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Now that power switches can have their wires in blueprints it's possible to make a laser wall with almost no drain.
It's still a bit tricky, but after many iterations, I managed to design a good blueprint. Other wire connections or wire cuts than the ones to power switches are not preserved when blueprinting, so I had to mix poles and place everything perfectly to get it working.

Why perfect? Here's why:

• The ease of laser, without the drain. Power consumption of the drain of triple layer laser down to 2.5% of what it would otherwise be. For layered lasers and a big base, the drain is not only a constant that goes on regardless if you have ongoing attacks or not, but the drain is also actually higher than the energy used by the active turrets while you are under attack! This design reduces drain so much that you can have a constant stream of bugs getting zapped and use less power than a draining design in peaceful mode! Extreme efficiency.
• Blueprintable. Just plonk it down and it works, no manual wire connecting at all. All wires that should connect do. No wire that shouldn't connect do.
• Sections activate independently. You can have a ten thousand tiles long wall and only the chunks that are attacked will be on. You don't get your whole perimeter turned on just because there are random attacks at some places but not others.
• It's 1 chunk long for easy tiling.
• It's only 25 tiles deep from outer stone wall layer to the power poles so it doesn't take up much space and doesn't force bots to fly long distances. A roboport is included in the blueprint within those 25 tiles so repairs and replacements happen quickly.
• Activates quickly so that it has no trouble zapping behemoths.
• Limits the maximum charge in the measuring accumulators so that it deactivates laser immediately and saves you power as soon as the attack stops. It almost looks like the turrets shoot while having the no power icon flashing because it's that quick.
• Can be turned into the always-on mode by circuit network. Just toggle a single constant combinator off or back on again to switch modes. Having power switches toggle constantly might drain your UPS if you have a gigabase, but with a single switch, you can go into draining mode where everything is constant and no updates happen. Not really necessary at any smaller scales though.
• The always-on turrets that are used to monitor for close by natives get fed by the main network also when they turn on all the surrounding turrets so that they can also help with the killing at full effectiveness.
• You can add more layers (up to about 8 total) of lasers without increasing drain at all.
• Beautiful design with turrets in straight lines.

Any drawbacks?
If the monitoring turret is destroyed then the surrounding turrets in that chunk will no longer activate until that turret is replaced by the bots. But even a constant stream of behemoths is unlikely to deal any real damage that risks this. I've seen a spitter hit another turret once, and the lasers survive that while the bugs gets annihilated. Lasers almost never get hurt, though occasionally a single wall piece gets destroyed. It's still so rare it's not worth considering. But it's not really a downside anyways:

• Even if it ever happens you can just toggle the no-drain switch and all your turrets get turned on regardless. (the mod Remote Switches give you constant combinators that you can toggle from anywhere with a GUI)
• And even if you are AFK and can't flip the switch, the biters still get shot by the chunk to the left and right of that single disabled chunk and won't go past your wall to destroy your base. They will just get aggroed by those chunks and all you lose are a handful of lasers at worst.
• And if you have installed mods that make the natives smarter and stronger so that they can deal some damage and avoid turrets, you can just place up to four turrets where the scouting turret stands so there's always one alive to activate the others. This is an extreme measure that no-one against vanilla natives should use since it just increases your drain (to 10%, still quite negligible). Orange in the picture below.

I haven't made any corner pieces but you only have 4 of those in any square so you can just have draining laser corners. Or just don't even have anything there except walls since the lasers attract the biters anyways.
*Edit*: Bonus meme! Corner piece! Always on, but how many corners do you have in your square anyways? Tiles with the bp above and connects the red wire. I'm assuming you place your stone walls touching the chunk border (so not as pictured).
*Edit*: BP updated. Fixed small bug.
*Edit*: Made a BP Book out of the blueprints. Moved some poles a bit north. Added radar (credits below). Added version without radar and place-once circuits for easy placement.
*Edit*: Updated bp book. Straighter power lines. No included radar though. Includes concave corners too now.
*Edit 2020-08-15*: Now the blueprints snap to the absolute chunk grid.

