Defence economy balance

[jodokus31]

Flame turrets are good, but they have to be backed by something. The nice thing about landmines, is they don't need to be backed by anything. Also, you can tactically deploy land mines with minimal resource commitment until you can tech up to artillery.

Landmines are probably yet better than flame turrets, but lets check flameturrets.

The thing I see in DW, if you get to flame turrets, you instantly have a tool to melt down all kinds of biters and with every group size. 90 aoe damage/sec. in 2.5 radius, +100/s per fire sticker + 13/s per fire on the ground. Additionally, that huge range + biters have no resistance to fire.

Lets assume, you are at evolution 25-30% until you reach flame turrets. Before you had big problems with huge waves of small, medium biters and spitters. 6 or 8 turrets firing a lot of iron to get them down and leave some destroyed walls and most likely also fallen turrets destroyed by spitters.
As soon you get the flame turrets, all those problems are more or less gone. because such a huge wave is melted down in no time, when the fire hits.
Of course, the initial cost is expensive, you need a wall in front, you need piping, some turrets to back up and the fire stream has a latency. But you hardly need any oil compared to the iron for ammo you used before. This tool makes you more or less invincible. The rest is just work

[shopt]

Reading this thread has been interesting. One thing I think that has been overlooked with gun turrets vs lasers regarding outposts, is resilience. Laser turrets at an outpost are vulnerable to biters chewing on your poles, meaning you need to either:

• * Set up redundant electricity connections
  * Produce electricity at the outpost (takes up space, meaning you need to defend a longer wall
  * Store electricity/steam at the outpost (takes up space, but less so)
  * Accept the risk or somehow protect your poles.

Storing ammo is much easier than storing energy. True you still need enough energy to run your inserters but that's orders of magnitude less than running lasers.

[jodokus31]

Reading this thread has been interesting. One thing I think that has been overlooked with gun turrets vs lasers regarding outposts, is resilience. Laser turrets at an outpost are vulnerable to biters chewing on your poles, meaning you need to either:

• * Set up redundant electricity connections
  * Produce electricity at the outpost (takes up space, meaning you need to defend a longer wall
  * Store electricity/steam at the outpost (takes up space, but less so)
  * Accept the risk or somehow protect your poles.

Storing ammo is much easier than storing energy. True you still need enough energy to run your inserters but that's orders of magnitude less than running lasers.

That's a valid point, but doesn't affect running cost (economy balance) that much, unless you also calculate rebuilding of outposts due to power outage

Every defence option has some disadvantages for handling it automated:
- gun turrets : feed ammo
- laser turrets : lots of secure energy
- flamer : pipes and oil nearby, also wall is quite important.
- landmines : bots for replenishment

[Koub]

Storing ammo is much easier than storing energy. True you still need enough energy to run your inserters but that's orders of magnitude less than running lasers.

And if you want full resilience with ammo turrets, use burner inserters. A single nuclear fuel cell will give over 17000 burner inserter swings. That's a lot of damage with uranium rounds.
Alternatively, feeding regular inserters with local solar panels + accus is also very cheap.

[shopt]

...

That's a valid point, but doesn't affect running cost (economy balance) that much, unless you also calculate rebuilding of outposts due to power outage

Which I guess is where I'm not sure I accept the premise of this thread, which seems to be that all 3 turret types should be economically balanced. Turret balance needs to be considered holistically across economics, logistics (both of producing and operating turrets), and fragility.

[BicycleEater]

Reading this thread has been interesting. One thing I think that has been overlooked with gun turrets vs lasers regarding outposts, is resilience. Laser turrets at an outpost are vulnerable to biters chewing on your poles,

Ah, but you see, this problem only weighs in on the equation if you have the foresight to notice this problem.
In all seriousness though, I don't find this a major factor - in my games, I ignore it, and assume that the biters wont attack the power poles (which they usually don't). And when they do, I add loads more power poles in the hopes that they can't kill all of them.
Also it takes so long to be a problem, that I'll usually have artillery before they cut off any outposts (unless there are some really unfortunate biter-routings), and fixing the problem isn't that hard in the early game, as its so rare.
This is also one of the reasons I use big power poles - they have much more health, and are sparser, so get hit less.
Also, if you are that scared of loosing power poles, it isn't hard to defend them a bit, with a few lasers and some wall, also in the late game, I tend to have roboport coverage going to my remote bases, which can repair power poles, and all of this is still easier than building an entire ammo factory/distribution system, with the trains that would involve.

