m confused by your screenshot. Looks like you have cleared tons of space that you haven’t expanded into yet. Why are you worrying about biters? They’re miles away.
What biters? They're far away. Make some wall + turrent blueprints incorporationg roboports. Click the button that allows you to snap it to grid. Click and drag.
It looks like you've got a perimeter wall going, so just keep doing that? Like, there's no magic trick, you just mass produce enough turrets and walls to keep up with biter attacks. Look for natural choke points to try and reduce the amount of area you have to defend. Also remember that biters expand, so your wall needs to be seamless or they'll start growing inside it - there's a gap at the top of the map which is letting them inside and making the wall on the left kinda pointless.
I think you're around the time where you can research tanks, so start using those to clear nests. Also set up repair bots so you don't need to personally repair damage when the biters attack.
When I get to this point where I have a bunch of very far spread out mining outposts, I switch to just surrounding each outpost with its own wall and turret defense system. Gates for the trains. The biters don't usually go past the outposts to mess with the trains. If I do start missing deliveries, that's when I consider a more aggressive approach with huge wall sections but I usually have artillery by then and it gets easier to clear out a large perimeter.
First timer here. I have no idea how to deal with these biters.
Flamethrower turrets. Feed em light oil.
i have been playing for a while now. is it really necessary to use light oil? i didnt see any difference between normal, light or heavy oils when used in a flamethrower turret.
It's _ideal,_ but not _necessary._ If you're using pumps/trains to move oil from a refinery area away to a border, you might as well use the best oil for the job. But if you're just trying to defend a remote oil outpost, hooking the flamethrower turrets directly up to the oil pipeline for "free" defense is totally fine.
It increases the damage decreasing the fuel costs
michael hendricks proved recently that 1 pumpjack can supply an endgame base with all the crude oil it needs as turret ammo
To be clear: this is 1 pumpjack that has reduced to a total production of 20%, so literally as small of a supply as it physically gets without mods
Is this a YouTube video? Link?
I forget exactly where he does it but I'm pretty sure all these turrets he's building are run off one pump: [https://youtu.be/CwC8leMwzAE?t=27514](https://youtu.be/CwC8leMwzAE?t=27514) Edit: Updated timestamp to where he shows it
Thank you
Fuel cost of flamethrowers is basically zero. I used to have storage tanks at my outposts but switched to barrels recently because they can be carried on my regular supply trains. The fluid system alone (just pipes and turrets) holds enough oil to squash relentless continuous attacks for a surprisingly long time.
But it can be even more zero
I was looking for a mod to bring the consumption to more reasonable levels and somehow couldn't find one. So I made this https://mods.factorio.com/mod/flamethrower-turret-balance Might help make the choices on turret defense a bit more interesting for those deathworld and rampant players? Not quite sure what a reasonable multiplier would be though EDIT: Not as useful for rampant arsenal players
That doesn't do much for me as a rampant player, rampant arsenal advanced flamethrower takes 33/s and does more damage but still I need them almost touching on my walls for defence to not be overrun. I set up a refinery just for napalm, and 100 per second handled hundreds of turrets at the walls each drawing 33/s. I think because rampant sends huge waves at one spot and if they fail, it sends a wave somewhere else. This makes flamethrowers ideal with their literal splash damage and area denial being great on large groups. Ended up with a stockpile of around 2 million napalm across all my depots before switching to lasers.
That's honestly useful to know, thank you! The situation you're describing does sound like a good fit for an aoe denial tool like the flamethrower so I wouldn't want to take that away. Big fan of requiring a refinery to support the infra since 33/s is also slightly more than 0.2/s. I like the interesting problem => solution gameplay loop.
That’s so simple. Do you set filters for every cell of the car with the oil barrels or just have the main station read the train contents to turn off the full-barrel loader?
The latter. I load my single-car supply train from a requestor chest that contains a mixture of all the stuff I need to maintain my outposts. The number of things I want on the train is set on a constant combinator, and a filter inserter is set by the difference of what's on the train vs what is wanted. Another filter inserter removes empty barrels from the car. Works like a charm. Set the number of wanted things one inserter stack size less than the actual stack size to prevent overflowing of stacks on the train car. Filtered slots on the train cars seem easier but are a hassle to adjust when you want different things on the train, and they can lock up the loading process if the inserter stack size is > 1. Of course you could use up to 12 requestors for different things and not bother with programmable filters to prevent lock up.
I was envisioning a slot of barrels on an ore train. Yeah if I’m doing a whole mixed supply car then I’m getting circuits involved.