Copy blueprint

And I also like minimal radar setups to monitor my walls.
There's no space for that in the wall chunk above the medium poles, but if you place the walls against the upper chunk border you can fit it in the same chunk just below the medium poles without unwanted connections.

Hi, my download of your BP did not include red control wires, nor accumulators... Any idea why?
Ah, never mind... download does not work if importing string into a BP book, as the download is a BP book of its own. In the former case only one wall with two deep lasers and poles and one switch was dowloaded. But otherwise the BP book has (4) BPs. Thanks.

Is the triple laser row design sufficient for 0.17, especially when it triggers retaliation attacks against Artillery?

These retaliatory strikes can be pretty severe at evolution factors over 90% when you are expanding your base (hitting large dense nests) .

My biggest concern are the spitters. Those evolved spitters seem to have quite a long reach and the constant repairs can chew through repair packs like candy. So far nothing I found has the reach to fully kill them before they can spit. The closest thing I found to minimize damage was a combination of lasers and flamethrowers, but even that wasn't perfect.

zOldBulldog wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:30 pm Is the triple laser row design sufficient for 0.17, especially when it triggers retaliation attacks against Artillery?

These retaliatory strikes can be pretty severe at evolution factors over 90% when you are expanding your base (hitting large dense nests) .

My biggest concern are the spitters. Those evolved spitters seem to have quite a long reach and the constant repairs can chew through repair packs like candy. So far nothing I found has the reach to fully kill them before they can spit. The closest thing I found to minimize damage was a combination of lasers and flamethrowers, but even that wasn't perfect.

Is it enough to stop them? Yes.
Is it enough to kill them before they get a chance to deal damage? You already answered that yourself. These triple rows are not stronger than regular triple rows. They activate almost immediately but always-on turrets do of course activate as fast as possible.

But you can add more rows of lasers without increasing drain. 8 rows would be very draining without this method but have the same drain as 1 turret per chunk like this. But having more rows won't increase your range. But with more rows you can instagib behemoth biter hordes that are suicide rushing your walls and acting as meat shields for the spitters. So the turrets can then more quickly switch to attacking the behemoth spitters. Their range is 16 and laser turrets range is 24, so a difference of 8 which is 4 turret rows that can attack spitters at their max range.

Repair packs are extremely cheap and also last a long time and stack to big stacks that last forever. They are effectively free. They are very hard candies. Stop worrying about repair packs, you are wasting your time. Can I see your ammo, repair pack and turret production (all time) and energy used by laser turrets (all time)? And also science pack production.

I should re-read the old topic on laser without drain. It had some good info and some tricks that I'm not using here. In particular, how to keep laser turrets off during the night with only solar power.

Summarizing what I think I am hearing... multi-row laser should deal with attackers faster than a mix of laser / flame, reducing damage received.

No, I didn't say that. I said that repair packs are a cost of doing business with the biters. I said that more lasers are better at reducing damage taken than less lasers.

Flame turrets quite a while to land their projectiles so they can't really stop the front of the swarm from doing anything, so in that regard they take up space that a quickly activating laser turret could have. But electricity is also a limited resource in early-mid game that you might struggle with from laser turret use so those have an ammo cost that you have to weigh in also. You probably spend 10 times more resources on bullets and electricity that you do on repair packs.

Qon wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 5:29 pm No, I didn't say that. I said that repair packs are a cost of doing business with the biters. I said that more lasers are better at reducing damage taken than less lasers.

Flame turrets quite a while to land their projectiles so they can't really stop the front of the swarm from doing anything, so in that regard they take up space that a quickly activating laser turret could have. But electricity is also a limited resource in early-mid game that you might struggle with from laser turret use so those have an ammo cost that you have to weigh in also. You probably spend 10 times more resources on bullets and electricity that you do on repair packs.

Hmm... I still don't understand what is the best option to minimize damage, assuming that I do not have any issues with power.