Which I guess is where I'm not sure I accept the premise of this thread, which seems to be that all 3 turret types should be economically balanced. Turret balance needs to be considered holistically across economics, logistics (both of producing and operating turrets), and fragility.

The holistic balance was my interpretation - in fact in factorio, I consider very little of the balancing to be economic - the logistics is far more important.
In this way, the gun turrets deserve to be far better, as routing power is so much easier than making belts everywhere. Flamethrowers satisfy this, as they take some routing for the pipes, but are more powerful in exchange. Gun turrets are a pain to do logistically, as unlike pipes, belts have direction, and are much more expensive (or have really short underground for the cheaper ones), and the ammo needs a relatively big factory devoted to it, as you are unlikely to be making ammo for anything else, whereas power and oil, you make anyway.

This is all from the perspective of a slow-run of default, where, in the late-game, the actual resource cost of the weapons is minimal, but the time-cost of setting it up is huge, unless you use lasers, in which case it is really easy.

[shopt]

Reading this thread has been interesting. One thing I think that has been overlooked with gun turrets vs lasers regarding outposts, is resilience. Laser turrets at an outpost are vulnerable to biters chewing on your poles,

Ah, but you see, this problem only weighs in on the equation if you have the foresight to notice this problem.
In all seriousness though, I don't find this a major factor - in my games, I ignore it, and assume that the biters wont attack the power poles (which they usually don't). And when they do, I add loads more power poles in the hopes that they can't kill all of them.
Also it takes so long to be a problem, that I'll usually have artillery before they cut off any outposts (unless there are some really unfortunate biter-routings), and fixing the problem isn't that hard in the early game, as its so rare.
This is also one of the reasons I use big power poles - they have much more health, and are sparser, so get hit less.
Also, if you are that scared of loosing power poles, it isn't hard to defend them a bit, with a few lasers and some wall, also in the late game, I tend to have roboport coverage going to my remote bases, which can repair power poles, and all of this is still easier than building an entire ammo factory/distribution system, with the trains that would involve.

I was ignoring it too until I had problems. I had an iron outpost around 40 chunks from everything else. I connected it up with a rail and some large poles. It was generating enough pollution to bring in the occasional small attack party of biters, easily dispatched by the single line of laser turrets I had behind a single tile wall. Somewhere on the connecting line I had run my poles and rails through a choke of cliffs and forest. An artillery base aggroed a heap of biters which pathed through the choke ripping up my rails and poles. The "harmless" attacks at my now defenseless and blind outpost caused a fair bit of damage, before I could get a train to the location and reconnect the wires. I put some walls around the poles thinking that would encourage the biters to path around, but that wasn't the case and this scenario repeated itself one more time before my artillery had cleared out the area for good.

Now did I play poorly there? Yeah I think I made some mistakes. If I was more knowledgeable about biter pathing I could maybe have modified the choke to get the biters to path around my stuff. The swarm was too big for "a few lasers and some wall". Maybe I could have built a defensive outpost at the choke, but I'm definitely not experienced enough to predict all the biter pathing issues along my 40 chunk rail line. Running more poles may have worked, and that's something I'll consider in the future (though the biters did eat 3 consecutive poles). Maybe if I placed my artillery base better I could have avoided drawing biters through that choke.

So maybe defending power lines isn't an issue for most people and my opinion is coloured by the issues I have had as a relatively new player. I'm now quite paranoid about using a laser-only defense anywhere that's not well connected to my main factory, despite the logistical ease of only needing to run poles to get it to work.

[BicycleEater]

...

I have had those kinds of problems, but I tend to avoid them in a few ways:
1: have a secondary set of power poles on the route out to a remote base, close enough to the first that they interconnect, so that you can lose quite a few before it becomes problematic.
2: use artillery trains, not turrets, as artillery aggros enemies to itself, which can result in different routings, so using trains you can aggro enemies to the nearest base, so they don't go through any of your stuff. This way you can attract almost all the enemy to remote bases, and barely have to defend your main base .
3: in the late game, use artillery and roboports to build a few super remote walls, and use these to fully enclose your base, and claim tons of land, then you never really need outposts.