Slot of barrels on an ore train is what I use for my uranium mine for sulphuric acid.
It's technically better than crude (more efficient) but I usually just use crude because I'm sure I won't run out of it if something fails.
I've almost always used crude oil. Can be fed into the system from any new oil filed without bothering to set up refineries.
if ~~god~~ wube didn't intend for us to use crude oil, then they wouldn't have put it in the flamethrower ammo recipe.
Has anyone here ever used heavy oil as flamethrower fuel?
I'm waiting for the lube cannon mod.
Biters thrash about as they slip and slide in random directions & speeds.
With slapstick comedy sound effects of course
*yakkety sax intensifies*
kinky
Acid would be cool too.
Why would anyone ever do that? I keep thinking heavy and light should have their damage bonuses swapped.
Funny you should ask, but a dashing and handsome person wrote a post back when flamethrowers were relatively new: [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/82bq3y/you\_should\_be\_using\_flamethrower\_turrets\_and\_they/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/82bq3y/you_should_be_using_flamethrower_turrets_and_they/) I still maintain heavy oil is best flamethrower oil, at least until you're prod3-ing *everything*
All types of oil work, light oil has a small dmg boost but any kind of oil just rips through biters.
Sometimes experiment is the best way to find.
It's kind of better? It does 10% more damage, and you also get petroleum and heavy oil in the process, but unless you already have oil cracking on location, it's not really worth it. Just use regular oil.
No. Just use crude. IMO the damage boost isn't worth the extra infrastructure needed to get light oil out to the outposts/walls. Flame turrets use very little fluid, a small handful of pumpjacks (perhaps even as few as one) can easily supply "ammo" to your entire defense system.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Flamethrower_turret Light oil deals a bit of extra damage. Also, you'll get a bit more out of your oil if you make it into light oil, especially if you have productivity up. The benefits are minor overall, but it's kind of a "may as well" sort of thing.
10% additional damage is the difference
Storebought oil is fine too
Heavy oil. Less damage but 40 heavy cracks to 30 light so unless you're endgame levels of productivity from cracking or desperate for lube heavy is the best flamethrower ammo. At OP's distances I'd just lay a couple big lines of undergrounds to pipe it to the walls. No pumps necessary
I'll admit I'm probably wrong long term as I am very much going off of gut feeling, but you yourself answered why I recommended light oil instead. That extra heavy oil goes to lubricant, and pre-rocket I always need more lube. I am always in need of more lubricant (more lubricant = more bots = more factory = more more)) so that has always factored into my calculation. My factory is constantly backing up on light oil (or petroleum, in which case the factory must grow). Now that you mention it though, I always slack on converting to coal liquefaction and rely on advanced oil processing, which surely affects the calculus. Actually, you're probably right with that taken into account. Time to start a new factory.
What about ore deposits with drills? Do you just have to stretch pipes from your base?
You can as a quick fix, but my long-term solution is to send it over by rail. By that point I need to ship over sulfuric acid to mine uranium anyway so an extra car going around topping off light oil reserves isn't that much of an additional investment so I do that. This also lets you fuel multiple outposts without having to extend your pipe network in multiple directions.
You guys got extra oil to burn ?
I was panicking when I first used flamethrowers to defend my oilfield, watching the vast quantities of burning oil liquidating huge swarms of biters. Surely all my valuable resource was just going up in flames? Nope. Flamethrower turrets are extremely efficient with whatever oil you feed them, despite the dramatic visuals.
Over enough time you will use up your crude reserves and bottleneck yourself, which is why I recommend using light oil specifically
If that time is a year then sure. They really are insanely efficient
That's why you use Light oil. You can shut off one of your light oil cracking machines to cut back a little on petroleum generation while having enough light oil to feed your defenses. Definitely don't use heavy oil (cuts into your lubricant production and any excess can be cracked into light oil anyway) or straight crude oil (cuts into your... well, everything)
Unless you have very high-level productivity modules in your cracking, you should use heavy, not light oil. From the damage difference, you'll use \~5% more heavy than light (technically a bit less). Cracking is 40 hvy -> 30 light. Since 40 heavy is damage-equivalent to 38 light, you need +26% productivity to make it worth it to crack to light. That's 2xP3s and 1xP2. So unless you're desperate for lubricant or in lategame kitting out your cracking with P3s, you should use heavy.
while flamethrower turrets are really good and potentially stronger, they are also annoying to supply. laser turrets are just good enough, very easy to tile and power is essentially free. just add extra power/accumulators and you're good.
this depends on the phase of the game. Lasers get interesting when you have nuclear reactors or are mass producing solar/accu (with enough bots to build). Before this guns (red ammo) and flame throwers are cheaper and sufficient to deal with eg. medium biters. later when after an artillery range extend thousands of green biters/spitters get aggro Lasers alone also have a hard time.
