I can't beat it...

[jodokus31]

I wanted to keep the discussion in vanilla realm. I have no experience with modded enemy overhauls apart from bobs enemies/warfare and cannot contribute much here.

BTW: I've got the oil in the base now. Now i want flame turrets (just need a bit miliary science).
Evo ~21,6%, Time ~3:35.
The solution was to don't overcommit on spawner clearing and create a belt fed perimeter (before i wanted to stick with turrets camps, but refilling is to much running around)
Grenades are also great for defending the big waves and save ammo.
I don't have the steel furnace yet, because they are quite expensive in research and machine cost, that the bit coal saving is not so important yet

[blazespinnaker]

You can try this:

Preview

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dwm.png

How about beelining for landfill? Just protect the miners. You need to really compress your starter base though, but as mentioned, once you hit oil tech it starts to become easier and you can move off your 'island'. May want to hand feed until you get to oil.

[Drakken]

I doubt I would be able to beat that map blazespinnaker. The oil is too far into the biter bases for me to access it for initial base defense.

I haven't played in a couple of weeks, I am on the verge of gold/purple science. My coal supplies are limited and I have had to switch over to solid fuel. Biters and spitters are now large types. Defenses still holding but do take some damage. Using minimal ammo as flame turrets take out most of the enemies.

I should be able to launch the rocket. We will see.

[blazespinnaker]

Thanks Drakken, for this thread btw. Certainly made me look at DW and Factorio differently.

There is actually a very trivial way to beat DW maps, though it requires a degree of patience. Just manage your pollution - eg, more hand minding, tearing down factories before your cloud gets absorbed, setting up shop elsewhere.

Once you tech up to landmines, you can settle in and fend off the biters fairly easily.

Edit: I may have spoken too soon. I'm at oil tech with flame turrets, but it's a deathworld marathon + railworld map (all resources cranked to zero frequencey)

Massive biter base is camping just off my oil field. Ugh. Plus I got impatient and built up a base that is drawing mass incoming biters. May have to start over.

Edit:

I started over and now I'm at green modules + bots, so things have relaxed a bit. I'm not as hard core as some folks here, I have trees, though I keep water cranked to absolutely zero. I don't want to be able to plant artillery on islands which I think is an unfortunate exploit that Wube doesn't plan on fixing. Sadly, that means like 65 fish tops

Replying to some other threads around here, posting here as it's about DW marathon and a bit of a digression to those threads.

Solar on marathon to reduce pollution? I think, the initial cost (and pollution) is insane in marathon. I would go for solid fuel and then nuclear.

Once you get green modules, miner pollution is much less. In fact, it's like the fourth worst polluter for me now, after steel furnaces, boilers, and assemblers. Adding radar and robots just makes boiler pollution much worse. Ports don't get modules.

After getting solar, pollution dropped down dramatically. I liked the results so much I spent the science packs on accumulators. Now I can add things without any boiler pollution.

Nuclear - not quite sure where that suggestion is coming from. Remember, this is DW marathon. Reactors are 13K plates. We are talking about 8100 lab hours and ~800k plates for science packs to get to kovarex. Solar energy tech is almost 1.5% the cost.

I'd rather focus on artillery. These biter bases are spawning like mad as I had to explore large chunks of the map to find oil.

You just put a pump back at base to help drain the pipeline. There really should be that much crude oil per pipe. On my case the pipeline consisted of ~150 underground pipe tiles and contained ~3k crude oil in total

I added a pipeline, which generated 10K production in oil over the lifetime of the build. So not as bad as I feared.

If the oil patch was closer to the biter base (1 chunk away), it would have been risky as pollution did blead to adjacent chunks. In that case, barrels are great as you can finely control the amount of pull.

I'm not playing pacifist at all, but I really have zero idea on how to deal with a base like that unless I've got at least a tank / CSP tech. Not to mention how many big biters are already present in the game at this stage. Fortunately, the green modules help a lot.

Kill it with fire. Build some flame thrower turrets.
Yes they are super expensive in the beginning, but they do a lot of damage.
You also have oil there and you can defend it quite easily.

Destroying such a big biter base will skyrocket evolution but you need oil sooner or later and its better in the long run than fighting the biters constantly.

That might work. I tried flame turret creep once, but it was awkward and for a base this size, I think I'll need quite a few more. Which would have generated a lot of pollution as I didn't yet have green modules which require a fair amount of oil.