By now I already understand that I should have at least 3 rows of lasers to deal with the 90%+ evolved enemies I am seeing in the mid-game in response to artillery clearing of new areas, and that I should have bots and repair packs.

But I don't understand whether I should or should not add flame turrets, uranium ammo turrets, or anything else to the artillery outpost. What do you recommend?

Also, what distance do you recommend between the weapons (laser/flame/turret) and the wall, and should I add dragon-teeth outside (keeping in mind that my bots will likely try to repair them and get hit in the process - ok if they just get repaired, but very bad if I start losing bots)?

zOldBulldog wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 6:15 pm Hmm... I still don't understand what is the best option to minimize damage, assuming that I do not have any issues with power.

I'm not sure either. Except that overwhelming firepower is the solution. Unless you bring in modded turrets that can do other things than damage that are actually even better.

zOldBulldog wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 6:15 pm But I don't understand whether I should or should not add flame turrets, uranium ammo turrets, or anything else to the artillery outpost. What do you recommend?

Flaming turrets might actually make you lose more bots since bots can take friendly fire damage. And they might be more likely to do that than getting spit on them. There's a mod that makes bots fireproof if you want to use that.

Gun turrets deal much more damage/turret with uranium bullets. But they have a shorter range so less of them will be in range of a concentrated mob (which is basically the only thing that will ever deal damage to you). And they need inserters so they take more space and thus deal a bit less damage/tile they occupy. Gun turrets also have less HP so will more easily die, compared to lasers that will survive spitter damage and can be repaired cheaply instead of being completely replaced. And lasers outrange behemoth spitters with their 24 range compared to 16 while gun turrets only have a range of 18.

If you are far enough then you can just research infinite energy weapons damage and use more laser turrets. Easy and reliable and needs some repairs but only minimal. If the frontline is 1 row of gun turrets then they might be close enough to deal damage. Flame turrets are a great way to stop a big swarm since the aoe and dot are very effective, even if it doesn't activate as quickly.

But I'm mostly playing in creative mode atm so I can't really tell from experience. I'll probably put flame turrets and triple lasers at the corners of my base if I don't round them off a bit (corners are a weak point since fewer turrets are in range of each enemy there) and only have 1 - 2 rows of lasers at other points. You only really need beefy protection around the artillery because other spots on your wall will not be attacked. They either go for the artillery or they don't come at all since the artillery already cleared the bases within pollution range.

But range should not be underestimated. The ability to have several rows that all engage means that the amount of turrets that are active go up by the square of the range instead of linearly as gun turrets do when they attack at behemoths max~ range.

zOldBulldog wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 6:15 pm Also, what distance do you recommend between the weapons (laser/flame/turret) and the wall, and should I add dragon-teeth outside (keeping in mind that my bots will likely try to repair them and get hit in the process - ok if they just get repaired, but very bad if I start losing bots)?

I haven't really tried dragons teeth that much. I think the point of them is that Behemoth biters can destroy 2 tiles deep at the same time so having anything (laser turret or another wall segment) directly behind another doesn't add protection They can really squeze through the walls pieces even if they are not fully connected (Maybe squeek through makes it easier for biters as well to get between wall tiles though?). But if you just repair the walls quickly enough (don't have repair packs and bots onnly a kilometer away in the logi network) then many layers of wall don't really help. One or 2 should last long enough to kill them all and the repairs are then done before the next wave. If you have a big base then losing some bots is certainly worse than repair packs, but also not a big deal at big enough scale.

Thanks, I think I'll go for a combination of your 3-deep auto-disable lasers and maybe a flamethrower at regular intervals.

I just learned that mines stun the enemies they affect. And it's also AoE and can be placed at long ranges (roboport construction area). That could really prevent all damage as long as you don't send bots to replace the mines while under attack. A big part of the swarm would be dead before they even reach turret range and when they do they will be stunned in turret range instead. While stunned they can't charge forward and they can't spit but you are free to BBQ them to the perfect temperature, just season to taste and you have a 5-star meal. Really gives your flame turrets the time they need to act on targets at long range and to hit the first wave. Flames + Mines seems like a beast combo if you have my laser wall as backup. Maybe detect enemies at long range by measuring oil used and don't insert mines into logistics chests until the level stabilises?