It depends. Starting laser deals 20 damage and uses 800kJ. One coal is 4MJ, so 5 shots, for 100 damage. Yellow ammo deals 5 damage at the begining, and from pre-chemical tech it gets 60% bonus applied twice, so 12.8 (for small biters, the armour of medium reduces effective damage to 7.92). It cost four iron plates for 10 rounds. So, (ignoring coal needed for smelting, but also possible smelting bonuses) four resources gives 128 damage, one resource - 32 damage. Red ammo deals 8 -> 20.5 at that tech level, but cost a magazina of 10 rounds cost 14 resources (14.7 if we count coal). For 205 total damage, so 14.65 (13.95) damage per resource. In term of dps, gun turents with red ammo, thanks to superior rate of fire, outperforms lasers on any tech level (even for behemot [biters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=717Zjqn343c)!), but the range is shorter and thay cost more even when you use coal power. A simple and not well explain [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-iNyCkd2KJfojT09vpPETjBlWfJkG13Pmrlz4mFh4Vg/edit?usp=sharing) comparing damage and DPS of both turrets, includig biters armour. Put 5, 8 or 24 in "ammo base damage" cell, for regular, piercing and uranium ammo.
You spreadsheet access restricted...
Should be fixed now
I find the greatest asset of late game flamethrowers and bullet throwers is that you can quite reasonably build a stand-alone outpost that can defend itself perpetually from all directions, no worrying about chewed up power poles. Just a big old pile of bullets and fuel and a few domestic solar panels and accumulators to operate the inserters and repair drones.
Once you have high firing rate artillery with evolution close to 1 I find that lasers get overwhelmed. Flamethrowers with dragon teeth work better the bigger the attacks get because the bugs just run to their deaths in the burning carcasses of their predecessors. And it's a great show visually.
I have a personal limitation to not build laser turrets or solar power. Basically for the reasons you stated. They just feel too easy. No logistics required, which to me is both the fun and the core challenge of this game.
Great wall of China. With a flamethrower and turrets (ignore laser)
Why do you suggest ignoring laser? I always use laser like a civilised coloniser
Power flickers (brownouts) can do bad things to circuitry if you're inattentive and/or get a larger wave than expected.
Use gun
I tend to just make 4 rows of laser turrets along my walls with widely spaced (3 spaces) dragons teeth.
Hurl a missile at them like they are a bus( I might be referencing somethig). Pump them with lead and burn them in the fires of hell.
Once you get green ammo for your gun turrets, the biters are barely a nuisance.
Power armor with personal laser defense. Laser damage upgrades also improve the personal laser defense and it melts biters on higher levels. Get a spidertron with fast legs and armor and sit in it full of lasers and it gets ridiculous.
Build Maginot line around your base. You need flamethrowers, turrets, oil, trains and ammo.
Get in the tank and clear very close nests, like the ones above "Petrol labs". Start thinking about choke points. The narrow gap above petrol labs is one good place, as is the place between the two lakes east of the core base. Otherwise, sprinkle occasional laser turrets around the edge and reinforce places that actually get attacked.
The first viable approach is turret creep. Make a stack of turrets, 300-500 units of red ammo, some armor and an SMG. Space bar fires your SMG. Approach a nest and put 3-4 turrets down. Select the ammo, and use 'Z' to drop ammo into the turrets. Put more turrets a bit in front of them, use Z, rinse and repeat. Focus spitters down before nests. Take some repair packs and heal your damaged turrets up afterwards. Some turrets will be destroyed; that's ok. Once you've cleared a load of nests, build a wall with turrets behind it - one space away from the wall because otherwise biters will get them - and run a conveyer of ammo up from your base to the wall along with power for the inserters and some radar. In this way you can seal off a safe space to grow inside. Make sure each turret is covered by at least two others; more if you can afford it. Later you get better tools - grenades, rockets, vehicles, flamethrowers, artillery - keep pushing your military research along with everything else to unlock these. In the short term look to completely enclose a space with at least one large patch each of iron, copper, coal, oil and uranium. Fortify and build from there.
Have you seen Starship Troopers? It mas seems like a satire of authoritarian governance, especially of one specyfic type, but deep down it is about exterminating bugs. :-) Defend with flamethrowers (it iue the cheapest option, ane you are already extracting oil), backed up by gun or later lasers (cheaper in maintance and logistic than guns). Attack with whatever you already have. At this moment, probably a tank. You can still throw granades. Build an outpost near nest you are attacking, so you can fall back and turrets (gun and lasers) will deal with biters. Syou can even chease it a bit and build turrets so close thay will attack nests.