The events you describe are rare, so while stressful, they don't matter in the end. Also while attacks like that cause damage, I tend to find I have enough spare lasers, mining drills and belts, that they aren't that hard to repair - the hard bit about setting up a remote base isn't usually the actual materials, but instead the logistical difficulty of making the trains go there properly etc. (particularly for the first few outposts, as these require an entire railway system which you probably didn't have before). This means that even if the base were completely destroyed, it wouldn't take that long to rebuild it, where the time to set up ammunition transport etc. is huge.

Also for gun turrets you still need power for the inserters, which means you will need an isolated electricity grid (which is always a pain), and the guns will still need more repair/replace than the equivalent lasers. It is also a challenge to make the guns good enough that they don't just immediately fall when attacked, particularly as they are so rubbish.
Another approach to fix what you are describing is flamethrowers, which still need less micromanaging than guns, particularly for a mining base, as then the fluid wagons wouldn't try to pick up the ore, which ammo carriages would, so it is easier to do in parallel. (Also for an oil base, you can just use the oil).
This all avoids the difficulty of setting up a proper ammo factory, as oil is far easier to get than ammo.

[alexz]

Will add my 10 cents about land mines. After trying different approaches, I think that the mines are the best weapon since researched till the begemoths appear. For both defense and nest clearing.
With mines, you do not need anything else at all. In DW Marathon game, I still got best results with mines. The strategy is following:
1. Research turrets, then walls, while making some ammo. Put all those in small outposts/bastions around your base, no need to have a solid wall.
2. Research straight to landmines, still making yellow ammo and putting it manually to the turrets. Bastions of 16 turrets with double wall withstand the waves of small and medium biters well.
3. When got mines, pipe the oil from the nearest well, set up 2-3 AM1-s making those mines. One basic oil refinery + one sulfur plant + one explosive plant is enough.
4. Scatter the mines on the biters incoming ways and around bastions manually (I am not a super fast guy, I usually have also small spitters at this time) - this will reduce the ammo supply needed to almost zero.
5. When have some hundreds of mines - grab them, go to nearby nests. On approach, drop the mines ahead of you with small strokes of 5-7 mines each. The mines act also as distractors, spitters and worms spit on them, destroy some of them, but some mines survive and kill everyone. 300-400 mines is usually enough to wipe a nest of 20-30 spawners. Without tanks, lasers, rockets, grenades, shotguns, SMG-s, and in the light armor.
6. Research to the the construction bots. Cover the base border with roboports, set up mines output to the provider chests. Blueprint dense minefields around your base, the mines are cheap! Again, you can create any form of a border, without need of ammo or oil supply, as with gun/flame turrets. Way before the expensive laser ones.
7. Forget about the biters and spitters till begemoths For expansion, just run around the nests, throwing the mines inside massively. Do not let worms target you, distract them with the mines. That's it.
Usually, after getting the conbots, I research the railway, make quite a large perimeter of rails. On those rails there are small stations with 1 roboport and 1 provider chest where the train unloads the mines (and also bots+repair packs to roboport if needed), and the dense band of mines (6-8 rows of them) outside the railway.
And then you can build anything you want in that area - more powerful reseach base with all 6 or 7 sciences, nuclear plant, artillery, whatever.

[Dmytrozern]

Background
I want to bump this thread and bring it back to the starting point. A lot of people here share their own playstyle. I would instead share my ~1-year public DW-ish multiplayer experience to back up the point, as there is not much "I want it that way" in public if there is a way to make it much more effective. The server usually has 5-15people online, and the style is pretty much DW vanilla(a new, more brutal world is generated after 10-30rockets are launched).

The problem
After almost a year on the server, the defense strategy looks pretty much the same — Ignore bullets, rush grenades, rush flamers, done. It makes sense since even with a 200-300% tech price, it's cheaper to defend with grenades before you get oil. And bullets become unneeded after flamers are in place. But since flamers are super strong and do AOF damage - there is no real difference if you are attacked by a horde or a huge horde. And building them is not that hard, even in outposts — load 10k oil in a tank and forget about defending this outpost till the end of the game, assuming you have some walls for bots to replace.

