Friday Facts #316 - Map editor Lua snippets & Non-colliding Biters

[Shogal]

I hope they will eat less UPS after the update, because massive biter attacks usually cause UPS drops on low-end CPU

[Koub]

Less collisions, less repathing, less pathfinding, less UPS drop. Seems likely.

[splein23]

Loving the biter update. Now we just need biter base creep to prevent turret cheesing and maybe a couple more biter types.

[Cribbit]

35 minutes into the game, and the biters are overwhelming my defenses.

Don't spread out your turrets. Biters will "dive" at the first military they encounter, with a range a decent bit wider than the turret itself. You can still cover quite a wide area, and if you need a wider area you can make two clusters pretty wide apart - nothing will sneak up the middle.

When you space the turrets they have less ability to cover each other. If you put them in a tight cluster then more turrets will be in range of the biters as they beeline in.

[Cribbit]

Loving the biter update. Now we just need biter base creep to prevent turret cheesing and maybe a couple more biter types.

The military balance changes in the last few major versions have actually made turret creep kind of outmoded. It's not like it was back in .14 and prior. It's not bad, it's just outclassed.

Turrets are still very good for covering you but it's quite a bit faster to clear with direct fire than turret creep. Small worms outrange turrets by 7 tiles. You can rush in and try to direct place a turret, but at that point you tend to be better off firing yourself anyways.

Early game the SMG and good movement is enough to clear bases. Mid game rockets are insane - you act almost like artillery. Turrets cover the rush from your aggression, the 36 range of rockets obliterates all buildings no sweat due to outranging worms so well. End game tank and personal lasers cut through biters like butter. That's not even getting into combat robots, capsules, flamethrower, etc which all increase the power at the mid/late game.

[splein23]

Loving the biter update. Now we just need biter base creep to prevent turret cheesing and maybe a couple more biter types.

The military balance changes in the last few major versions have actually made turret creep kind of outmoded. It's not like it was back in .14 and prior. It's not bad, it's just outclassed.

Turrets are still very good for covering you but it's quite a bit faster to clear with direct fire than turret creep. Small worms outrange turrets by 7 tiles. You can rush in and try to direct place a turret, but at that point you tend to be better off firing yourself anyways.

Early game the SMG and good movement is enough to clear bases. Mid game rockets are insane - you act almost like artillery. Turrets cover the rush from your aggression, the 36 range of rockets obliterates all buildings no sweat due to outranging worms so well. End game tank and personal lasers cut through biters like butter. That's not even getting into combat robots, capsules, flamethrower, etc which all increase the power at the mid/late game.

Yeah you're right. I've noticed that after the last few updates that trying to cheese biters with turret creeping isn't super viable anymore. Those worms obliterate turrets even with a personal roboport so you can quickly blueprint them down with power poles. I still would like to see some new biter types without having to use mods. Would love to see a way to keep my bots from dying when trying to automatically repair the perimeter of my main base and outposts. Also an option to make my bots stay within their network would be great so I don't have to build square bases.