Edit:
I tested it. There's no way any behemoth swarm can get through a mine+flame defence. Had a single row of laser in case they came close to my walls. That was way overkill. Walls was also overkill. Laser almost never shoots at all and the behemoths can't get through half the mine layers. They basically stop at the first layer. I removed several layers of mines to keep the furthest layers + spitter range within flamer range and it was still overkill.

However, if you don't stop the bots from replacing mines you are going to have a really bad time.
Your fire damages your bots and your mines. While attacks are going on you will lose thousands of bots and mines if you place them during the attack and quite a while after. The bots will fly into the fire and burn to death. When they survive they place a mine in fire or acid spit the mine instantly dies. Since flamethrowers are free to shoot at immobile targets the ground flames last a long time after the fight too. Also even if they do manage to place a mine a spitter will attack mines that are not armed so it will be killed as it is placed by a spitter that you can't reach with your turrets. This will trigger a new mine placement which keeps the spitter immobile outside of your turret range because you keep feeding it new un-armed mines to spit at. At least the flame AoE is about the size of a mine so if your mines are spaced out enough to not destroy each other then the flames burn the mines that have already exploded since those are the ones with natives on them. So they don't destroy armed mines.

Mines + flames is probably overkill regardless of swarm size and how few mines and flame turrets you downsize to. But the weakness is that you can't rebuild the mines while attacked and quite a while after or you will lose all your mines and bots in the first attack. So if you get attacks very often at the same spot you will need the lasers to help the flamers when the mines are out. But with artillery, you mostly get bursts of attacks with a long time in between since they only attack when they migrate into your automatic range or you upgrade your range or manually fire.

Edit2: Apparently mines can't damage eachother according to a thread I just read. But if you place them too close to each other your flames will kill the surrounding mines that haven't yet exploded.
But this means that you are free to place mines as close as you want if you use lasers instead of flame turrets. And then you can definity stunlock all of them outside spitting range and replacing them can be done immediately when your lasers stop firing. Which someone has posted a neat detector for! :3

Koub wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2019 9:46 am Note : Now, landmines benefit from explosives damage upgrade .

That's infinite landmine damage research!

Edit3:
Continued testing and wrote about it in another thread:

Qon wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2019 10:16 pm But I did some more testing and mines alone are actually enough if you fill the entire roboport construction area. Just don't replace them during an attack and you are good. Simplest is to just not have them in a logistics chests except every 10 minutes or so. A simple timer circuit can put them in a steel chests so con bots can't grab them and then move them to a provider for a few seconds and then back again to the steel chest. Turrets are not actually necessary. And by not having turrets the spitters will not have anything to spit at. A whole behemoth swarm can only get through like 2-3 layers of mines so even if you have a single artillery turret so that they all beeline into the same spot you can take continuous attacks by really aggroed behemoths for minutes at the same spot before they even get close enough to get shot my laser turrets. If you have several turrets then that means you spread out their attacking spots. If you don't have a lot of expansion then you barely ever need to replace the mines once you cleared out your artillery range.

Flame turrets are extremely strong with mines. But then you have to spread out your mines because with 1 mine/tile the flame AoE will destroy surrounding mines. And flames last a long while when pooled at the same spot on immobile stunned targets so you can't replace the mines for quite a while after being attacked. It's strong enough that you could probably fairly easily deal with behemoths with 10 times the health, but also annoying that you can't just chance on no attack going on at the time when you release the mine replacements. And mines alone are already strong enough. If you use lasers then that isn't as good combo power wise, but anything with mines is already overkill in terms of defensive power so it's not like you endanger yourself if you use lasers instead of flamers
But lasers don't linger after a fight so you can place mines immediately when the fight stops. And you can pretty much eliminate drain from lasers (follow the quote arrow link) and you don't need many turrets since they just do some irregular cleanup or never ever fire depending on how many layers of mines you have.

