How do I deal with early game biters?

[Jetlaw]

What are good methods of dealing with early game biter attacks?

Unless I start in a corner somewhere with good cover from bodies of water I spend so, so much time just walling around and building a gun turret network, then inserters to feed them all with ammo, the factories to build the turrets to begin with etc.

Is there a better or more efficient approach to dealing with early biter attacks?

I tend to operate 8 furnaces for iron, 8 copper furnaces, 3-4 stone furnaces, 10+ boilers and steam engines, 1 electric mine to 2 furnaces. Early game this infrastructure generates masses of pollution which really pisses off biters, but I find with any less game just drags on as I need tons of materials to begin mass production of red and green science.

[boro]

The best defense is offense. Prioritize armor and shotgun research and take out near camps as soon as possible. As long as there are no medium biters yet taking on bigger camps is still pretty easy.

If you get attacked from all sides immediately a pipe wall is a great alternative for normal wall. It holds back small biters long enough for you to run to that location.

[Xterminator]

Unless your making your base really spread out at the beginning, there shouldn't be a ton of space to cover. And if your playing with normal biter settings, the attacks are infrequent enough and with low enough numbers that feeding your turrets by hand shouldn't be much of a problem.
Also, the biters attack in certain spots and almost never change spots unless of course you expand out your walls or kill a base. You should be able to notice a pattern of where they are attacking, and then only have to fortify those spots.
And as someone else said, if you get the SMG and some heavy armor before medium biters start spawning, you should be able to take out nearby bases, unless they are quite large. :p
Hope this helped!

[xnmo]

In my most recent game I needed to spread out my base in the beginning to get iron, so even with with biter settings on normal they got all up in my grill real quick. I've still got most of my early defenses mostly intact, so I put together a bunch of screenshots to show you my setup.

Protip 1: Walling off completely is unnecessary early on as biters go after turrets well before anything else, so you just need strategically placed turret bunkers in all the areas they are attacking. This takes a lot less time and resources than making a solid wall going across the entire map.

Protip 2: Manually inserting ammo is for scrubs

Pictures Ahoy

Biters love to snack on radars for some reason



I had assemblers making ammo in those first two. It's easier to just put down a box right next to the assembler and put the needed iron straight in rather than making an ungodly mess of transport belts and splitters to try and route resources to every single place that's necessary.






Ignore the land mines



Later on you can use provider and requester chests so you still get some use out of these bunkers (I took down the walls and the 2 south turrets on this one to make room). Make sure to place limits on all your chests so you don't end up wasting all your resources on 5k magazines!

[n9103]

The radar thing is either a hold-over from the earlier combat routines before pollution, or it's because they're usually the highest pollution creating buildings near the front lines, due to their high power usage.

[xnmo]

The radar thing is either a hold-over from the earlier combat routines before pollution, or it's because they're usually the highest pollution creating buildings near the front lines, due to their high power usage.

Biters don't go rabid over roboports so I'm guessing it's the former.