0.17 Defense Against Big Worms?

[makrom]

The irony isn't lost on me that the biters are now turret creeping my defenses. Big worms can outrange laser turrets and even flame thrower turrets. I have hardly ever noticed that before .17 but now it happens ever so often that they spawn in such a position.
The only defense I can think of is using artillery, but that has huge caveats and requires a lot of effort. Is there any better concept to defend vast endgame bases?

[DaveMcW]

artillery requires a lot of effort... to defend vast endgame bases

This seems balanced to me.

If you find enemy expansion tedious, you can turn it off in game setup or with cheats.

[makrom]

artillery requires a lot of effort... to defend vast endgame bases

This seems balanced to me.

If you find enemy expansion tedious, you can turn it off in game setup or with cheats.

Ah I was rather wondering if there are smarter ways to cope these challenges rather than looking for ways to remove them
I was just wondering if anyone came up with a better way. I am playing deathworld marathon which likely augments the problem, but given the right base size, it should pose a problem on any difficulty level (as long as biters are aggressive).

[Mr. Tact]

Wow. Haven't played a 0.17 game with biter expansion yet. That does sound rather annoying. Not sure if I like the idea or not... on the one hand I've always considered biters a little silly since after the mid-game handling them is pretty easy. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to have to deal with that kind of issue.

[Ranakastrasz]

Huh. I like this. Absolutely adds to the game, even if it might be too strong. I haven't gotten that far in any case.
Biters deciding that, since your line of defense is impenetrable, the solution is to produce siege weaponry.
Mostly I would be concerned that it would keep scaling up to the point that they start building these everywhere around your base and push you back at all points such that anything short of artillery couldn't keep up.

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Personal experience, the current worms, and I am only dealing with smalls thus far in my Marathon-deathworld game, are surprisingly effective at dealing with early turret creeping. Not sure if they are prioritizing the turrets or what, but my attempts at turret creeping aren't working so well. But, it was kinda trivial before, and now I actually had to think about it for a short time before I attempted it again.

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If it outranges everything short of artillery, I don't think anything short of manual intervention or artillery will work. So keep yer pollution down, and/or start getting artillery. That and go on frequent biter burns.

[Mr. Tact]

....If it outranges everything short of artillery, I don't think anything short of manual intervention or artillery will work. So keep yer pollution down, and/or start getting artillery. That and go on frequent biter burns.

Since artillery is a solution, I find it difficult to be totally against the change. If that wasn't the case and you were required to go on "frequent biter burns", then I would be totally against it. Biters are a legitimate part of the game, but shouldn't be a consistent major component in the late game.

Definitely means I won't be converting my big base to 0.17 without first doing a major upgrade to the defenses....

[Ranakastrasz]

Since artillery is a solution, I find it difficult to be totally against the change. If that wasn't the case and you were required to go on "frequent biter burns", then I would be totally against it. Biters are a legitimate part of the game, but shouldn't be a consistent major component in the late game.

Yep. Although on the other hand, artillery is pretty high tier. Once you get artillery though, and set it up, biters are, to my understanding, no longer a threat at all.
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Do expansions use pollution? As in, like attack waves occur when an area is polluted, do expansions require pollution to trigger, or is it just evo factor?
It should be the former in my opinion. That way, with the new pollution-spawner mechanics, efficiency modules and just cutting back on pollution, as well as clearing encroaching enemy bases should aid with defense. Which is kinda the whole point, I think.

[Hannu]

Sounds interesting. Artillery solves the problem for "normal" players semi trivially, but I usually leave biter protection zones in my bases. Now I must kill them all or make insanely large areas so that I can use artillery to keep them in their land.

[Ranakastrasz]

Sounds interesting. Artillery solves the problem for "normal" players semi trivially, but I usually leave biter protection zones in my bases. Now I must kill them all or make insanely large areas so that I can use artillery to keep them in their land.

Yep. Can't let them attempt a jailbreak or anything. Heh.

[makrom]

To be fair, it doesn't appear that turret creeping is actually part of the AI strategy now. It just so happens every now and then that when they expand, a worm pops up that has your turrets in range, yet out of your turret's range.
While I greatly appreciate the thought of increased end game biter difficulty, I think it should come in a form where it can be dealt with in an automated and scaled way. Having to micro manage train layouts including stops and schedules whenever you move your perimeter is not ideal from my point of view.

[Ranakastrasz]

To be fair, it doesn't appear that turret creeping is actually part of the AI strategy now. It just so happens every now and then that when they expand, a worm pops up that has your turrets in range, yet out of your turret's range.
While I greatly appreciate the thought of increased end game biter difficulty, I think it should come in a form where it can be dealt with in an automated and scaled way. Having to micro manage train layouts including stops and schedules whenever you move your perimeter is not ideal from my point of view.

Well yea, of course it is an accident. They just coincidentally build a base with artillery in a sweet spot. Golden bb effect i Think its called. If you attack everywhere, from every angle, you will find a weak spot eventually, if any exist. Same effect here, but the weak spot is between the max range of your turrets and the max range of big worms, from your defenses, so its more common.

What is this about train layouts? Is there something wrong with artillery turrets? I mean, yea, its fun to watch a train pull into a station and then start blasting away, but why can't you just add artillery turrets to your defenses?

[BlakeMW]

I can't guarantee this will work in this version of the game, but historically chunks which are outside the pollution cloud and far away from the player are mostly inactive (for performance reasons, otherwise nests would force the game to a crawl), that means that worms in those chunks do not fire at targets, if you wall the enemies out of your pollution cloud (probably easiest done by reducing the size of your pollution cloud with eff modules) they'll probably leave the walls alone. There might be the extremely odd exception with a chunk temporarily activating due to a biter expansion party passing through or something, but it should be pretty secure.

You can place radars at your borders to quickly verify chunk deactivation, the biters (etc) within radar vision will be frozen rather than animated.

[mward]

Having to micro manage train layouts including stops and schedules whenever you move your perimeter is not ideal from my point of view.

See this post for a simple way to set up an artillery perimiter defence which is very easy to extend:
viewtopic.php?f=194&t=68006