Factorio Forums

Trying to figure out where to place gun turrets and why. It seems like a lot of veterans don't wall off their entire base and just place turrets in clumps around it. I've also seen some designs that look like they don't have ammo automatically refilling them.

Turret clumps are designed to kill medium spitters. Single turrets and undefended walls are useless against them.

But medium spitters take a long time to evolve, if you are playing slowly. Only veterans who scale up the factory (and pollution) very fast need to worry about them.

Once you start getting regularly attacked by biter on a given map, you'll notice that most attacks will take the same paths. Just defending those can be enough.
What also helps is knowing that you only get attacked from places where your pollution cloud touches biter nests. If you destroy all the nests far enough from your pollution cloud, then it's easier to manage.

The very first gun turrets often are handfed. And if you manage your pollution cloud, depending on your map settings, you can get far enough into the game withour worrying about biter pressure on your defenses. Might be that.

It depends a bit on if you play deathworld or not. In a non-deathworld game you can just place some turrets around to start with and drop 50-100 ammo in each. That will take care of everything for a good while. Building a large wall per hand is just a waste of time there. Reinforce points under pressure (often coal boilers, miners and smelters) as needed

An intermediate step towards a full wall is to build bunkers. Place 5 turrets in a row and daisy chain them with inserters from the middle one. Then feed the middle one from a box with ammo. And a build a wall in front of the turrets.

If you play with non-expanding biters you can prevent attacks by killing nests in your pollution cloud. That doesn't work so well in the end game though as heavy module and beacon use leads to a gigantic cloud that extends even beyond upgraded artillery range (unless you have artillery stations at distant mining outposts for example). So a wall in many places can be necessary even then. Biters may also path around some of your defenses if the shortest route to a pollution source takes them around it. In my current game I've had some groups walk through huge solar fields along train tracks to attack miners near my core base

I like the idea of putting defenses on the path where the biters go... which means paying attention and being able to identify the paths used by the biters... Ah ha! Data! I <3 data! Show me the data!
Wouldn't it be cool to have a mod that traced all the biter tracks through your base? A map view that shows a white pixel for one to ten biters in that spot, yellow for 11-100, orange for 101-1000, and red for more than a thousand?

Amarula wrote: ↑Sun Aug 02, 2020 1:28 pm I like the idea of putting defenses on the path where the biters go... which means paying attention and being able to identify the paths used by the biters... Ah ha! Data! I <3 data! Show me the data!
Wouldn't it be cool to have a mod that traced all the biter tracks through your base? A map view that shows a white pixel for one to ten biters in that spot, yellow for 11-100, orange for 101-1000, and red for more than a thousand?

Or you can just 'cheat' and reveal the enemies' paths in the debug menu

nitiyoso wrote: ↑Sun Aug 02, 2020 6:54 am Trying to figure out where to place gun turrets and why. It seems like a lot of veterans don't wall off their entire base and just place turrets in clumps around it. I've also seen some designs that look like they don't have ammo automatically refilling them.

best place to start are the miners, the smelting area and the power roduction.
These are the biggest polluters and the biters will try to destroy them.

There is no need for a big wall in the beginning. Start with unprotected turrets, then fence them in and later on you can build a proper defense line.
Flame turrets are very good in early midgame and later on.

Best way to feed ammo is by belt or manually.
A stack of 200 lasts quite a while.

If I use belts I usually use the red inserters to reduce splash damage from the splitters.
You can also chain the gun turrets by placing an inserter between two turrets, but I wouldnt recommend it because when one turret or inserter is destroyed to complete supply chain is interrupted.

JimBarracus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 06, 2020 4:55 am
<snip>
Best way to feed ammo is by belt or manually.
A stack of 200 lasts quite a while.
<snip>

200 lasts a while as long as the turret isn't destroyed!

Then it's a very quick way to LOSE 200