My specific point is that a stack of 50 Big Electric Poles and 50 Laser Turrets, 200 repair packs, and a personal roboport with 20 construction bots and a blueprint can destroy pretty much everything. The only "consumable" is the repair packs (dirt cheap) and maybe the Poles cause I like to leave an electric network out there to grow from (and drop radars).
Vs a Destructor bot, where you have to deploy 80+ (according to videos) and they timeout,so they are guaranteed to die.
It feels like the balance intent was to have swarms of military bots and have them get consumed as a way to use up resources. So resource-less combat seems unintended. But turret creep is also very much taught to you in the campaign. And I stumbled on the "if I just bring power poles I can use lasers" and then "lasers can out range a big worm" and then "personal roboport blueprint makes it all just a grind".
As I see it, you need turrets to be useful on defense without a lot of upkeep. But then they are so OP when you can trivially deploy lots of them on offense.
things that might work
- Make construction bots have less health. Or a very slow recharging shield. I've seen times when I go a bit too hard and a bot dies before dropping the item. But usually they take a hit or two and end up coming back to me and getting repaired.
- make a ranged enemy that doesn't like electric poles. So instead of attacking the high HP high armor Turret (which needs to be if you want them to work for base defense) they attack the soft Pole that keeps the turrets firing. This puts your giant infrastructure feeding the outposts at risk, though.
- Softer turrets so you have to use walls. You could still put walls in your blueprint, but you have to risk far more bots. Still a problem for ranged attackers and enough lasers kill melee before they get close.
- some sort of limitation on Turrets and the personal roboport. I don't quite know what would go here, since anything you do is going to impact the original base-building experience.
- more useful combat bots. Again, any design here is going to suffer from "no consumables" vs any/lots of consumables.