But, even if I did take out the base, like you said - that will spike evolution.

The formula for EF from the wiki is 1 - EF = (1 - t) * (1 - p) * (1 - s) (time, pollution, spawner kills)

DW Marathon cranks everything up a notch, so taking about 60 spawner bases would spike evolution hard.

[jodokus31]

Solar on marathon to reduce pollution? I think, the initial cost (and pollution) is insane in marathon. I would go for solid fuel and then nuclear.

Once you get green modules, miner pollution is much less. In fact, it's like the fourth worst polluter for me now, after steel furnaces, boilers, and assemblers. Adding radar and robots just makes boiler pollution much worse. Ports don't get modules.

After getting solar, pollution dropped down dramatically. I liked the results so much I spent the science packs on accumulators. Now I can add things without any boiler pollution.

Nuclear - not quite sure where that suggestion is coming from. Remember, this is DW marathon. Reactors are 13K plates. We are talking about 8100 lab hours and ~800k plates for science packs to get to kovarex. Solar energy tech is almost 1.5% the cost.

I'd rather focus on artillery. These biter bases are spawning like mad as I had to explore large chunks of the map to find oil.

Small amounts of solar panels could be helpful (although i don't know its worth the tech cost), but if you really need serious power, it's better to go for nuclear, i would think. Solar panels themselves are very expensive for the performance, esp. marathon, with higher steel and circuit costs
For nuclear, you don't need enrichment processing. You just need to have enough uranium mines (~1 yellow belt is plenty) and processing. Uranium processing itself is only 800 blue packs

I'm not playing pacifist at all, but I really have zero idea on how to deal with a base like that unless I've got at least a tank / CSP tech. Not to mention how many big biters are already present in the game at this stage. Fortunately, the green modules help a lot.

Kill it with fire. Build some flame thrower turrets.
Yes they are super expensive in the beginning, but they do a lot of damage.
You also have oil there and you can defend it quite easily.

Destroying such a big biter base will skyrocket evolution but you need oil sooner or later and its better in the long run than fighting the biters constantly.

That might work. I tried flame turret creep once, but it was awkward and for a base this size, I think I'll need quite a few more. Which would have generated a lot of pollution as I didn't yet have green modules which require a fair amount of oil.

But, even if I did take out the base, like you said - that will spike evolution.

The formula for EF from the wiki is 1 - EF = (1 - t) * (1 - p) * (1 - s) (time, pollution, spawner kills)

DW Marathon cranks everything up a notch, so taking about 60 spawner bases would spike evolution hard.

I would try to defend the outpost with walls, flamers and some hand feed turrets in the back.
If you have green modules and don't use much in the beginning, you don't produce that much pollution, to get really big attacks there. Flamers are very good at that, even without any upgrades.

[blazespinnaker]

lol, but 4000 packs total for nukes without kovarex. The amount of pollution you generate without kovarex is pretty huge. Plus you have to defend the uranium mine field.

On top of that, no reduction in pollution until you get everything. With solar panels, pollution starts reducing on the first panel you construct.

All in for nuclear, we are talking 270K plates before you get there without kovarex. That's including concrete, which is long run necessary, but not when you're trying to get to artillery to deal with spawning biter bases. It's not including mining op or the stuff beyond the reactor.

https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... k35b+8AQ==

On top of that, my base only pulls about 20mw of power as if have GM in everything.

300 panels costs 45K plates. Another 15K plates for the tech. 60K installed Versus Nuclear at 270K plates and like 26K plastic. And like I said, pollution starts reducing on the fist panel, so 15K plates.

Dude, with that, I'd be half way into artillery tech. No way this makes sense.

https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm ... ack:r:1000

Creeping up on that base, no way. It's littered with big worms. Sure, I can defend now, but I have tech for it. Bootstrapping is the thing about factorio.

[jodokus31]

On top of that, my base only pulls about 20mw of power as if have GM in everything.

Good point. Solar seems to be fine for bootstrapping until you get nuclear.
But, when it gets to bigger power needs, solar is very bad.

