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A couple hours in to my game, I discovered a large portion of the map(thanks to radars) and i see a significant amount of biter nests scattered around the map. my pollution is relatively small considering I run mostly on solar power and the little pollution I have is not reaching any of the spawners. Yet, I planned to expand and I feared these nests could be trouble later on. I decide to turret creep them with laser turrets but when I arrive at the nest I already see medium biters. Like I said before my pollution is far from these nests and yet they are evolving already. I attack anyway and I claim victory, I did this to three or four other nests easily. Then i start to see some big biters, few of them, but still some. about an hour later i am seeing huge bases with lots of big, medium, and small biters. Even with highly upgraded turret damage and shooting speed my laser turrets are being slaughtered.
with my tiny amount of pollution which is still nowhere near there nests, biters evolved fully. this brings my question, with my solar powered eco-friendly power source how did biters evolve this quick? does solar power really stop or even slow down biter evolution?

Pollution is a minor factor in biter evolution. The main factor is time. Biters will evolve to medium after 10 hours and large after 20 hours even if you do nothing.

You also get 10 minutes of accelerated evolution for every spawner you kill.

The benefit of solar is it frees you from needing to find new coal mines all the time.

On the nose, Dave.

Also, it's not a great idea to turret creep with turrets alone. They should still be walled.
Don't neglect the damage and speed researches for laser turrets, those are also very useful, and the first 4 levels of each are definitely worth the cost.
Finally, you didn't mention how many turrets you creep with, but I would recommend no less than having 24 built even in an early-mid game creep.

DaveMcW wrote:Pollution is a minor factor in biter evolution. The main factor is time. Biters will evolve to medium after 10 hours and large after 20 hours even if you do nothing.

You also get 10 minutes of accelerated evolution for every spawner you kill.

The benefit of solar is it frees you from needing to find new coal mines all the time.

Thanks!,

I forgot to mention that I destroyed 3 or 4 GROUPS of bases, at least around 3 nests in each group.
I guess attacking that many bases early on in the game and speeding up the evolution just made it harder for myself.

In vanilla I can deal with 20+ spawners with 30 laser, I barely need turrets.

Another thing to keep in mind with biter spawns, is that they don't DE-spawn when the evolution level rises, so if the population is maximum with small biters outside it, you'll find it with small biters outside it, only after killing the small biters will big biters spawn.