Factorio Forums

I'm seeing some general success abusing the hell out of Distractor Bots.

They deal laser damage, have a longer deploy range, you get 3 per pod, and they don't count against your limit. That last part basically equates to "spam the crap out of me".

The deploy range means I can throw 10-20 pods into a large nest and be generally assured that things are going to die. Any 'area effect' damage caused by large biters will generally be used against their own buildings, and the only real concern really is maintaining overwhelming force so that I'm not the closest thing to anyone (at which point it's time to beat feet)


Player weaponry as a whole is a joke. Most of your 'military' weaponry exist purely to clear out trees when out of range of constructor bots. I don't bother with flamethrowers anymore, or landmines, or grenades. One large biter/worm renders everything but laser tech obsolete.

Undermind wrote:Construction time would be nice nerf for this. But I think first we need some alternative to offense with towers in mid game, like tanks, artillery and bombers.

Bombers! oooh, bombers sound cool actually all those sound cool, but I hadn't heard bombers suggested yet. I like!

Zourin wrote:I'm seeing some general success abusing the hell out of Distractor Bots.

They deal laser damage, have a longer deploy range, you get 3 per pod, and they don't count against your limit. That last part basically equates to "spam the crap out of me".

The deploy range means I can throw 10-20 pods into a large nest and be generally assured that things are going to die. Any 'area effect' damage caused by large biters will generally be used against their own buildings, and the only real concern really is maintaining overwhelming force so that I'm not the closest thing to anyone (at which point it's time to beat feet)


Player weaponry as a whole is a joke. Most of your 'military' weaponry exist purely to clear out trees when out of range of constructor bots. I don't bother with flamethrowers anymore, or landmines, or grenades. One large biter/worm renders everything but laser tech obsolete.

Just need to make weapon requirements higher so they eat up more. Even if you can deploy tons of them they would require a large amount of resources.

I think the opposite..weapons need to require LESS. The main reason I prefer lasers to capsules is that they cost ZERO if you have enough solar power generated, and enough laser towers made. Zero...no cost to deploy, fire, redeploy against another base later, into infinity. Where a capsule only gets a limited one time use, the laser can be reused and fired forever...

liq3 wrote:

Zourin wrote: However, the rapid/instant respawn rate of nest defenders, plagues of worms, and the general feeling that you, the player, should have a hand in their destruction, make most bases unapproachable. Most bases can only be conquered by 'Offensive Towering' and having swarms of bots, especially if there are large worms present. The player himself exists only as a central point and suffers general impotence when it comes to fighting beyond the submachine gun/shotgun phase. At which point, it's all about power armor, stacking exoskeletons, and generally having the bots and towers play the game for you (taking the fun of combat away from the player)

And that's generally on medium/average settings, not even deathworlds.

I don't see a problem with this. He's a puny human against alien dogs with armour so thick it can stop piercing machine gun rounds. He's no space marine. Also, having to use turrets and robots keeps with the theme of a man who doesn't have much power himself. His only purpose here is to build the stuff that ACTUALLY does the work (i.e. the factory). Making you use turrets / bots keeps with that theme. ;p The man himself is somewhat weak, but with his technology helping him, he's deadly.

True but their still a one problem one solution, laser turrets and/or combat bots decimate them because they cannot deal with them, in a way that isn't charge suicidality. How ever a long range biter would (possibly) solve this problem. MOD MAKING TIME!

Would be nice to have some more tech mid/late game to deal with biters (artillery? ). And mines that do something against large biters. Maybe even some sort of super high tech minigun that chews up ammo really fast, so it's expensive to use, but can decimate bases.

CherryKiss wrote:I think the opposite..weapons need to require LESS. The main reason I prefer lasers to capsules is that they cost ZERO if you have enough solar power generated, and enough laser towers made. Zero...no cost to deploy, fire, redeploy against another base later, into infinity. Where a capsule only gets a limited one time use, the laser can be reused and fired forever...