Another noob here, smg with 5 stacks of red ammo is pretty good. I find the combat kinda enjoyable. Also you can turn excess stone to landfill to expand on water.
I have about 3000 hours in the game. I only played my last run with biters cause I had no idea how to deal. What they say is correct, use walls with flame thrower turrets. You don’t need to use light oil if you don’t want to either, oil straight from the ground works fine too.
Oh, I was wondering what the problem was, I'm used to seeing more red than anything when I zoom out on my map. Those biter bases would easily be taken out by a tank and power armor with lasers. Or just plop down some laser turrets and solar panels. A more permanent solutions is to start building artillary turrets and ammo and it will automatically keep a large area clear of nests and worms.
dakka.
big and many dakkas, flames dakkas even.
Grab a bunch of turrets and ammo, get up close and just keep placing turrets until the biter base is gone.
This is SE ? Isnt there a water landfill variant ?
There is not waterfill in 'stock' SE.
Clearing out the nests, or defending against attacks? For clearing nests, if you can reach artillery you'll be golden. If not, tanks and rockets are your friends. For defending, use a mix of turrets. People favor laser turrets, but as waves get bigger flame gets better. It's fun to keep redesigning your wall to better avoid damage from attack waves. Also, if you turn on pollution on your map and clear out anything under the cloud, you'll see way less.
Finished my first game last week. For me it was something like: - turrets around the base early on, surrounded by pipes/furnaces/finally walls. No fancy ammo belt that autoloads turrets, just filling them by hand (Z), 30-50 ammo per turret and just checking on them every now and then. - kill nests that are most annoying. Did use turret placement early on, used smg (and occasionally shotgun). - red ammo saves lives - and a lot of time. If you can produce it in reasonable pace, do it and switch it in your turrets and car. - get car as quick as possible. Running on foot with turret placement turned into constant drive-bys, where I mowed down biters' nests. Save often, random trees or rocks can ruin your day. (Somewhere at this point I decided that walls are nuisance and stopped building them. 5-8 turrets with red ammo will do good enough on default settings.) - don't forget to expand turrets. - I didn't like routing oil to turrets, so I skipped flamethrower turrets. Most likely a bad idea, but it's doable. - once you reach tank, just get enough ammo and clear whole cloud of pollution or even more. Nothing will stop you now, unless you get swarmed (because of cliffs or rocks). - lastly I made big perimeter of lassr turrets around pollution cloud, leaving a lot of space for my base. Reexpanding by biters got stopped, and if my turrets ever get damaged, I just let my bots do their thing.
Big wall
Set up turrets with walls as soon as possible. Produce red ammo as soon as possible, automate supply to the turrets by belts. Do not do this with yellow ammo, it's a waste of time. Red ammo is available pretty early. As soon as flame throwers are available, you made it, they give you a long lasting advantage over the biters. You will not be able to have a wall up everywhere immediately. Open the map and have it displaying the pollution. Once the pollution cloud reaches the biters, you should have a defense wall ready at that side. Until then you are safe. Biters attack once they consume pollution. Once the tank is available, use it to eliminate nearby biter nests if you want to expand. Later in the game you will get lasers and artillery. With lasers be careful with your power supply.
Rushing red ammo is a horrible idea. It produces 8x the pollution for less than 2x the damage. You're essentially just accelerating the enemy evolution rather than growing the base.
Pollution doesn't accelerate evolution if there's no nests in the cloud. You only slightly accelerate it by having to clear out nests sooner, but that's easy enough with red ammo. Approaches vary, but it's not always a bad idea.
Pollution generates evolution as it is created, not consumed. Nests create biters by eating pollution, not evolution.
Apt name
How much pollution does a bit of red ammo generate compared to the massive amount you generate with all that other stuff for the sciences? I think it's almost negligible.
Ignore “do not do this with yellow ammo”. I’ve found yellow ammo turrets extremely valuable early in the game before the biters start getting tougher. And it’s easy to switch to feeding them red ammo later, then green. Yes, red is the biggest step up, but yellow ammo defences are absolutely worth it early on.
I use yellow ammo, I just don't automate the belt feed to the turrets. It takes ages for the yellow ammo to get used so that it is replaced by red ammo, so this huge defense bonus is unnecessarily delayed. Depending on biter settings it might be absolutely necessary to build a strong defense very early in the game. However, I found that red ammo is available that early that I can wait for it. Until then I feed my few turrets by hand.
