So deathworld...

[Pongard]

After finding the game too easy I decided to restart with the deathworld setting. I had to restart several times, but finally I was able to defend myself. At some point it looked really good, but now more and more big biters are attacking, and they just laugh at my turrets with standard bullets. I tried to switch to AP ammo, but I think it's too late, the ammo isn't as good against them as I hoped, and I can't focus on evolving my base with all the constants attacks that can't be repelled.

Does something think there is a magic trick how I can save my game (without cheating)?
Or maybe a hint for the next game what I can make better? I know I would have needed oil to further advance in the tech tree, but I decided to go for iron ore first, as I slowly ran out of it. Maybe that was a mistake... Or that I killed too many bases, and this accelerated their evolution too much?

In the end it's the high armor of the big biters that broke my neck, can someone tell me how to deal with them?

[Deadlock989]

Nests won't send biters your way if they're not being fed by your pollution cloud. If your military research levels can't handle what's incoming, your best defence is to reduce your pollution. No magic required.

You also made life harder for yourself by starting on a mostly desert map. No trees = no tree pollution absorption.

[jodokus31]

Desert maps, with low trees are incredible much tougher compared to green ones with lots of trees, because trees and green tiles eat pollution and it doesn't spread so far. Deathworld is also tough, because biters evolve much faster from just time passed compared to default settings. So you need to rush to get ahead.

From medium biters on, I would go for AP Ammo, because of the armour. These projectile damage researches are pretty important, to save on resources.
If you have access to crude oil, then go for flameturrets with a wall in front of it. They have a pretty good range, but only point in one direction. But they are very resource efficient and kill big groups fast at the wall.

If you clear a big area, but don't secure it, they will expand back and you have to kill them again, which raises evolution even more. And polluted bases also eat pollution, so it doesn't spread that far. So I would think twice before killing a base. Better reduce pollution. Solar panels can help and efficiency modules.

[BlueTemplar]

Rush oil.



(Nearly ran out of resources there trying to keep blue biters at bay...)

[Pongard]

I guess I have to be more sensitive about pollution. I thought I can brute force through, but seems like this is no option.

[Honktown]

Played a bunch of games with extremely high enemies (including all settings in .16 turned up to max, and some mods that made certain things like ores much worse). There are two key things with aliens: 1) they ONLY send guys your way if their nest is close, or if your pollution is touching them and 2) the attackers are proportional to the pollution absorbed - less pollution, smaller attackers and smaller groups (you could/still can see that the pollution literally gets absorbed by nests on the map).

One game I had to literally shut down my entire base (was trying out some ore-changing mods, and they resulted in tiny ore patches that needed much dirtier drills). I had to spend a very long time running around to single drills feeding single furnaces outside the range of biters, or just on the edge, but when they're tiny a single turret can deal with them. Also had to move to an area with all base resources nearby, and no nests. (aliens don't nest in trees)

A big thing is you NEED to get to oil. In .16 there was absolutely no way bullets can scale. It might be changed slightly, since I think they decreased the cost of damage upgrades, as they've been merged. Oil is also needed for red chips and upgrades and such, so if you pollute too much or get boxed in, you're going to lose.

If you can get some oil, flamethrower turrets + stone walls are incredibly good defenses. They take no power, are incredibly cheap to run, and are a little slow but very cheap to build and do a LOT of damage. The only downsides are they don't track quickly, so walls take a little damage from the first biter (double or triple the walls. All of them). The much bigger downside is that construction bots aren't fireproof. Was very far in a game when I realized that, only after upgrading the flamethrower damage enough to get the bots killed, with warnings every 10-20 seconds that I lost a bot. I remember seeing 339 steam engines and a handful of solar in my power screen before I was able to switch off to nuclear. Couldn't go solar because of space, and laser turrets were necessary, but I couldn't get nuclear up and running. I had been using the "steam tank accumulators" strategy at first, because it's much faster to get running than accumulators.

P.s. going from 40 MW to over 120 when turrets fire is bad enough, but then being around 100 MW and jumping to over 600 is insane.

[BlueTemplar]

Another downside with flame turrets is that you might have to clear some trees if you don't want them to burn the whole forest down... which you desperately need for pollution absorption !
(Fire also causes pollution, but I have no idea how significant is that - I'd say negligible ?)

[Deadlock989]

Another downside with flame turrets is that you might have to clear some trees if you don't want them to burn the whole forest down... which you desperately need for pollution absorption !
(Fire also causes pollution, but I have no idea how significant is that - I'd say negligible ?)

Both types of fire flame entity have an emissions per second of 0.005, that's 0.3 pollution/minute. So two orders of magnitude less polluting than a boiler running at capacity. A single flamethrower turret can spawn a great many fire entities in one go, though.