Preferred combat style

[Stootza]

Hey all. In my first play-through, I had a pretty satisfactory, er, factory in place, but was just missing the alien relics for new research. I stumbled across using the cars and doing drive by rocket blasting as a moderately effective way of starting off. Then as I gained a few relics, I made the mk1 power suit and found an even more enjoyable way of killing the biters. I run out Rambo style and launch myriads of land mines in close proximity to their spawn homes. The mines trip and kill the spawners as well as the biters that follow, and its so much fun watching a massive line of them swarm in and get obliterated by a handful of mines. I also use the defense bots to help distract and take out the swarms after my initial assault. Some of the denser packed clusters are still tough, but I've cleared out as many as a dozen of them in a single base with this strategy.

I was curious what other unorthodox methods of biter elimination everyone had come up with

[Jinmago]

I usually push with lines of laser turrets or quickly take out the bases and kite the biters to my defenses.

[pyrolytic_tungsten]

The combat shotgun is effective at destroying spawners, especially if you have piercing shells and sufficiently fast power armor. The key is to never stop running around and make passes of the spawners destroying a number of spawners in a single pass. You can destroy very large nests this way but you have to be careful about not getting stuck in one spot so the biters rip you apart. If going after lots of biter bases you eventually have to return to your base defenses to get rid of the spread out 100+ big biters chasing you.

If worms give you trouble use poison capsules against them. The shotgun /combat shotgun are shorter range than the rocket launcher but the more rapid fire rate with good damage makes up for it. Rockets have always felt like their range was too short to me and the fire rate is fairly low (without lots of alien tech requiring upgrades). By chance I often seem to be fighting biters in forested regions so I don't usually feel like trying to use the car. Although I have used turret creep in some of the games I've played at increased biter settings, it has always felt a little cheaty to me.

[InsaneFox]

One option you have once you have access to the rocket launcher and automobile is to conduct a drive by on biter spawners. This is particularly useful when your own armor is insufficient to handle a spawner or cluster of spawners, as you can easily outrun big biters in a vehicle without facing the same mobility penalty that you would on foot when using weapons. However, this tactic does not work on worms or spawners that are surrounded by trees.