Desert Seed

[MakeItGraphic]

Hello all,

Finally able to play consistently after a couple years.

Usually play with whatever the map gives me, never had any challenging seeds before. Until this one however. No grass tiles, very little trees. No branching resource patches outside of biter territory.

Factorio_Hellios_2019.png (135.33 KiB) Viewed 9135 times

So pollution control is definitely a challenge. Nearly 6 hours in have 5 assembly machines, 4 miners, 3 stone furnaces, 1 boiler/2 steam engine, and a lab. Expediting technologies that aid in pollution control, and installed Bio-Industries to expand those options.

Had a few questions though.

- For assembly machines the higher tier (blue) over the basic machine produces less pollution however utilizes more electricity. Boilers produce 30/m pollution. Where AM1 produces 4/m, and AM2 produces 3/m.

For larger setups is this reduction in pollution beneficial when factoring in the cost of using a boiler setup?

- For biters nest what are the total effects of clearing them (using rampant)

Eg. is it beneficial to wait until your military resources are well established before clearing nest to avoid backlash from your evolution factor escalating?

Right now I have been heavily controlling how much is built, and it's rather tedious. And walls being so expensive I have next to none. Bullets are very cheap, and easy to make, and for the most part turrets are as well.

Any suggestions would be helpful, never played a desert seed before where I had to pay so much head to biters.

[Serenity]

For power you can get solar panels with just red and green science. They need steel however. That reduces your pollution during daytime

And walls being so expensive I have next to none

You can use pipes as walls

[SyncViews]

What map settings?

On most maps I just aggressively expand to out pace the biters. Automate ammo and turret production pretty much along with the green science setup, then on really hard settings push for AP ammo ASAP. Especially with expensive recipes AP ammo can be a bit of a resource sink so keep that in mind. With vanilla biters types at least, assuming keep pace with turret research upgrades, they can deal with everything including groups of behemoths, so upgrading to lasers or uranium (or later researching into the unlimited weapons tech), multiple layers, pushing them all the way out of the pollution range, etc. is extra / easy mode.

The main problem I had before is if biters block the only oil I can find with lots of big worms or above (looks OK on your map), generally doable but have to be a little careful. Or if don't expand aggressively enough and deplete resources and therefore turret ammo (mostly had this with expensive research+recipe settings, AP ammo can become a massive resource sink if playing a no-laser game). Producing lots of pollution slowly rather than the same pollution quickly kinda evens out if there is nothing much to safely absorb it, and you have biters building new bases and time-based evolution as well.

In a desert specifically with so little pollution absorption I think stopping pollution reaching biters is practically impossible, and most of the means to get very low pollution are not available in the early game when it matters (solar, nuclear, electric furnace, efficiency modules).

- For assembly machines the higher tier (blue) over the basic machine produces less pollution however utilizes more electricity. Boilers produce 30/m pollution. Where AM1 produces 4/m, and AM2 produces 3/m.

Power, mining (including due to the high power use) and furnaces generally will be much more of a pollution issue than AM1 vs AM2. AM2 has a higher crafting speed to consider for net power/pollution, but either are still pretty low and AM2 is cheap enough to build everywhere/always once automated that worrying about times when AM1 might be suitable isn't of much value. AM3 is too expensive/late along with any beacons/modules to really be relevant for survival.

Eg. is it beneficial to wait until your military resources are well established before clearing nest to avoid backlash from your evolution factor escalating?

Well, kinda. Certainly don't leave your immediate base area until you have solid turret coverage. But clearing a small number of nests to expand production is almost always going to be worth it, and if you sit around waiting your going to get time and pollution based evolution anyway. I think destroying a base is equivalent to something like 10 minutes play with zero pollution, I never did the maths for it though.

[MakeItGraphic]

For power you can get solar panels with just red and green science. They need steel however. That reduces your pollution during daytime

And walls being so expensive I have next to none

You can use pipes as walls

Yeah I am researching Solar Panels now.

Thanks for the tidbit on pipes, they're less then half health in comparison to the walls. However you can just double up on that, and a lot easier to produce. So ^_^

thanks

[BlueTemplar]

Considering that you should have the car by now, you've hardly explored around ?

Rampant changes everything :
Since you now have two clouds to worry about : pollution and pheromones.
And you can't see pheromones without debug tools.
And it's hard to get a sense for the effect of pheromones when biters are randomly switching between Peaceful and varied Aggressive phases.
My own experience with Rampant says that if you don't want to have unending waves of biters during some of the Aggressive phases you're going to have to clean every nest several (~4+ ?) chunks away from any(?) structure you own.
And pheromones seem to spread further as the evolution increases, even if you were to stay on the exact same base.

[Xeorm]

For biters I generally suggest treating them like a tax. You're using up ammo to kill them that you'd rather spend on making more production. Desert starts increase the tax rate a bit by having less pollution reduction, but the main issue is it being easier to start the tax in the first place with having the pollution reach the nests. In general you'll still make things quicker by killing biters that come rather than staying small and unnoticed. Especially on non-deathworld starts.

So build up, build a few turrets, let the biters come, and work your way up from there. Haven't played with the rampant mod before, but I'd wager it's similar enough in style.

I wouldn't worry about no walls, turrets defend well against early waves. Though pipes work decently as a substitute.

[RinDiddy]

I've got some advice for you. I typically prefer to always start on a desert map. I just like the way it looks plus there's not a ton of cleanup when building things.

It is a far different world though as you've noticed already.

The first thing to keep in mind is patience. There's not much around to absorb pollution so if you build too rapidly you'll find welcoming visits from your new neighbors. Even with max reduction in pollution it will still take a long time for your initial pollution to go away.

Right off the bat you're going to need a better weapon. Often times you can't build much at all before being attacked. Usually the closest nests to you are small and can be handled with a machine gun. You won't suffer much of a evo penalty by getting rid of them and you'll end up saving materials in the end by not wasting ammo on turret defenses.

The next option I look at is a choice between efficiency modules or non-boiler energy. The top polluters you have in order would be: Mines, Boilers, Furnaces, other. I always attempt to get rid of the need for anything coal-based (except for plastics) as just about all coal/fuel based machines create a ton of pollution.

So things like Solar Power, Accumulators, Efficiency Modules, Nuclear Power, and Electric Furnaces make great choices for desert worlds.

Answers to your questions:
- Don't bother too much with higher tier assembly machines until you've found a way to get energy without boilers, or have efficiency modules.. Boilers create much more pollution and require more constant resources which also add to pollution.
- Read up on the Factorio wiki concerning Evolution. Typically not much increases if you only take out a dozen nests but if you get crazy with it you can really speed up the evo factor. You get greater penalties earlier in the game for killing spawners as opposed to later in the game.


The beginning goes slow but once things get rolling, you REALLY get rolling. There's many different paths but choosing to manage pollution in the beginning will save you a ton of headaches in the end.