Hardmode strategies

[Mithrals]

Hi

Just started a game with Enemy Bases: very high, very big, and very good. To make it even harder i made a small starting area. Ive gotten decently far into it Compact designs are the only way to go, but i burn through my resources far too quick. At this moment i am forced to go through something like 60 more biter nests to get to my next iron.

hard map.jpg (51.58 KiB) Viewed 4808 times

Im about to give up and start over. since i clearly wasnt organised enough in my approach.
Anyone have any advice on how to deal with HOARDS of biters in clusters like in my map?

I got to power armor 2 and got my poison bombs. Power armor i dont think ill need since if they get to me im pretty much dead no matter what i do. At the moment i slowly build myself a hollow wall, poison the whole area around me and place down laser turrets as i slowly build about 10 more squares forward, rince repeat. This is very resource heavy though and i cannot sustain it for another 60'ish nests.

Maybe some supercompact t1-3 sience lab approaches? I went total overkill on science packs and can easily halve it nex time. I went with Topas design in: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=2600

It feels like i cant expand at all until i get laser turrets, then i can get the immediate area but not any nests, next is accumulators and poison bombs. Thats when it feels safe'ish to slowly move out.

Anyone else doing super hardmode? Toughts? Advice?
Maybe some optimal research paths? (I wish the research tree was more organised)

Solar is out of the question until i can kill bases since i dont have the space so efficiency modules are my only real option for reducing pollution as far as i can tell. tbh i just focused on defence and let pollution go for now.

[muzzy]

Pollution control. Minimum amount of mining, and place a furnace right next to electric miner, so once the furnace is full of ore the miner only works at 50% efficiency (and generates only 50% pollution). Place your only steam generator inside a forest so that it eats the pollution. Try to make it so that the pollution never reaches any biter nest if possible.

Slow and annoying, but if pollution NEVER touches biters, you can just alt-tab and browse the net while you're slowly researching your way towards solar and so on... and use all your idle time manually constructing something useful instead of making factories.

It works really well (at least from an in-game perspective) and is a super depressing way to play the game.

[torham]

For me, the best strategy for clearing biters has been turret spam. Pretty much what you described there, you lay down a wall of turrets, advance under the protection, lay down another wall of turrets, rinse and repeat. Its FAR more efficient than rocket launchers and or combat bots. poison capsules are very effective against worms, but very costly to actually kill biters with (especially big blue biters).

Early on, I have found the flame thrower a very cheap and very good weapon to clear biter nests with. lay down some turrets to keep the biters away from you and torch the nests. Also as far as I can tell, biters have no immunity to fire, so flamethrower is still effective against medium biters (blue ones have too much HP and hit too hard).

[roman566]

Use drones and blueprints to quickly place large amounts of turrets, you can even deploy them as self sustained fire basses, big electric pole, next to it a medium one, surrounded with turrets and a double wall, enough drones to build it in one go and attacking will be much faster.
Or get a combat shotgun, armor piercing rounds, 3 Fusion Reactors, 3 exosceletons and 7 mkII shields. With that just 'leeroy jenkins' an enemy base. Run inside while blasting nests, the pathfinding AI will usually 'crash' when you get between several nests and with that very little bitter will follow you. Sure, as soon as you emerge they will start chasing, but it would give you enough time to destroy several hatcheries in every attack. Oh... and save every time you try it, after getting experienced I rarely died but it did happen.
Or combine those two, use turrets to gather attention while you get inside and blow up nests. I might try that myself.

[BurnHard]

I always make massive use of capsules. Poison capsules, Slowdowns capsule and the early defender and distractor capsules.

When I have a car, I am heavy driveby-shooting the spawners with the machinegun, they go down quite fast with piercing bullets and some upgrades. Biters neaver reach me, when they get too much i drive back to my base defences.

Beaten all games so far without need of this "tower creeping"

[torham]

I always make massive use of capsules. Poison capsules, Slowdowns capsule and the early defender and distractor capsules.

When I have a car, I am heavy driveby-shooting the spawners with the machinegun, they go down quite fast with piercing bullets and some upgrades. Biters neaver reach me, when they get too much i drive back to my base defences.

Beaten all games so far without need of this "tower creeping"

I just think its much more expensive option. If I am careful, I can clear even big nests with blue bitter spawners with around 30 laser turrets and some electrical poles. I usually loose only 1 - 2 laser turrets, the rest is recoverable. For the price of 2 laser turrets I have cleared a big nest in under 5 minutes, with no danger of death to myself....

[undeadnightorc]

I found using construction bots and blueprints to create a "creeping barrage" of fortified laser forts helps a ton.

But this plan backfired massively in one game. In my rush to clear out a combined mass of massive biter bases I forgot to build enough accumulators and solar panels to power my base for the extended attacks. What ended up happening was that for a couple crucial minutes the coal miners stopped sending coal to my boilers and this caused a chain reaction of power failures everywhere, eventually leading to a loss of power to my creeping barrage of laser forts. I watched in horror as my lasers stopped firing and the unending stream of biters eventually destroyed everything, including me after I was unable to outrun them

[cece302010]

Wish I could say otherwise, but this type of gameplay isn't feasible at the moment.

This is my progress into a game with only 3 changes in the setting. Very Frequent, Very Big, and Very Rich Enemies. No other settings were changed.

http://tinypic.com/r/30bgtp5/8

I did an embedded image but it didn't show the whole picture, so you'll have to use the link.

Using mass laser push, I crushed 3 Mid size bases and a Large base along the water to reach the coal that was north of my base. That image is me pushing further out around the the coal patch to try to secure it, but as you can see, it's slow grinding. At this point, the AI for the the biters is completely broken. I can run into the huge nest and get maybe 5 biters chasing me. Everything else is at a standstill. I think the nests are still spawning because I think it's the new spawners are chasing me and everything else is broke.

Honestly, I don't think this type of map is possible (unless the zero pollution strategy work, but who wants to try that!? Not I!). Even if you're lucky enough to be able to build a enormogigantohumongo solar/accu farm that can maintain continuous turret fire day and night without relying on steam power, the push out is just too grindy with the spawning speed & quantity of the biter nests and the breakdown of the AI makes it worse and not as fun.

[Lee_newsum]

Have fun with this map https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =36&t=3235

and for help have a look at my TS3 link in sig

[Mithrals]

Ty for many a good advice, i tried to push with lasers only, but found they got through my wall very fast. maybe i went too far each time. Ill give the old map another shot and see what happenes. At this point this sounds like the best idea since i have 0 iron to spare until i reach the next iron patch.

Games are more fun when they are uberhard imo