So mines are god mode if you don't rebuild them during an attack or while the ground is burning.

With the advent of space-age and the quality mechanic; I think theres new things to talk about on this thread (I know this is a necro--but this is new/additive right? also, I looked around and I diden't see any rules against necro anyway).

I found this today, love it and I hate that I diden't think of it on my own; also, I realized that your "scout" laser is a perfect time to use high-quality lasers for.

the extra range means that it "sees" the enemies and starts draining its batt (and thus triggers the main line) a bit faster; resulting in your main line being ready by the time the enemy comes in range.

chances are that you won't have max-tier lasers for your entire front line---so whatever tier you can afford your main line being, have your 'scout' lasers be that +1.

Depending on how your setting up your quality-production; you could go for +2 and have the pointer tower be set back a extra 2 tiles for safety via a extra wall and making it improbable the enemies target it.

BTW: you can improve this by using the 'big' power poles---not only does this let you offset the "mechanics" of it easier since you can put a second down very far from the rest of the line, but the power-distance is shorter (only 4), allowing you to reduce how much space the scout laser needs to be power-seperated from the rest meaning you can have more turrets per row in your main line.
Note you can use alt-c to specify exactly what poles each pole are connected to, which is important for this to work---although you still can't specify what networks will power a building except by what poles are near it still (IDK if that feature is after when this thread was made tho!).

If your not just porting the quality mod into vanilla/non-spaceage (theres a mod for that if you want it, although I think you still need to have the space age DLC, even if not enabled) and using space-age as well;

rockets can also be used relatively early, if you pick gleba early anyway, for this purpose too with their large (freaking 36!) range. I'm of the opinion, although I haven't used them yet, that rockets should be reserved for the largest enemies per the reason they added the feature....but thats actually okay here I think because a wave not including the largest enemies probably means your not too worried about a slight delay for your laser turret to trigger; just make sure to have them both act as 'scout's in a "OR" gate fashion and your fine IMO.

The large range that the railguns have (40 even at Q1) means they can be used too; just place them just behind your scout-laser and they will both act as triggers;
(admittedly, by the time you have railguns you probably already have your biter situation at home solved--but hey; its fun to re-design things if you have an upgrade no?)

To be honest, if you play for a longer time you realize it's not necessary to create super sophisticated defense walls. It's a waste of resources. It's a waste of time to build it all. The less items you need, the faster it is constructed and the faster it provides defense.

About waste, there is so much energy available, you don't need to care for the laser drain. Just connect all the turrets, add some more solar panel field, and you're finished.

On Nauvis, I guess the most efficient defensive weapons are still flamethrower turrets and a single row of laser turrets in front of them, all behind a 1-tile wall with a shallow dragon teeth installation in front of it to slow down bigger biters. Combined with roboport coverage to supply repair and replacements.

That's a really simple blueprint with not many different items, after all with zero circuits and very simple supply infrastructure except perhaps the train station that delivers the supply for some bigger wall section.

Tertius wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2024 5:19 pm To be honest, if you play for a longer time you realize it's not necessary to create super sophisticated defense walls. It's a waste of resources. It's a waste of time to build it all. The less items you need, the faster it is constructed and the faster it provides defense.

About waste, there is so much energy available, you don't need to care for the laser drain. Just connect all the turrets, add some more solar panel field, and you're finished.

On Nauvis, I guess the most efficient defensive weapons are still flamethrower turrets and a single row of laser turrets in front of them, all behind a 1-tile wall with a shallow dragon teeth installation in front of it to slow down bigger biters. Combined with roboport coverage to supply repair and replacements.

That's a really simple blueprint with not many different items, after all with zero circuits and very simple supply infrastructure except perhaps the train station that delivers the supply for some bigger wall section.