This is for a 480MW plant:

Solar480MW.png (8.62 KiB) Viewed 5000 times

nuclear480MW.png (22.01 KiB) Viewed 5000 times

Dude, with that, I'd be half way into artillery tech. No way this makes sense.

artillery is a whole other category. 8000 yellow!, blue and military science + prerequisites + running costs.
And it doesn't solve the power problem later (unless you mean you run out of resources with reasonable amount of "biter clearing work" )
Up to blue biters, the tank is not bad. Together with aggressive landmining
Anyway, artillery has one big advantage over other biter clearing tools: It clears bases automatically

[blazespinnaker]

yeah, i may go nuclear after artillery for the lasers. but probably lasers first with mass boilers, and then nuclear.

but, artillery, 2million plates. fun.

but artillery seems right. with so many big biter everything now, constantly spawning biter bases, and not really doing a rocket rush (want to turn this into a megabase), it seems like the best way to move forward.

clearing bases for fun is OK, but as a necessity it gets a bit tedious without a spidertron and it's very very expensive resource wise. better is just to sit back and defend, but eventually that will wear down on resources and the constant maintenance is annoying, even with robots.

people keep talking flame turrets to clear them out, but I have yet to see a pattern with those that work. flame turrets destroy everything but walls, so you can't really layer your attack. Plus, I'm playing hardcore, so I have to be cautious.

best so far: landmines for defense (10x better than turret creep, I don't know why people talk about turret creep), poison capsule for worms, and rockets for spawners works very well. shields are game changing here. but it all gets very expensive compared to artillery and I've already cleared a 1m iron ore patch. fortunately a 14m one is nearby.

Going to try tanks with flamethrower + shells. First attempt didn't go so well. edit: yeh, tanks suck. Flame thrower is lousy against big+ spitters.

Of course, going to be at 98% evolution very soon.

[jodokus31]

Going to try tanks with flamethrower + shells. First attempt didn't go so well. edit: yeh, tanks suck. Flame thrower is lousy against big+ spitters.

The tank flamethrower weapon is not very good. I would go with explosive shells and maybe flamethrower to get rid of biters after attack. The tank gun is also not so bad, if you have some upgrades.
Spamming grenades or landmines inside the biter base is very effective. Cliffs, water and rocks are very annoying. If you are stuck, you are basically dead.

Flame turrets for clearing bases works, because of the huge range. It's not very fast, but pretty safe. You have to protect with gun turrets. Actually, I tried the last time, when worms had lower range (In the past, worms had lower range, but the spit did always hit without slowdown)

best so far: landmines for defense (10x better than turret creep, I don't know why people talk about turret creep), poison capsule for worms, and rockets for spawners works very well. shields are game changing here.

Of course, going to be at 98% evolution very soon.

Yeah poison capsules and rocket launcher are good. If you don't like the tank.

98% went fast, how long are you in? Then you have behemoths already and the tank gets very weak

[blazespinnaker]

Yeah, exactly, it always seems to come down to range in these sorts of things, I can attack you but you can't attack me. Big+ worms out range everything (except artillery), AFAIK. Fortunately, multiple poison capsules take them out en masse rapidly, so very effective.

Once the big worms are gone, taking out the spawners with rockets is very easy. Messing with flame turrets I feel wastes a lot of oil on take down. The whole thing just seems very awkward and cumbersome compared to my current approach.

I really couldn't get the tank to work. Slow and fragile, IMHO. Maybe someone can post a video. I'll see if I can post one of mines+poison+capsules.

Spamming grenades doesn't work so hot at this point as the range is too low (15), the damage is minimal and you spend a lot of time dodging worms and biters.

Spamming land mines in bases is interesting, but reach is rather short and bots get picked off rather quickly. Poison capsules have 25 range, rocket has 30. I feel I'd end up getting decimated by the big worms if I tried land mines in bases.

I'm not at 98 yet. About 70%. I cleared a lot of bases that spawned and were annoying me.

Once I get artillery though, I'll hit 98% quickly enough. But, oh boy, what range

[jodokus31]

I really couldn't get the tank to work. Slow and fragile, IMHO. Maybe someone can post a video. I'll see if I can post one of mines+poison+capsules.

DanGio has recorded a very good series:

https://youtu.be/gEB6uWQUyxk?list=PLtp7 ... aIH&t=1833

https://youtu.be/1oaTEYhPph4?list=PLtp7 ... SaIH&t=625

[blazespinnaker]

Yeah, that was my experience as well (the one where he almost lost the tank). And his idea of a "big base" isn't quite what I'm dealing with.

https://imgur.com/a/P3VKr3V

I think his evolution factor was probably lower than mine is currently. Not sure if this is video is DW marathon. Between 4x science and double cost of intermediates, everything takes 8x as much to tech up.

