Combat robots useless?

[lancar]

Never said even once that Tower Creep wasn't more resource-efficient.
This does not make droids useless in any way, shape or form. You pay for the speed and convenience of a drop-down army, available anywhere in the world.

Talking about convenience, fill your powerarmor with personal roboports, your inventory with couple hundred to thousand laser turrets and you can simply force-paste a blueprint that covers the whole enemy base, which gets obliterated in seconds. There are some logistic bot losses (including the materials they happen to be carrying) in case there are huge numbers of worms, but still lower than guaranteed resources lost when using actual attack bots.
If you want to avoid losses, or you are taking bases which actually cover whole screens, you can also take it "slowly" pasting strips of towers and waiting for them to clear out what they have in range, until you paste another strip.
This works even in 100+ hours games with evolution factor basically maxed. Why carry around handheld weapons when your factory itself is a weapon of mass destruction

The fact that this is even possible makes me think that it needs to be nerfed.
I don't consider it cheating or exploiting, but I do believe it detracts from the combat portion of the game. It would be plain weird if the devs figured this should be the new go-to solution for combat, diminishing the importance of everything else they designed for it.

Perhaps decreasing the HP of the Construction robots so they'll die in one hit from a spitter of lvl2 and up, and introduce some (fairly weak) AoE attacks for the aliens would do the trick?

[Tinyboss]

Perhaps decreasing the HP of the Construction robots so they'll die in one hit from a spitter of lvl2 and up, and introduce some (fairly weak) AoE attacks for the aliens would do the trick?

The problem (to my mind) with all suggestions of this type is that clearing out the hundredth biter nest is just never going to be fun. So it might as well be efficient.

In my current game I'm looking for big resource patches to build rail-connected mining outposts, and every time I go looking I have to clear a dozen or more biter clusters. As efficient as turret creeping with the personal roboport is, killing biters is still what consumes the bulk of my exploration time. I would not welcome any change that makes it even slower. I think that by the time I have built power armor, I have killed enough biters that I deserve for it to be easy from that point onward.

In fact, I think the best answer is making combat robots that are even better than turret creep at clearing biter clusters. At some point in the game, and this could be well after power armor and turret creep, I'd like the experience of clearing a biter nest to be comparable to clearing out a section of factory with the deconstruction planner. Point, click, done. Some different kind of nest that still takes time and care could be added, but it should be less common.

That's my take, anyway.

[Adil]

Yeah, that's a mystery why people keep suggesting nerfing any semi-decent ways of combat when it's brought up that other methods are severely worse than the former.

[Zhab]

Well the fact that the current state of the game makes you say that combat is boring or worst a pain in the but is the heart of the issue in my opinion. I know this is not a primarily combat oriented game but 2 main enemy types with 4 colors variations is kinda lame (also worm I guess). That being said, this game is in alpha and I'm pretty sure that the devs have more in mind about the aliens and the combat part of the game.

As for turret creep... I find it lame and cheesy as hell. Do we deserve an end game efficient a powerful way to deal with aliens ? Maybe we do. But turret creep should not be it (I have my ideas of how the devs could cripple turret creep without having any effect on base defense, but that is not the point of the thread). Using robots to bombard aliens with a rain of laser fire sounds an awful lot like what the robots capsule are meant to do. If you would rather use roboports (personal or otherwise) to lay down laser turrets rather than using destroyer capsules which is clearly meant to be the end game efficient and powerful option to deal with the aliens... well it means that something somewhere is horribly unbalanced. (Which is not necessarily the turrets, just to be clear)

[Gus_Smedstad]

If it were me, I'd be completely re-thinking how combat is balanced. My own take is that it's the ridiculous spawn rate that encourages things like turret creep. I've dinked around with doing things like using the tank or rocket launcher, but the reality is that if I don't have a wall of turrets backing me up, I'm gonna die, because the bugs spawn much faster than I can kill them unless I have a wall of turrets or flying robots. At all stages of the game, not just when the green-stage bugs show up.

If the game were balanced so that personal weapons were effective, or one or two early-stage combat robots were helpful enough to make clearing nests without a wall of turrets practical, if the bugs would stay dead for a reasonable amount of time after you lure the army out and kill them, turrets could be scaled back. But that's not how it is, so I'd just as soon use blueprint-spawned turret forts.

[Tinyboss]

What exactly is "lame and cheesy" about turret creep? If we can describe the problem better, then we are halfway to finding a solution. I'll throw out some potential problems with turret creep and say what I think about each one. Feel free to comment on them or add your own objections if I haven't thought of them.

There's little or no risk.
In a slow, build-up-your-empire sandbox game like Factorio, I'm not really interested in having a constant risk of death. Especially given that death is an automatic game reload (in single player--I haven't tried multiplayer yet), I don't think frequent deaths are a good thing.