Since a simple wall takes less time to setup a blueprint for yeah, its faster.

but not by much--as long as you are practiced with circuits or at least with what build you prefer (and thats assuming your arn't pulling in blueprints from other runs and making from scratch); it perhaps takes a extra 5-10 minutes to setup this blueprint their talking about (although even thats conservative under the practiced-with-circuits assumption)---far less then the additional coal-mine, routing, power-production-parts like SP/accum (or boilers) and factory time on producing all of that.

the material cost meanwhile, of adding a few combinators, a couple extra poles, a solar panel/accumulator/etc per BP; is almost nothing---it might even be less then the laser turrets that you don't place down (you do lose overall firepower doing this--but very little...and thats not your argument here anyway)

Once the blueprint is made and the materials accounted-for; the only thing left is the number of items---this adds, what, 8 items while removing 2? even with a minimal 1-row wall or even a half-row...thats basically nothing. a single turret and the walls in front of it are half that cost so adding this is like 15% more bot-trips at most---most often it'll be like 5% (and if your bottleneck really is your bot-building time, then good on you I guess).

meanwhile, it can--depending on where you are in the gameplay loop of course, save you a lot more then 5 minutes of production in saved time spent on expanding power production/storage (even with coal) or finding new sources of coal. this trick this thread is talking about is still pretty good even if you only have a single row (IE: mid-late game) afterall.

Then there's the possibility of having various mods that extend the game play loop out far enough (or otherwise change the order/availability of things) that a deathworld-run *HAS* to consider energy consumption while being limited in claimed space/access to coal that "just throw down more power" isn't a option. (and no, deathworlds are *not* in fact constantly bombarded from every direction at every moment--so there's still plenty of savings for those runs). (yes, deathworlds usually rely on flamers more then lasers--but I could easily see someone modding things so that flamers aren't as OP as they are for a deathworld-run).

lastly? the whole point of this game is to have fun optimizing---if you find that building defenses is boring then great; thats fine. But I certainly love thinking about this kind of thing (although I definitely think the above points stand on their own anyway!).

TLDR:let us have our fun dang-nebbit!

I certainly don't want to spoil your fun. I built a sophisticated almost-zero-power wall like this myself, tinkering with it took about a week I guess, but after I was finished and I was satisfied how it did work, I realized what I wrote above.

A wall without any energy control worked the same for my factory, so I asked myself for what all these circuits, switches, battery-detectors are for? Every tiny chunk-sized wall segment (or in my case: 50 tiles, coverage of one roboport) needs one set of them. For nothing in the end. It worked as well without, and it worked better, because it was more reliable and more stable due to less complexity. It also lowered the energy usage spikes, because the moment you connect a wall segment, the empty energy buffers of the lasers get filled in addition to the power required for firing. This doesn't take place with always-on lasers.

The wall shown in this thread is also slightly too weak for the late game with behemoth enemies (it tries to counter this with an excessive amount of laser turrets). It can happen the lasers are not enough to handle a larger amount of them in time. Add flamethrower turrets, and you need just one line of laser turrets, and just spaced with a 2 tile gap. And since you always need some detector turrets for energy control, the amount of switched off lasers decreases even more and the need for energy control as well. You need just one single oil well for a whole giant megabase defensive wall around everything including the mines.

So I rebuilt it again without including any energy control.

I admit I just play with vanilla default settings for enemies. Since I don't really have fun with enemies in a factory builder, I will certainly never increase enemy difficulty.

Tertius wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2024 6:56 pm I certainly don't want to spoil your fun. I built a sophisticated almost-zero-power wall like this myself, tinkering with it took about a week I guess, but after I was finished and I was satisfied how it did work, I realized what I wrote above.

A wall without any energy control worked the same for my factory, so I asked myself for what all these circuits, switches, battery-detectors are for? Every tiny chunk-sized wall segment (or in my case: 50 tiles, coverage of one roboport) needs one set of them. For nothing in the end. It worked as well without, and it worked better, because it was more reliable and more stable due to less complexity. It also lowered the energy usage spikes, because the moment you connect a wall segment, the empty energy buffers of the lasers get filled in addition to the power required for firing. This doesn't take place with always-on lasers.