Thanks for the link, though. I'll give it another try on some smaller bases. edit: hmmm, maybe not:

Screenshot 2021-01-15 111815.png (251.89 KiB) Viewed 4900 times

Probably the issue I'm dealing with is my evolution factor is too high. Spent too much time clearing out bases, I guess.

[jodokus31]

No, it wasn't marathon. I know, its a lot harsher on evolution.
Just wanted to show the approach with grenades or mines (second link). Mines are a lot stronger, you "just" have to dodge the worms and biters. And you also can shoot in the meantime. But it's of course a question, if you want to reload, when you messed it up, or not.
Blue biters all the way is tough.

[SuicideJunkie]

I'm not playing on DW, but I have a strategy of using rockets or artillery to pick the spawners out from between the worms.
The worms don't absorb pollution and send attacks, but they also prevent recolonization there.

The ideal situation then becomes that colonization waves step into the guns and die without increasing evolution level instead of creating more nests.

Would such a thing help at all?

[blazespinnaker]

Actually, to understand this better, there is "show enemy expansion" debug values. AFAIK, only spawners impact expansion probability. Killing worms or not doesn't do anything. On the other side of that, no need to waste rockets and shells on worms unless you want to build there.

Though spawners are tricky to take out with rockets when bases are thick with behemoth worms. Power armor + shields helps there.

If artillery and If you are tactical with shells, you can actually destroy a biter megabase with very few artillery shells as shells have a pretty good AoE. I've taken out 4 spawners with one shell before, and a 60 spawner megabase with about 20 shells or so.

It gets a little tedious after awhile on DW marathon tho, but handy to do when you're low on resources and shells.

[SuicideJunkie]

I suppose the biters may have just always preferred to colonize my big territory behind the defense wall rather than the thin worm-packed buffer zone I'd left.

Perhaps you could lay out a grid of wall segments (or floor tile?) that don't block movement or attract fire, but also don't leave room for a spawner between them. Colonizers aren't a problem if they're only spawning worms. Feels like you'd need bots to deploy it with any efficiency, but could be a good use for excess stone.

[Trific]

The worms don't absorb pollution and send attacks, but they also prevent recolonization there.

They do not prevent recolonization. Been there, tried it, doesn't work. And of course, then you have to deal with bases that have not only their own worms, but the previous worms as well.

[blazespinnaker]

I suppose the biters may have just always preferred to colonize my big territory behind the defense wall rather than the thin worm-packed buffer zone I'd left.

Perhaps you could lay out a grid of wall segments (or floor tile?) that don't block movement or attract fire, but also don't leave room for a spawner between them. Colonizers aren't a problem if they're only spawning worms. Feels like you'd need bots to deploy it with any efficiency, but could be a good use for excess stone.

Yeah, interesting idea. Just tried it. Doesn't seem to impact the expansion probability values. I think increasing distance to nearest spawner is your best deterrent. Artillery is pretty good at that.

[Lacero]

I managed a deathworld marathon with 10x research costs by basically cheating, setting water high and using the choke points.
I swear I pumped half my starting iron into bullets before getting flame throwers, that was the first point I could relax.

It was hell and I've no idea how you all manage it at all.

I did find you can throw grenades so fast that grenade hit + run on single spawners is viable. the combat robots were also a great distraction when the swarm got too much.

[blazespinnaker]

Yeah, marathon is quite something else for sure. DW itself is very easy as you can just tear down your base before your pollution cloud triggers an attack, but marathon costs make that very tedious very quickly. And then you have the race against time to avoid biter evolution. Fun.


I want to apologize to the poster above. You're right about blocking spawners and the idea is good! You can block spawners. I used 35 train rails to block a chunk for any expansions. Takes about 40? pipes if you go that way. Walls are more expensive compared to those two, IMHO. Poles are probably cheapest, but you'll need bots to get the wood.

I am not sure how I'd use this. I have artillery now, so it really doesn't matter and it's rather tedious and not particularly cosmetic technique, but maybe early game it could be tactically important. Will try it some day for real.

One thing I have to say about DW is the alerting mechanism is pretty annoying as it's on constantly and it's not very informative. I have to wait for 5 or 6 before looking at it, but I miss some things because of that.

edit: I've given up and just turned off the alert sound. It alerts fairly non stop now. Can't wait until artillery is ranged enough to wipe the biters off the map + 2 black blocks of depth.