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With 10-20 Laser Turrets you can kill any alien base. I think this makes all other military techs kind of useless.
It takes a little more time to kill bases with turrets, but it's easy and spares a lot of resources.

rulethechaos wrote:With 10-20 Laser Turrets you can kill any alien base. I think this makes all other military techs kind of useless.
It takes a little more time to kill bases with turrets, but it's easy and spares a lot of resources.

Combat is boring anyway. Better to get it over with.

The enemy has no economy, no complexity, and are completely the same everywhere. There is virtually no tactics and no strategies.

You can't destroy their supply nodes and they don't use any resources. That patch of iron ores will always be there.

The player can always choose not to by-pass the many strategies available that aren't turret creeping. No need to force them to take the challenging route.

rulethechaos wrote:With 10-20 Laser Turrets you can kill any alien base. I think this makes all other military techs kind of useless.
It takes a little more time to kill bases with turrets, but it's easy and spares a lot of resources.

It's a recurring complaint about combat. Others include enemies respawning too fast.

The devs have mentioned that they want to do a combat overhaul, but iirc there's no firm plans for when. There are many cool things they want to do.

I must admit that even if I've never tried turret creep to clear a nest, the insane respawn rate of biters tempts me to give it a try from time to time.

I have played on maps, where that strategy was the only available. Otherwise would have been forced to quit the map.

Actually turret creeping is so time consuming and boring, that it's sad. I tried automating it with robots, but ultimately I ended up with another tactic, that at least can give me some adrenaline and don't allow to fall asleep. I set up killzone, just a double line of turrets, wall and a bunch of express belts moving aliens away from the line. Then I grab heaviest gun I have (I actually prefer submachine gun than shotgun), bunch of walkers and mk2 shields and run around base, slowly destroying nests one by one and dropping poison capsules on worms. After battery drops, I lure the mobtrain along the turrets few times, until only thick body carpet remains. I can clear several bases in one run, then I pack everything up, mop up artifacts and move. While more complicated to set up it's far more easy on ammo, since turrets have to shoot only every so often. I also prefer normal turrets to lasers, since dragging power lines behind me is soooo boooring and limiting. I still carry a couple of solar panels and battery to allow inserters stuff turrets, but ultimately I only have to move some ammo to one chest from the car.

Well ... if you can't beat the game, then you've lost
I have lost quite a number of Factorio games.

I have an idea, why not have some shiny new aliens that are immune to laser turrets, but extra vulnerable against bullets.

How about many bosses that will appear when you reach hidden criteria for a secret randomly generated milestone?

What if some of those things have different abilities similar to Left 4 Dead like a choker, a ranged unit... Maybe even adding an entire race of alien natives that seeks to rob your chest of materials?

I believe this game has so much untapped potential that is not being utilized yet.

Perhaps a siege worm that specializes in ripping down walls like paper for the other critters to follow its attractive(stinky to us) stench trail. What about slime balls or the equivalent to a brood lord from star craft where it in itself is a factory for weaker critters. What about critters that doubles itself for every 50 things it takes out? What about flying things that negates some defenses entirely? Why is there no hives that have a queen where all other critters have a hierarchy to it and how they behave.

Give them formations, abilities. Different stats. Unique traits. Better yet, add an entire expansion that is strictly focused on surviving an infestation that was far more dangerous than anybody ever imagined. Almost like nature on steroids where they want to save their world from your engines of destruction.

OK but on one condition : I want to be able to automate my defenses.
This is Factorio after all

I didn't read everything past the first post but... Laser turrets were increased to be 4x as strong as they used to be when the 0.12 chain started, to match their new graphic of being a 2x2 structure instead of a 1x1 structure. Gun turrets however were only doubled in strength as they went from a 1x2 (Always 1x2, never 2x1, which caused blueprint issues) to a 2x2. As a result, the laser turrets are twice as strong as they should be compared to gun turrets.

Values are planned to change for 0.13, as is the whole combat system apparently.