bugs getting closer

[factoriobiker]

Bugs nests seems to come closer and closer to the base..
turrets seems not work that well....
are laser turrets better? They use electricity right?
will the bugs come closer and closer and become bigger and bigger

[Qon]

are laser turrets better? They use electricity right?

Some would say laser turrets and flamer turrets are OP viewtopic.php?f=16&t=88482 (I kind of disagree to some extent)

Gun turrets with the right upgrades (uranium ammo etc) have the highest single target DPS. Flamethrower turrets are great at what they do, and you only need a sparse amount of them so that the perimeter is coverd, but should be combined with some other turret.

[netmand]

the biters travel in all directions but are also attracted to pollution. they evolve (grow bigger and more numerous) over time and feed off the pollution in the air. left unchecked, they form attack groups that grow larger in number after each attack.

for defense, use the latest tech you can afford to make a fair number of turrets from (and keep them stocked with ammo). use walls. use landmines. kill nearby nests to preempt attack groups and prevent them from growing too numerous.

[factoriobiker]

i thought at first when i cleen the nest they will not reappear

[Serenity]

turrets seems not work that well....

Then you aren't doing it right. Even without uranium ammo they are quite good if you research the speed and damage upgrades

Laser turrets are just easier because you don't have to feed them ammo. But they actually do less damage unless you invest massively into research

They can also be combined because of their different ranges. And backed up flamer turrets and of course walls

i thought at first when i cleen the nest they will not reappear

That depends on your map settings. You have to explicitly turn off expansion

[factoriobiker]

ammo is a bich to deliver and make.....do you make factories for ammo, i make it by hand all the time and refill turrets manually

[Serenity]

At the beginning manual delivery is perfectly fine. Turret's don't consume that much for a few attacks. If you need a strongpoint you can daisy chain 5 turrets and feed them from the middle. Then you only have to fill one box.

Otherwise you can run a belt of ammo along your turrets and have them pick it up

And of course you should automate ammo production. This is Factorio. Military science makes you do that actually. You can build more than you need for that alone and use the rest for yourself. Or have a separate production line.
Even before that it's trivial to make basic (yellow) ammunition next to your first iron belt

[factoriobiker]

how to daisy chain it, with belts and arms?
So you need arm for each turret to load the ammo....

[netmand]

Otherwise you can run a belt of ammo along your turrets and have them pick it up

Personally I just do direct insert. You can chain turrets with inserters to relay ammo without the need to produce a lot more ammo to sit on long stretches of belts.

[factoriobiker]

can you post screenshot?

[Moo Rhy]

The outer turrents are fed from the central one

factorio daisy.png (411.59 KiB) Viewed 2906 times

[starlinvf]

if you're new, turret logistics can be a huge pain. The main problem comes down to how big of an area you're defending. To prevent biters from just rushing in, you need one of the following (or a combination of).

- Enough turrets to cover the direction they're coming from.
- Enough turrets in one spot to kill them all before they can destroy defenses
- overlapping turret coverage to help meet 1 & 2.
- blocking off path ways to the factory using walls and/or terrain
- in some cases for remote factories, setting up ammo production or ammo delivery so they don't run out of ammo

Gun Turrets are cheap to build, and typically effective until swarms start getting a lot of spitters (since they can shoot over walls). The cons however is their supply logistics. Since new players tend to not have a handle on compact factory design, they tend to over expand too fast, and not have a good way to supply turrets in mid-game, when attacks start getting more frequent. you have 3 options.... belt ammo up to them from a central production hub, cart them up in bulk using something like a train (if distance is substantial enough), or cart up raw materials and build an ammo production site closer to hot spots to simplify logistics. initially Building the ammo supply setup is the hard part; but upscaling extra turrets is about the same hassle as increasing factory production rates like you would for anything else. So if you think about this as you expand outward, Gun turrets tend to remain useful for the whole playthrough. But you progressively need more of them as attacks get bigger.