It's too efficient / requires little care.
As you noted, the enemy variety is not great. If we had more different enemies and therefore needed different strategies for each nest, that would make combat more interesting. But that's more a problem with the enemies than with combat robots or turret creep per se.

It uses up almost no resources.
This, to me, is the most valid objection. Assuming you're on solar power, the only cost of wiping out a nest with laser turrets is the few repair packs you use up and any construction bots that are killed, which are each trivial compared to clearing the nest in any other way.

Given the current state of combat (i.e. it's very repetitive and not interesting) I wouldn't mind if turret creep got nerfed (for instance, by preventing turrets from firing for a few seconds after being constructed), as long as:

1. It's at least as easy to clear a nest using top-level combat robots as it currently is with turret creep, and
2. The resource cost is reasonable, that is, clearing the biters out of an area doesn't use up too much of the resources you are likely to find there.

We need to consider the relationship between building and fighting: am I building a factory to fight the biters, or am I killing biters so I can build my factory? Of course it kind of goes both ways, but it's obvious that the focus is much, much more toward building. The end-game condition is about building things, and think of all the challenges you have to pass to get there. On the other hand, combat never really changes, and there's nothing to be gained from it other than real estate and purple science. I think that's mostly fine--Factorio is a building game. So I think that whatever the combat challenges end up being, they should be overcome primarily by factory building, i.e. producing what you need to win.

[lancar]

The reason turret creep should be nerfed is because it circumvents the combat, not enhance it. As it is now it's broken, the mechanics of one part of the game have overridden the mechanics of another.

Turrets need to be powerful to defend well, but when they're used for offense instead (and to a greater potential than actual offensive weaponry) then something is wrong, and needs to be fixed.
Otherwise, we might as well just skip the alien combat alltogether. I mean, if it's reduced to a two-click experience (That doesn't even cost anything to use), then what's the point? Might as well just turn aliens off in the world settings and be done with it, if it weren't for the fact that you need their Artifacts.

Personally, I'd much rather have an interesting combat system than a cheap way to get around it.

[Sting_Auer]

I think a lot of the problems can be narrowed down to the lack of variety or need to adapt. Enemies are constant, they always behave and act the same way.

Some different kinds of enemies that behave differently and serve different purposes would be a good start, but wouldn't solve the problem entirely. Biters being able to recognize when an area is too dangerous to try to attack would help a lot, and would make them try to find alternative means of attack. It could probably be something based on the amount of damage they've dealt compared to the amount of Biters that died attacking a certain area. They would prioritize areas with better ratios, or areas that have not been attacked before.

If there are not any reachable easier areas, they should start to build up larger masses of biters each time they attack, to try to finally overwhelm defenses. Players would need to take a more proactive and adaptive approach to defending their bases by optimizing wall design and turret placement to minimize losses.

Applying the success ratio of damage/deaths to specific paths and targets would make the biters slowly, over time, refine their attack strategy. They would begin to prioritize specific routes of attacks and target "chains", attacking a specific gate then continuing through to a secondary defense layer, for example.

I might post this in the suggestions board as an expansion to my thread about more aggressive and advanced biter expansion.

[voyta]

I think a lot of the problems can be narrowed down to the lack of variety or need to adapt. Enemies are constant, they always behave and act the same way.

Some different kinds of enemies that behave differently and serve different purposes would be a good start, but wouldn't solve the problem entirely. Biters being able to recognize when an area is too dangerous to try to attack would help a lot, and would make them try to find alternative means of attack. It could probably be something based on the amount of damage they've dealt compared to the amount of Biters that died attacking a certain area. They would prioritize areas with better ratios, or areas that have not been attacked before.

If there are not any reachable easier areas, they should start to build up larger masses of biters each time they attack, to try to finally overwhelm defenses. Players would need to take a more proactive and adaptive approach to defending their bases by optimizing wall design and turret placement to minimize losses.

Applying the success ratio of damage/deaths to specific paths and targets would make the biters slowly, over time, refine their attack strategy. They would begin to prioritize specific routes of attacks and target "chains", attacking a specific gate then continuing through to a secondary defense layer, for example.

I might post this in the suggestions board as an expansion to my thread about more aggressive and advanced biter expansion.

That's all dandy, but doesn't help the combat robots which are the supposed offensive measure to be the better option for offense than turrets that are supposed to be defensive measure.

Currently the easiest defense is to kill all biters in your pollution range, then wall that section of map off ad place some defense lasers relatively sparingly. That way biters only attack when they are trying to migrate, which is typically only small squad. Having them attack in less predictable and more organized way would likely make the defense game more fun. Implementation note: damage dealt alone is not quite the way to measure their success (e.g. several tiles thick walls can absorb a lot of damage without any significant resource losses for the player).