Next, rockets can be launched before green bugs or not far into green Evo, where flamers alone still work like charm, so there is no need to invest resources and time into lasers, power, and tech. The same with mines. They might be even better, but why do new infrastructure if current works?

To sum it up, ammo turrets are not used due to the ease to get to flamers, lasers are not used because flamers alone are enough. And it's even easier in default bugs settings. So why have mechanics that are useless?

If one weapon is superior, then you don't need the other.
If they are comparable, then you have the choice.

Suggested solution
1. Nerf flamers with more consumption, less damage, and less range.
2. As Nefrums proposed, increasing the number of bullets in a magazine to 32. Also, a range boost would be nice, since it's not really logical for something that is spitted to fly more distance than a bullet.

Result
Expecting a result of usage of all mechanics throughout the game. Like it was said, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. Some places are guarded with flamers, some with lasers, and some with ammo, and some require all.

[gGeorg]

2. As Nefrums proposed, increasing the number of bullets in a magazine to 32.

Ammo clip with 10 bulets means, tower need another clip every second, or less. It means, inserter feeding ammo is basically sensor of biter presence. It is VERY useful for automation and combinator contraptions. If you look for some economy balance, then make it so, you produce 3 clips for current price. Bigger clip removes a feature mg tower as sensor.

Also consider another values than only HP dmg. Flame turret slow down enemies, it means, lasers are more efficient because of more time to shoot. I would recommend balance fiire tower to more of utility weapon for crowd controll. e.g. tone dmg down but rise up slow down effect. Perhaps add fear effect? This way the need of combined defence is highlighted. Also qq that one weapon is more powerful than other becomes irrelevant, because you need them all to be successful.

[BlueTemplar]

Also, as already mentioned, bigger ammo magazines would make gun turret pushing even *more* overpowered than it is now.

(Maybe it would be fine for red (not yellow and not even green) ammo only, because you indeed have grenades at that point anyway ?
And if less than 32 bullets per turret was enough, maybe there was no need for a warning anyway ?)

[...]
Also, a range boost would be nice, since it's not really logical for something that is spitted to fly more distance than a bullet.
[...]

Nauvis' "aliens" are not logical anyway. Gameplay >>> Realism.

----

Yeah, I'd like to expand on this (from the first post) :

[...]
Given mid game tech level. red/green/military/blue science available, but not yellow/purple
[...]
To me it feels wrong that gun turrets require 8x the power as laser turrets do. The infrastructure required to feed gun turrets with ammo dwarfs all other kind of defense. I still do believe that players should be encouraged to move to better kinds of defenses, but the gap between using gun turrets and flame turrets is just to large.
Flame turrets is available early, requires a totally insignificant amount of fuel and has way better single target dps in addition to aoe damage. This makes defense very trivial from early in the game, if you use them.

With the new balance that has stabilized towards the end of the 0.17 beta, I'd say that with laser turrets and conbots having been moved to blue science, has been made even clearer the gap between :

- "Early-Mid Game" : first oil, but no blue science yet. Includes Flame Turrets and manually laid Minefields.
and
- "Mid Game" : blue research, except Nuclear. Arguably also includes the expensive tier 3 & 4 physical projectile damage techs (even though they need milsci, but not blue sci yet).

(I would also suggest that being able to afford & set up complete roboport coverage (electric drain !) and/or vast solar fields with accumulator backups belongs to even later than this "Mid Game" phase, and so is indeed offtopic.)

And so flame turrets are not just so much better than lasers or gun turrets (with damage upgrade 2 at best, so especially against blue biters, which are a dreaded fairly hard counter at that point), flame turrets are available much earlier too !
(Even minefields kind of lag flame turrets, because slightly more expensive to research, and require bringing oil and water near each other, which might or might not be straightforward depending on map. Minefields are great in forested areas though. EDIT : But unlike flame turrets, they're not almost free to "operate".)

So by the point where you can get laser turrets (or even minefields !), you could have already had set up a whole flame-based almost impervious defense for quite some time...