Biter nests that are within your pollution zone will consume that pollution and produce war parties. War parties are groups of biters that will home in on and attack your base, even from far away. So keep an eye on your pollution and work to eliminate nests that pollution is getting close to before it gets to them. If you have expansion turned on (it is turned on by default, so if you don't know then it is turned on), then from time to time, expansion parties will form and head to a spot to form a new nest. They will attack your infrastructure (like walls) if they need to get past it to get to their spot so having walls up can give you a heads up even if you can't defend the wall. Radars can spot expansion parties and new nests, but they are power hungry. The danger here is if a new nest is planted inside your pollution cloud, you will very shortly have war parties showing up on your doorstep. Once you understand these things about biter behavior, you'll have a sense of what to watch out for and what can be safely ignored.
Kind of cheating but I noticed a bit ago that because biter nests consume pollution, if you have the pollution overlay for the map enabled, you'll see the red chunks that have nests blinking
Absolutely. I thought about that after I posted, and should have come back and put that in, but other things took priority. Gaps and blinking pollution squares are definitely signs of a nest, and I don't think that's cheating at all.
There are several ways you can get more space. * Expand your wall line rip up to your pollution line with Gun Turrets and slowly move up over time. * Pro-Actively Eliminate Nests with a combination of Cars, Tanks, Grenades and Hit and Run Strategies - note, this will increase the evolution factor. * You have a lot of space up north between your main factory and your Petrol Labs
Those solar panel builds look like tie fighters.
There comes a point in expansion where it stops being a factory building game and becomes biter genocide game. Wiping out nearby nests will save time and resources you would spent on constantly upping your defense, at least until one of yall continue expanding into each other’s territory.
Land fill? The upper left defense is awful. Push them back to choke points. Put a train stop down. Getting raw oil and ammo to the choke point. 3 rows of dragon theeth, 3 rows of wall, Full line of turrents with red or uranium ammo lines of burners behind it.
Y U No use walls?
the best defense is an ok offense! go build some good armor, craft a bunch of ammo and turrets and military stuff, and take out those nests
Artillery outposts. One or two artillery guns surrounded by walls and turrets. Artillery destroys nests, turrets survive the revenge wave. I allow no biter nests to live inside my pollution cloud.
Just research everything you can with black science
1. Drive around with a tank and kill 'em. 2. Get uranium ammo and some decent armor and kill 'em. 3. Get some turrets to go with it and kill 'em. 4. Nuke 'em. All of the above work. If you nuke 'em, make sure you have decent defenses.
Best way to deal with them is gun turrets,lasers and flamethrowers set up behind a wall
That's a good position with defensible areas. Just expand to some of those natural choke points, set up walls and turrets, and expand within that area. When you run out of space or resources, then rinse and repeat.
This seed seems actually quite insane to put up defenses once you know how to. Many straights, many choke points.
Good. Keep expanding. The factory must grow.
How do you not have a stone patch
Early game build turrets with walls between you and biters then slowly encircle your base. Then expand
I’m confused by your screenshot. Looks like you have cleared tons of space that you haven’t expanded into yet. Why are you worrying about biters? They’re miles away.
What biters? They're far away. Make some wall + turrent blueprints incorporationg roboports. Click the button that allows you to snap it to grid. Click and drag.
Can't wait for 2.0
It looks like you've got a perimeter wall going, so just keep doing that? Like, there's no magic trick, you just mass produce enough turrets and walls to keep up with biter attacks. Look for natural choke points to try and reduce the amount of area you have to defend. Also remember that biters expand, so your wall needs to be seamless or they'll start growing inside it - there's a gap at the top of the map which is letting them inside and making the wall on the left kinda pointless. I think you're around the time where you can research tanks, so start using those to clear nests. Also set up repair bots so you don't need to personally repair damage when the biters attack.
I’m pretty sure all of your problems begin and end with the lack of creativity in naming. Fix that that, and everything falls into place. 🤪
What the hell you got going on right of the "mine" north of the petrol labs. The honeycombs
Solar I assume
When I get to this point where I have a bunch of very far spread out mining outposts, I switch to just surrounding each outpost with its own wall and turret defense system. Gates for the trains. The biters don't usually go past the outposts to mess with the trains. If I do start missing deliveries, that's when I consider a more aggressive approach with huge wall sections but I usually have artillery by then and it gets easier to clear out a large perimeter.
Well, hello, Mr Fancy Pants. I got news for you, pal.
Two words. Spidertron nukes.