The guy that mention Uranium ammo failed to mention that Uranium is more late game, and takes a ton of research to get the ammo unlocked. Most people mention it, because early late game involves Nuclear power, and end up with a lot of Uranium 238 (dark green) left over from the ore processing. U-235 (light green) is a rare output (0.7% per cycle), and is the one used for fuel cells... but 238 is only useful in enrichment or ammo production. From a practical stand point, you'll probably never touch this unless you want to.

Around Mid-game is when Laser turrets start becoming practical. The main advantages of Lasers is their extremely simple logistics, since they tap into your Power network. However, despite being an option early on, power generation is a problem. Each turret can sap 1-2Mws of power easy while firing.... which means you need ~2-4 Steam engines (per) to supply it, or it can start to black out your whole factory. You wanna hold off until you have Accumulators unlocked, as they are (by design) a Battery that can dump extra power into the network if demand overloads your power generation. 9 Accumulators Per Turret, multiplied by the number of Turrets in the cluster that sees the most action, is enough to cover most fights.

If you want to get Creative, you can use steam engines with a Large tank of Steam as storage, and a Boiler supplied from a Box full of coal as an alternative to accumulators. There is a quirk of Steam engines, in that they only consume steam to create power when there is demand. Boilers also only create steam if the pipes have room. So it only consumes coal when power is used. As long as this remote set up is NOT connected to your main power network, its a kind of like a big battery. You're still limited to 900kw output per engine, so you'll need 2 engines per turret shooting to keep them at full power.

But once you get nuclear power going, you can generate a ton of electricity easily. More then enough to supply a bunch of Laser Turrets without really feeling it.


The last 2 are Flame Turrets and Artillery. Both have something of an AOE element to them, letting them scale easily as attacker numbers increase. (Gun and Laser turrets are single target)

Flame turrets have somewhat easier logistics, since pipe networks are easier to build then belt networks. It can take any oil type as ammo. For the most part, just use which ever oil type is the most convenient to access for that area. If you care about efficiency, you can do the energy cost math on your own.

Artillery has the same basic logistics problem of Gun Turrets, but their sheer damage and slow fire rate means ammo stock piles get a lot of mileage. And because they're more late game, you typically have a much better supply network setup, and a better handle on supply handling, to automate restocking with minimal setup effort. Theres also an Artillery cart for Rail ways.... so you can set up tracks, or hook it into your main rail network, and have it run patrols. Either will attack anything in range, and is a very effective way to kill enemy bases that get too close.


Beyond turrets, there also Walls used to block enemy movement. However, Enemy pathing AI has a few hard to predict rules when it comes to defenses. If theres an opening nearby, they'll try to use it.... but if they see something they consider a threat (like turrets and radars), they'll go straight toward it, and try to knock down obstacles in the way. This means you don't actually need a completely walled off Factory to work as a base defense; but it still needs to cover enough space to make detouring unfavorable to it.

[starlinvf]

I also forgot to mention.... if you haven't read up on how Enemies and Pollution works, you may want to take the time to learn a few things.


Enemy Evolution is intentionally an Arms Race with the player. The catch though is that, the more you scale up your factory, the more pollution it generates. Pollution is what triggers attacks, and accelerates their evolution into bigger units. Since the biggest pollution sources are Boilers for Steam engines, Mining Drills, and large amounts of Assembly machines,(all of which you have to build up more of to expand your defenses faster) upscaling your factory actively upscales the enemy threat. So you either try to build faster then they can evolve, or seriously go nuts with defenses so that it'll take out anything that comes for you.

The general problem though is that dealing with defense diverts resources away from research.... in the early game thats a huge deal, since your defense options vastly improve the further up the research tree you are. You also have to consider that your starting area has a very finite amount of raw resources.... and burning through that before getting trains and advanced material processing set up (to cart in remote resources and more efficient processing, respectively) makes getting more resources in a lot more difficult.


usually you can stay ahead of the curve if you use cliffs like natural walls, letting you focus on choke points, and getting an ammo production line set up early on, so you have a stock pile of ammo when you start to place turrets. You can worry about automating ammo lines later, once you have belt and inserter production automated for Green Science (ie either tapping excess supplies, or building an extra machine each to insert into a box you can grab from later).