Koub wrote: ↑Wed Jul 24, 2019 9:28 pm
Marathon deathworld is meant to be very difficult. Even moreso now that pollution is an issue. I'm sure there are people out there who find marathon deathworld too easy, and add some more challenge like mods to make the experience even more difficult, but they probably are a minority.
Try to build as small as possible, to prevent your pollution from attracting biters.
This is why it's useful to learn to build 'just what you need' with the layout thought through so that you add more easily later on. Learning this lesson, and in general the ramifications of having biters and pollution in full effect, is the reason why I don't like playing without biters (I can stomach expansion disabled if what I am doing is going to require tons of space; like a 'full towns' railworld).
As for dealing with giant nests:
At low tech levels it can be pretty hard. It helps a ton of you have some lakes near your start. Look for the little black things moving around the lake and harvest them manually. These are Raw fish, which can be used to heal yourself in combat (REALLY helpful before you have Energy shields when fighting decent sized bases). With these, and proper tactics, I can usually clear any early game base that doesn't have medium or especially big worms (the one's nearest to you shouldn't have these). Getting ahead in military tech is really important as it will drastically reduce the cost of expansion (which is your life blood in a high difficulty game).
Generally, you should at least be able to reach military 1 without having to clear nests (very small starts can sometimes require you to deal with nests almost immediately after getting a few furnaces up).
At this level, best option is to use SMG for biter killing and Shotgun for nest killing (if u are having trouble getting near nests, the SMG may be better). Worms bigger than small=no-go as your weapons won't do appreciable damage to them. Try to get Heavy Armor asap (Light Armor is better than nothing in the meantime, but Heavy armor causes Small biters to do almost no damage to you, which is REALLY helpful against larger nests; remember spawner kills are what matters, the biters will be endlessly replaced).
Military 2 gives piercing ammo and grenades, which are both worthy upgrades. The ammo makes SMG handedly better than the Shotgun for all purposes (save cost efficiency; so the Shotgun is still worth using for situations where less firepower won't cost you), and Grenades give much needed AoE damage (you can chuck nades while shooting btw) and can actually kill medium and even big worms (later does tons of damage though, so it's still difficult/requires that it is only not-small worm there and Raw fish for healing). Piercing ammo can also do decent damage to Medium making taking out small numbers of them doable.
After getting military 2, there are 3 things to go after next (order should depend on need/resource availability):
-Modular armor (and energy shields/battery mk1/portable solar panels)
-Flamethrower
-Rocket Launcher
Modular armor is pretty obvious. It's Heavy armor with twice the durability and a 5x5 equipment grid, which means personal shields and the ability to actually recover hitpoints (shields) in battle, vitally important as the game goes on when nest-clearing. Recommended equipment setup is:
-3 shields
-4 batteries
-5 PSPs (you may opt for more PSPs for less batteries if you need to be able to fight more often than recharge rate permits, but that comes at a cost of how long you can fight for before energy is exhausted)
The flamethrower does reliable damage to almost all enemies (only the big worms seem to be hard to kill with it, and Behemoths thanks to having tons of hitpoints), it's only real cons are it's short range (and somewhat limited damage to nests; it's decent but not great). This is your biter killer when the SMGs dmg starts to become lacking (usually when Medium biters become common, thanks to them have 75 hp and 4 flat armor v physical damage).
The Rocket Launcher boast a fantastic 22 range and great damage (with basic rockets). This makes it an excellent weapon for killing worms and spawners while minimizing exposure to large amounts of enemy damage (rush in, snipe a worm/spawner or 2, run away, use Flamethrower to kill your pursuers, rinse, repeat until nest is eliminated).
I recommended prioritizing base removal towards the following goals, in order:
-immediate future resource needs (running out of vital resources=game over)
-nests in pollution cloud (nests in pollution cloud spawn angry visitors that will cost you resources at the very least)
-longer-term resource needs (so you don't get behind the '8-ball' at is were)
-near pollution cloud nests (so you can up production without unwelcome guests)