The wall shown in this thread is also slightly too weak for the late game with behemoth enemies (it tries to counter this with an excessive amount of laser turrets). It can happen the lasers are not enough to handle a larger amount of them in time. Add flamethrower turrets, and you need just one line of laser turrets, and just spaced with a 2 tile gap. And since you always need some detector turrets for energy control, the amount of switched off lasers decreases even more and the need for energy control as well. You need just one single oil well for a whole giant megabase defensive wall around everything including the mines.

So I rebuilt it again without including any energy control.

I admit I just play with vanilla default settings for enemies. Since I don't really have fun with enemies in a factory builder, I will certainly never increase enemy difficulty.

1): energy spikes don't matter when you have accumulators--its literally the whole point to them that they handle them. and you don't need that many (no more then you with always-on certainly).
2): complexity doesn't matter once you have the blue-print setup; (what failure modes did you encounter anyway? I feel like you'd briefly mention at least one if they were actually overly complex in some un-mitigatable way... but maybe not?...this is exactly the thread to discuss what issues were found while exploring this idea....)
3): handling the ultra-late-game, where the waves are actually reaching the upper limit of what they ever reach, slightly less well also doesn't count for much---by that point in the game, *EVERY* (conventional) problem is trivialized by "just throw down more <insert requirement> down" except UPS-concerns and we are not (just) talking about the problem space for mega-bases (their almost *DEFINED* by UPS-optimization concerns in my opinion).

4): What about deathworld runs then? pretty sure you will need more then 1 row of lasers and flamer in the late game then---and in the early game you need the resources that your casually supposing can be thrown away for the powering of this. Theres a point to be mad that lasers aren't very viable till later on--not right as you unlock them; and nuclear power+flamers+lasers is roughly the point deathworlds stop being particularly challanging....but I can easily see someone want to try to make lasers work anyway.

5): even a 1-row using flamer turrets still would cut the passive drain by...(looks at the example pictures) roughly a ratio of 13-to-1? thats hundreds of solar panels worth of drain saved even for a modest base; easily into the thousands by the time your get to post-rocket.

edit:
lets just go into the numbers so we don't have to argue over whether or not its actually worth it based off just intuition.

its a touch under 2 turrets per panel and 21 accumulators for 25 panels for powering the drain; so for 12 turrets in a row (since one has to be left active for a row of 13 (example pictures before) that's 6 panels and a touch over 5 accumulators.

Next, we have to pay for one accumulator in this print, (it's still helping to power the wall and we are actually over 5 accumulators); but lets just round down and say we are saving 6 panels and 4 accumulators.

so 6 panels and 4 accumulator---even with conservative rounding in your favor with your scenario. that works out to 20 batt, 90 green-c, 30 copper-p, 30 steel and 8 iron....its worth noting that this is enough to pay for about 3-4 turrets....that's ~~ 1/3 of your row

This is *not* nothing if your actually resource-constrained or time-constrained in how fast your factory can convert resources into parts for your wall; especially since its pretty plausible that the first thing you do after unlocking/setting up batt/solar/accum/lasers is putting up walls reliant on these and so your going to be putting these all down as your factory can make them--which means your bottleneck will be on your production of exactly these things.

(I'd even point out that since flamers on their own are useless, you probably would want to start with the lasers first---so fastest-time-to-complete-wall is likely a function of your production time of turrets+power-for-them.)

....

Now; you could easily change the numbers around by using steam instead of SP/accum (or nuclear); but I think my point still stands:

between the walls, poles, flamer turrets, pipes, etc, being unaffected either way; I think its reasonable to LOWBALL this as being 10-20% cheaper walls in addition to a lot of saved space, time spent expanding power, factory time for the parts for the wall, etc.

....and thats with OP-flamers, no re-balancing mods, no endgame+ enemies to necessitate multi-row lasers (even with flamers), and on (I assume) roughly vanilla world-settings, where your not constrained in how much resources/space you have to spend on your defenses or power-production; and probably not really time-pressured.