Also consider the turret pushing balance :
What kind of boiler overbuilding does it take to assault a blue biter/spitter/worm nest with laser turrets ?
(And what does it do to your pollution levels ? AFAIK pollution from burning flame turret oils is negligible.)
How do laser turrets fare against blue worms ? (Flame turrets, even though they have lower range than blue worms, are *just* long ranged enough and resistant enough for these nest assaults to work well and for the player to stay mostly safe even without modular armor.)

I'm doubtful of the supposed construction high cost : flame turrets work very well even with sparse coverage :

flame_turret_sparse_coverage.png (368.86 KiB) Viewed 9107 times

(Modded, but biters are untouched.)

They're also much more resistant to "biter sabotage" than at least lasers : a completely disconnected flame turret can still fire for 33 seconds (or is that 67 ?)
(Be careful to lay them out so that a destroyed turret doesn't cut your pipeline, but *also* consider connecting (both of !) their tips with underground pipes only (not like in that screenshot) : +50% HP compared to normal pipes.)

----

[...]
Also for gun turrets you still need power for the inserters, which means you will need an isolated electricity grid (which is always a pain), and the guns will still need more repair/replace than the equivalent lasers. It is also a challenge to make the guns good enough that they don't just immediately fall when attacked, particularly as they are so rubbish.
[...]

As already mentioned, it's not mandatory - a bullet & fuel belt with burner inserters is an option
(Though it *is* more fragile to spitter area damage than long inserters - overbuilding to minimize time under fire might be viable until at least behemoth spitters ?)
While for far away outposts, train unload pumps or unbarrelling *do* need electricity.

----

Two other somewhat weird defense options that *might* be appropriate to this stage of the game and that haven't been mentioned yet are :
- train walls
- and... just a ton of walls until you can get there to deal with the threat !

[Dmytrozern]

[...]
Also, a range boost would be nice, since it's not really logical for something that is spitted to fly more distance than a bullet.
[...]

Nauvis' "aliens" are not logical anyway. Gameplay >>> Realism.

I meant flamer "Spit" — poor choice of words. Another idea is to decrease flamer distance to be a biter-aimed weapon only. But it would be nice to be able to prioritize spitters to be targeted first for other turrets tho... However, at this point, it might require much more time and work to rebalance, so it's more of food for thought while developing new expansion.

Also, as already mentioned, bigger ammo magazines would make gun turret pushing even *more* overpowered than it is now.

True. I don't like this type of cheezy tactics like turret creep or mines spam. A bigger startup time for both might be nice change.

[4xel]

To sum it up, ammo turrets are not used due to the ease to get to flamers, lasers are not used because flamers alone are enough. And it's even easier in default bugs settings. So why have mechanics that are useless?

Multiplayer DW marathon is not necessarilly strictly harder than everything else, and even then, it does not mean its solutions are best for other settings.

If you do a single player default setting speed run, rushing grenade can make sense if you have bases to push, but you really do not want to defend with them, sometimes you have to, but any manual defence is a waste of time. This is one way single player is intrinsically harder than multiplayer, time is more scarce and any partial or full automation is worth more, even when it is less ressource efficient.

In particular, you will have to use a lot of gun turrets, even just for temporary defense, and often even to push out the first alien bases. They do feel bad because of how quickly they become inefficient and outdated but they are definitely useful.

[HadesSupreme]

Suggestion:

Normal magazines: no change
Piercing magazines: increase damage to 12, adds +1 range
Uranium magazines: nerf damage to 18, adds +2 range, technology unlock changed to blue/military science.

This makes piercing cost-effective and makes uranium a viable alternative at the same time that flamethrowers and laser turrets unlock. It makes little sense that uranium magazines come so late since it's not actually a nuclear-related technology.

I'm also in favor of greatly increasing flame turret fuel consumption and making lasers energy consumption scale with their DPS.

[FuryoftheStars]

It makes little sense that uranium magazines come so late since it's not actually a nuclear-related technology.

If a change to the tech requirements of uranium ammo were to be done, I could certainly see getting rid of yellow science (thus knocking the military tech requirement down from 4 to 3), but it doesn't make much sense to me to remove the processing tech that creates the material used in it from its requirements.

[HadesSupreme]

It makes little sense that uranium magazines come so late since it's not actually a nuclear-related technology.

If a change to the tech requirements of uranium ammo were to be done, I could certainly see getting rid of yellow science (thus knocking the military tech requirement down from 4 to 3), but it doesn't make much sense to me to remove the processing tech that creates the material used in it from its requirements.

