Factorio Forums

I've read the FAQ about this and still got the same problem as a lot of people - it seems too hard. I don't want to go through this with any "cheaty" way, so it would be cool if someone could answer me few questions how to go through it without using console commands, turret creep or rushing to grab pieces before being swarmed.

Clearing first base - should I do this with car or by foot? Way too often I end up crashing with car into something, but without it I get swarmed too fast. Or should I start building base even before first nest? And what to kill first?

Clearing second base - people are saying defender capsules are way to go, but it just doesn't seem to do much. They either die too fast or biters focus on me anyway. Am I just using them wrong or what? Just how do I clear this second base?

And generally what should I be producing if I set up a base? All videos I've watched made it look stupidily easy so I don't trust them.

Tried to do it slowly without a car as in movie, first base was indeed much easier and eating fishes helped a lot, but at the second I only managed to kill first few nests and then still get swarmed the moment I get into a range of shooting anything. On movies people seem to get barely few small biters attacking them when getting close to nests, I seem to get half of the entire enemy base on me... It's like in actual game aggro range is significally greater than on those movies. Maybe difficulty changed since they were made? I've seen on most of them there are still old graphics.

If you're playing on maximum difficulty it's hard to take the biters in a fair fight without resorting to turrets or clever strategy. You can use defenders (and slowdown capsules) to distract the biters and worms while you run to the crash and claim the computer. If you stick to the forest along the edge of the nest the medium biters have a very hard time pursuing you because they're too fat to fit between the trees, you just need to throw defenders at the worms to take the spits.

If you really want to gung-ho and do bloodly battle with the biters in a head on fight, bring lots and lots of grenades in addition to the defenders (maybe 75 grenades, 150 defenders) - grenades can be thrown rapid-fire without slowing your run speed and about 4-5 grenades will destroy a large number of medium biters. Still, after several tries the best I could do was destroying about 50% of the nest before grabbing the computer and running. Actually wiping out the biters on maximum difficulty without resorting to turrets would be an extreme challenge, I have a feeling it could be done with enough fish but is clearly not the intended way to beat the level.