There are not enough options vs bases early game

[brunzenstein]

And the „more effective ways of doing it“ are?

[BlakeMW]

The design idea behind them was that you can secure oil patches with them which obviously doesn't work anymore, but I don't think it worked significantly well beforehand either.

I could see converting defenders into a land-based combat robots without any need for flying, OR an earlier version of flying construction robots, but neither of those things are too likely to happen as we have a ton of other things to do.

Initially it might be helpful to give the Defenders reasonable combat stats, even in 0.16 they were rather pathetic with a brief window of usefulness before armored biters mostly neutralize them. Increasing the damage to 8 like the piercing ammo they are made from, and increasing the hitpoints to 100 like construction bots (they use the same frame now) might make them slightly useful at their current position in the tech tree.

[BlueTemplar]

I've heard that the damage of regular and piercing ammo was increased sometimes before 0.15 ?
If the Defender damage wasn't updated at that point, this might explain the inconsistency...
So they should either be changed to require only regular ammo, or their damage increased to that of piercing ammo.

And/or I also prefer Defenders to NOT require Oil (missed that change...).
Make them use Engines instead of Green Circuits maybe ?

Or, even better (though even more time-consuming) : make 2 tiers of defenders :
the first one with Engines + Regular Ammo,
the second one with Flying Frames + Piercing Ammo
(EDIT : and a third one with Uranium Ammo, while we're at it?)
?

[bobucles]

There are three major scaling factors to bots:
- Weapon upgrades
- Strength in numbers upgrades
- New and improved bot tiers

A bot being individually weak doesn't matter if you have a lot of them. Similarly, it's okay to obsolete the lower tier bots as the player develops the superior variants. If we assume that individual bot strength is "okay", then the game balances hinges around three things:
- Having the tech available at the right time (early tech is more convenient, late tech less convenient)
- Having the right number of bots for the current game tier (too many bots is too strong and too few is too weak)
- Paying a fair amount of resources per bot (too expensive is weak and too cheap is strong)
Bots can probably find a good place without any major overhaul. A few tweaks ought to make them feel good.

[mward]

A comment on how to turret creep:

Napoleon is supposed to have said "It is not possible to have too many men on the battlefield": and this is also true for turrets. When raiding bases, the longer the fight goes on, the higher the cost.

Therefore, you need huge amounts of ammunition and lots of turrets: at least 1,000 ammo and 12 turrets for your first base clearance, with more later (you can't have too many!) Devote your entire base to ammo and turret production if necessary.

Bind one key to turrets and one to ammo. Start just out of range of the biters. Click and drag to place a line of turrents, then click and drag to fill them each with half a stack. Immediately move forward and place the next line, then move again and place. Do not go back and pick up or repair anything until the end of the fight: the idea is to blitzkrieg across the biter base as fast as possible so that the mimimum number of biters are able to spawn and your turrets take minimal damage.

In this way, a base can be defeated without losing a single turret and using up the minimum of ammo: so your initial investment in ammo will last a long time.

In the later stages the personal laser defence is awesome. To dodge spitters, hold down one direction key and repeatedly tap another (eg hold down W and keep tapping D).

[DerGraue]

Turret creeping is functional, but in most stages of the game there are more convenient and possibly more effective ways of doing it, and in the end it comes to personal preference.

I was very close on starting a thread to complain that turret creeping is not possible anymore when I found this post, which ironically states the opposite, although I am not talking about the early game.

I am the guy who build this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RvWVOAFLGU

I was actually looking forward to build something like this again in 0.17, just better. But based on my testing this will not be possible anymore.
1. The splash damage kills a lot of construction robots very quickly -> they try to repair, they die, repeat
2. The extreme long range does the rest.

Building and watching stuff like in my video was actually the most fun I ever had with factorio. I mean, the game is about automation, so why not give us a chance to automate laser turret creeping, be it with personal roboports or with recursive blueprints!

I also played now in 0.17 several hours on a death world and I like some of the changes, I like the fact that you can dodge around the projectiles of the worms with your car, or tank or even on foot. This is a good change, in my opinion.

So we got a new way of dealing with biter nests: dodging around, but we also lost one way: turret creep, which is really sad.

Here is my suggestion: Make the construction bots immun to the splash damage so they can repair the turrets without instantly dying. Also reduce the range of the behemoth by a lot, at least 10 tiles and the big worm a few tiles. They still outrange the turrets.
Both changes still will allow players to run around and dodge stuff, so this part is the same. If you attack a large base there are always enough worms to shoot at you.
Late game artillery and nukes are still the best and fastest options.
But midgame you can turret creep, if you want to. Or use one of the other options, like tanks, PLD with energy shield, flamethrower, we just have one additional option.

[grokky]

early game i just make a ton of grenades (which are kinda cheap and easy to make) and a car; then I just drive around the nests throwing grenades and shooting them down, usually ignoring the worms until I can deal with them later

it worked really well so far

[leadraven]

What a coincidence! I just wanted to create similar topic.

I've started marathon x4. I was trying to fight without turret creep, because I feel it a little cheaty and devs don't encourage this strategy.
In the beginning I destroyed nearest bases with machine gun and basic bullets. But nests have an armor and when bases became bigger, destroy them became very expensive. At this very moment I've got red bullets, just in time! I've cleared more bases (still without turret creep). But medium worms and biters appeared in numbers, and I was forced to retreat. I needed more firepower.
Oil patches were far away, and I've decided to go for military science first (without oil) to deal with groups of medium warms. And here is my issue:
All I've got from a black science (that doesn't require oil) without oil were 2 upgrades for bullets... That's it, two upgrades! Anything else needs chemicals!
I had to use turret creep to capture oil fields.

Long story short, it is a common situation when player have to deal with medium worms to get access to first oil. But black science doesn't provide enough options without chemicals.

[BlueTemplar]

With those 2 upgrades, you go from +20% total bonus to +60% total bonus.
This increases your AP damage against medium worms from 1/(10-8x1.20+2) = 0.4166.. per shot to 8x1.60-10 = 2.8 per shot !

But yeah, if you don't have oil, you'd still probably want to focus on grenades against medium worms / blue biters.

Marathon x4 is certainly not a common situation (EDIT 2019-08-01 : oh, you mean just default marathon, which has a 4 times tech price multiplier?). (Are you sure that those were original nests and not expansions ?)
In my (Marathon Deathworld !) game there were only small worms on the first oil.
(And even then, I preferred to skip them for my 2nd oil, which only had a couple medium worms nearby, which were quickly dispatched once I plopped that pumpjack.)