I think it could work either way depending on how much you wanted to change. If you wanted to make a minimalist change then just knock Uranium Ammo down to Mil 3/Uranium Processing requirements. If you wanted to do more, make it so that Uranium was mineable and convertable into U-238 without centrifuges so that Uranium ammo could be developed without Uranium Processing. Or just make it so Uranium Processing was required to use a better recipe that produced U-235 rather than just U-238.

I suppose it doesn't matter TOO much though since Uranium Processing is a relatively cheap technology all things considered.

Also I'd lower the amount of beakers needed for Uranium Ammo from x1000 (R/G/M/B/Y) to something like x400 (R/G/M/B). This would still leave it significantly more expensive than lasers and flamethrowers, but you're paying for the seamless upgrade to your defenses rather than needing to re-engineer an oil line or tons of power production and storage. This would still leave it at x1600 beakers for DW Marathon which would be fairly hard to reach if you wanted to do a bullet-only game, but should still be within the realm of possibility especially if piercing ammo received the buff I suggested.

EDIT: Another question would be what to do with Uranium cannon shells. Could be split off into a separate tech that comes after tanks.

[HadesSupreme]

I should also mention: The reason gun turrets deserve a +1/+2 range increase with better ammo is because they currently have pitiful HP and are essentially glass cannons whose only defense is putting out huge mountain of DPS before a spitter kills them. Spitters already upgrade their range from 13 to 16 over time while gun turrets only have 18. This is enough to just barely keep spitters out of range if you space walls perfectly 16 tiles away from your gun turrets, but the less excess range your turrets have the lower the number of turrets that can focus their fire on incoming targets. This becomes especially a problem with corners where even with the best wall designs only 2-3 turrets can engage an entire wave at a time.

[BlueTemplar]

Finally, an opportunity to cut corners !

[...]
Also, a range boost would be nice, since it's not really logical for something that is spitted to fly more distance than a bullet.
[...]

Nauvis' "aliens" are not logical anyway. Gameplay >>> Realism.

I meant flamer "Spit" — poor choice of words. Another idea is to decrease flamer distance to be a biter-aimed weapon only. But it would be nice to be able to prioritize spitters to be targeted first for other turrets tho... However, at this point, it might require much more time and work to rebalance, so it's more of food for thought while developing new expansion.
[...]

Oh, my bad.

Well, maybe we'll see in the expansion pack either fire-resistant aliens, or maybe even flying aliens which are immune to flame turret streams and/or flame puddles, and/or attack from a range lower than minimum flame turret range ?

To sum it up, ammo turrets are not used due to the ease to get to flamers, lasers are not used because flamers alone are enough. And it's even easier in default bugs settings. So why have mechanics that are useless?

Multiplayer DW marathon is not necessarilly strictly harder than everything else, and even then, it does not mean its solutions are best for other settings.

If you do a single player default setting speed run, rushing grenade can make sense if you have bases to push, but you really do not want to defend with them, sometimes you have to, but any manual defence is a waste of time. This is one way single player is intrinsically harder than multiplayer, time is more scarce and any partial or full automation is worth more, even when it is less ressource efficient.

In particular, you will have to use a lot of gun turrets, even just for temporary defense, and often even to push out the first alien bases. They do feel bad because of how quickly they become inefficient and outdated but they are definitely useful.

As a reminder, it's better to focus here on :
- early-mid game when you first get oil (which often *already* involves doing some «liberation») and flame turrets become available
- and/or on mid-game when you set up blue science and laser turrets become available...
or I'm afraid we'll get lost in discussions.

[...]
I'm also in favor of [...] making lasers energy consumption scale with their DPS.

It *already* scales with shooting speed, which is a separate research from damage per «shot».

[sarge945]

Another idea is to decrease flamer distance to be a biter-aimed weapon only. But it would be nice to be able to prioritize spitters to be targeted first for other turrets tho... However, at this point, it might require much more time and work to rebalance, so it's more of food for thought while developing new expansion.

AFAIK, The different types of turrets are already better against different sizes of asteroids in Space Age, meaning it already makes sense for gun turrets to be able to prioritise certain targets.