Until we change it, that mining laser turret would give you just some scraps and forbid building laser turrets near enemy bases

kovarex wrote:

CherryKiss wrote:forbid building laser turrets near enemy bases

make something like with zerg? corrupted land, this is rather interesting idea.

AlexPhoenix wrote:

kovarex wrote:

CherryKiss wrote:forbid building laser turrets near enemy bases

make something like with zerg? corrupted land, this is rather interesting idea.

Exactly, something like zerg creep is what we have in mind.

AlexPhoenix wrote:make something like with zerg? corrupted land, this is rather interesting idea.

wow...I have to admit that DOES sound like a neat idea! only able to build turrets so far, they could still be used perhaps as fallback point then, and you'd have to go in with normal military to finish the base....

As much as I enjoy the easy street efficiency of turret creeping, I still think that'd be a pretty solid change to make in the game!

CherryKiss wrote:

AlexPhoenix wrote:make something like with zerg? corrupted land, this is rather interesting idea.

wow...I have to admit that DOES sound like a neat idea! only able to build turrets so far, they could still be used perhaps as fallback point then, and you'd have to go in with normal military to finish the base....

As much as I enjoy the easy street efficiency of turret creeping, I still think that'd be a pretty solid change to make in the game!

Yeah sounds great as long as there are multiple options for achieving this end. As it stands if this was included in the game now it would kill it for me.

Balinor wrote: Yeah sounds great as long as there are multiple options for achieving this end. As it stands if this was included in the game now it would kill it for me.

May i ask why it would "kill it for you"? Not that the other used tactics aren't somewhat dull too, but at least there are some other ways to kill biter nests.

Calico wrote:

Balinor wrote: Yeah sounds great as long as there are multiple options for achieving this end. As it stands if this was included in the game now it would kill it for me.

May i ask why it would "kill it for you"? Not that the other used tactics aren't somewhat dull too, but at least there are some other ways to kill biter nests.

I have the misfortune of having extremely shitty luck (or a lack of patience when creating new worlds) and thus often end up having to use tower creep to get far enough into the game to reach the higher technologies. I just really want to get into a position where I don't have to go out killing the biters, I want to use technology to do it for me.

I think, there should be no way to make that, without making your hands dirty. And the big reason for that is, that there might be a (dull, boring, long) way, to live with them, which converts in the long run to a gain.

I still think just one changes would solve all this problems: Building time for turrets and biters. You place a new turret (or a logistic bot does this, doesn't matter), and the turret need 3 to 5 seconds to fully deploy. It can be attacked, but not attack for himself. The same for biters, but with ca. 10 seconds.

Nova wrote:I still think just one changes would solve all this problems: Building time for turrets and biters. You place a new turret (or a logistic bot does this, doesn't matter), and the turret need 3 to 5 seconds to fully deploy. It can be attacked, but not attack for himself. The same for biters, but with ca. 10 seconds.

Rather than limit the options people can use the logical approach would surely be to provide better options. Currently we have two routes to expansion as I see it, mass production of turrets and walls to slowly creep out or mass production of combat robots. Providing more interesting tools to battle the biters at long or close range would ultimately improve the game in my opinion.

That's right, but we would still need some changes, because tower creep is already easy and effectiv.
The same for the biter: Instant respawn would even with better options be annoying and counter productiv.

you could add something like artillery and have some alien weapon tech that is really strong. so you could have an alien rocket launcher that has a 3 rocket clip before you have to reload and does massive AOE damage. so good for clearing trees and massive hoards of biters but not really good for taking on the base. you could have cruise missiles that use the map to launch so the player has to manually launch the missile but it is extremely expensive but OP as all hell and takes a while to be made. so you can have it so that it requires the crude oil to have another sort of refinery into cruise missile fuel allowing you launch them towards the basess and it takes more fuel the more chunks it has to travek and you make different version so one does massive damage on impact, one does continuos damage so if you wanted to farm them and so on and so forth