Help me avoid turret creep

[mkaito]

Hi and thanks for taking the time to read.

My concern is mostly about early game. Once you reach a certain level of tech, clearing nests becomes increasingly easy, culminating in just nuking large swaths of terrain. As soon as you can drag a decent number of combat drones behind you, clearing nests becomes decently easy. But what about before that?

Very early, taking out nests with just an SMG is doable, albeit slow. But as soon as you get medium sized biters, or nests with more than 2-3 spawners, this becomes unfeasible. Hell, if there's a nest nearby with just a medium worm, you're going to have a hard time.

This leads me to two possible conclusions:

I'm either missing something about how to kill them damn buggers.

Or, the game is balanced around the idea that you're just not meant to go out and clear nests before a certain tech level.

[Lav]

If you have available oil, there shouldn't be major issues getting to higher levels, you'll just have to turtle up and play defensively for awhile.

Without oil, your options are limited. Try investing into military research heavily. You can get basic combat drones without blue tech, as well as two levels of damage and follower count upgrades. Heavy armor, SMG with 4 levels in damage/ROF, shotguns with 4 levels of the same, grenades with 3 damage upgrades should give you a decent chance against medium worms.

Plus even if you don't want to use turrets offensively, nothing stops you from using turrets defensively - build a bunch of turrets close to the nest, and all biters will flock to them, leaving you free(ish) to deal with nests and worms.

[Xeorm]

For a regular, vanilla game you should have some option available at whichever tech level you are to help with biters. Turret creep is always a functional method, but flamethrower or tanks are very strong too. Tank especially I think is a good mid-game option. Don't even have to manufacture shells, as long as you have piercing ammo for the rifle and ram the spawners to death.

[Frightning]

Medium worms are pretty killable with Heavy armor+SMG w/ Piercing ammo, especially with some Bullet damage upgrades (for a no oil solution, anyways). Grenades also help for this, and are about the only non-oil requiring weapon that can meaningfully damage Big worms (which sometimes appear in initially spawned bases that happen to be on your nearest oil, annoyingly). Once you have oil up, the Rocket launcher is bloody amazing at killing worms and spawners, and the Flamethrower does reliable damage to all types of biters and spitters, so between the two of them, you should be able to handle almost any base (run Modular armor with 2-3 shields+some batteries for survivability, can upgrade to Power armor (MK1) later when you get the chance to research it). The Tank is also amazing for base stomping, so once you have that, you should be totally fine until Behemoths start spawning, which doesn't happen for a very long time (need to hit 0.9 evolution factor iirc, which with how it's asymptotic in progressing from 0 to 1 means that it really takes a lot of time and pollution+spawner kills to get it up to 0.9). By the time Behemoths start to show, you should already have things like Uranium ammo and honestly even Atomic bombs by then. So again, life is easy. Pro tip: If you need to deal with a particularly large base early, try to find some water with Fish in it and harvest as many fish as you can, each one gives 5 Raw fish each of which does -80 Physical damage to you when used (yes -80, which means it actually heals you for ~80). So that can help you tank before getting Modular armor (which requires oil for Advanced circuits to make it).

[Deadly-Bagel]

I'm still extremely unimpressed with the Rocket Launcher, standard shells do instakill a nest with low level damage research but if you can't get the shell through the biters it's useless. For the most part it will take 2 Explosive Shells to kill any spawners and the best you could realistically hope to hit is 2, so they're just an expensive way to clear the horde of biters following you. I say you're better off putting the research into bullet damage which will be the main source of personal damage for most of the game, and still a large part of the rest.

Heavy Armour and AP ammo will see you through the early game. When you get it the tank is a lot more powerful though unwieldy, and risky if there are obstacles such as a forest or water, but for the most part it should see you pretty easily to power armour.