I guess significantly reducing the range of flame turrets, and making laser turrets "scale up" their damage over the course of continuous fire (start with very low damage, while locked onto the same target gain damage every tick, resetting when switching), would make them good against small and large biters respectively. Then, being able to set a basic whitelist/blacklist filter on turrets would be about perfect. This addition alone could significantly improve the variety and strategy of turret gameplay.

It also fits in with the "gradually more complex automation" difficulty curve of Factorio. In this context, you would first have to automate gun turret reloading. Then, as the game progresses, you would need to add in automation of flame turrets as well, and eventually laser turrets. Right now, you can outright replace gun turret reloading with supplying oil, which is significantly easier and simpler. Once that's done, the biters are never a threat anymore.

I don't think this would be too much work, and would significantly improve the gameplay on it's own.

But I digress. I know this thread is talking about the balance of the economy, but in my opinion at least, the real problems with turrets and biter gameplay comes from the core design itself, and fixing the defence economy alone won't solve a lot of the core issues. Biters are just uninteresting. I have a few ideas here to hopefully address the core problems and make biters more interesting:

1. Add an "adaptation" mechanic. Basically, as you use flamers, the biters adapt by evolving new variants with thicker insulation that make them more and more resistant to flame over time. Same with thick carapaces resistant to bullets, reflective hides resistant to lasers, etc. This incentivises using multiple methods of defence, as they will take significantly longer to adapt to everything compared to one type of attack. The Expansion adds Rocket Turrets, so having them adapt to those too could be interesting. The idea is that you're essentially forced to maintain a bit of everything, which in my opinion actually utilises the automation gameplay of Factorio and prevents simply setting up an oil pipeline and never worrying about it again. Now you need to make sure you have bullet production up too, enough power for laser turrets, etc. Having to diversify like that is one of the strengths of Factorio because it heightens the value of automation. The newly evolved biters would be mixed into standard attack waves. To accomplish this, the game could use a form of "artificial selection" to bias the makeup of hordes - if the player has nothing but flame turrets, hordes are more likely to contain the fire resistant biters, which would make sense since they would also be the most likely to survive and reproduce.

2. Certain campaign events (like starting to build a rocket) should summon a large horde. Most of the time you can largely keep biters at bay pretty easily, especially if you disable biter expansion. Having a big finale type event (or even a few over the course of the game) should give players a feeling of finality and closure as they prepare to leave the planet, while also being a final test to ensure their defences are adequate. The explanation for this can be handwaived away, like rocket production releases a certain type of radiation that irritates the biters, or something. One thing that I like about The Riftbreaker is how it calls a big horde everytime you upgrade your HQ. I understand it's more of a tower defence game, whereas Factorio is more of an automation game, but Factorio's combat gameplay has many tower defence elements and could learn a lot from other games, especially when the gameplay surrounding biters is so lackluster.

3. All defences (including gun turrets) should require power. This way, maintaining a good power output is important, especially if the biters attack at night and you're relying on solar panels.

4. Biter Nests should be more interesting. Instead of just hives and worm spitters, some of them could also contain defensive enemies, like a queen (which is basically a super powerful biter), or more varieties of turrets (like growths that shoot webs/nets which slow down or prevent vehicles from moving to prevent circling around and firing, rolling explosive balls similar to banelings from Starcraft 2 to destroy tanks, etc). Taking out nests should require strategy and planning, not just driving around in circles in a car throwing grenades and holding space-bar until everything is dead. These enemies would be purely defensive in nature, and wouldn't participate in attack waves. Some nests would be better taken on with a car, others with a tank, and others on foot with a handheld flamethrower or rocket launcher, depending on their makeup.

5. After evolution factor 0.4, the biters should develop the ability to burrow, allowing them to crawl under walls and defences and emerge directly in your base. This is designed to hard-counter just building a wall and simply running oil around in a big loop to feed flamethrowers. Concrete could prevent this initially, eventually reinforced concrete would be required, and after a certain evolution level (possibly 0.9) it should't be preventable at all. An alternative to this would be "ram biters", which can very quickly smash down walls and turrets, but are otherwise defenceless against the player.


All of these together are probably way too much and would cause all sorts of issues, but hopefully one or two of these are good enough that people like them.