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So I'm getting to the point of getting Laser turrets, and I'm not sure what the ideal turret defense looks like; Gun turrets? Laser Turrets? Flamethrower Turrets? An even mix?

Short answer: Laser turrets.

Long answer: Definitely laser turrets.

Laser becouse energy (solar) is free. Use half row (turret every 2nd spot), full row or double row, though I feel like full one should defend everything.

Depends on what you are fighting against.
Laser turrets do less damage when fully upgraded and they are not armor penetrating but they do have longer range.
So when fighting against behemoth biters laser turrets lack DPS that a gun turret does have but against a spitter the laser turret is better.

Overall most problems can be solved by placing more laser turret, but a mix would be better if you want to minimize the chances of taking damage.

Damage statistics can be found in this topic

quinor wrote:Laser becouse energy (solar) is free. Use half row (turret every 2nd spot), full row or double row, though I feel like full one should defend everything.

Bullets are cheap, accumulators and solar panels are not. When using laser turrets in standard settings you easily need at least twice as many solar panels to sustain them, so while it's only an initial cost it's a LOT more expensive than a few clips of ammo. You could calculate the break-even point but batteries are hard to translate to steel and copper.

I use lasers purely for convenience. I don't need to worry about supplying ammo to outposts and then to the turrets themselves, and they're much simpler to set up.

Well, behemoth biters take 100+ piercing rounds at max damage, or 1000 iron, 200 copper. For one behemoth. Lasers look a lot cheaper at that stage. Pre- behemoth, sure gun turrets feel cheaper, but why build for the short term?

Edit: Ah hrm, forgot bullets per magazine that'd change a lot. It's still pretty high I'm betting, likely 100 iron, 20 copper I think.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:Bullets are cheap, accumulators and solar panels are not.

But you need energy to make the bullets. If you account for that then it's not so clear cut.
Lets calculate the energy consumption for gun turrets to kill one behemoth biter with fully upgraded turrets & ap rounds:

5000hp/behemoth / 32.3hp/bullet / 10bullet/magazine = 15.48magazine/behemoth

Crafting one ap magazine: 210kW * 3s / 1.25 = 504kJ
Smelting 5 copper plates: 5 * 180kW * 3.5s / 2 = 1575kJ
Mining 5 copper ore: 5 * 90kW / 0.525/s = 857kJ
Smelting one steel plate: 1 * 180kW * 17.5s / 2 = 1575kJ
Smelting 5 iron plates: 5 * 180kW * 3.5s / 2 = 1575kJ
Mining 5 iron ore: 5 * 90kW / 0.525/s = 857kJ

(504kJ + 2*857kJ + 3*1575kJ)/magazine = 6943kJ/magazine
15.48magazine/behemoth * 6943kJ/magazine = 107478kJ/behemoth

Now the energy consumption for fully upgraded laser turrets to kill one behemoth biter:

5000hp/behemoth / 44hp/laserbolt * 800kJ/laserbolt = 90909kJ/behemoth

It actually takes the laser turret less energy to kill a behemoth, though if we use efficiency 1 modules where we can, the energy usage changes in favor of the gun turret:

(0.2*504kJ + 0.2*2*857kJ + 0.4*3*1575kJ)/magazine = 2334kJ/magazine
15.48magazine/behemoth * 2334kJ/magazine = 36130kJ/behemoth

But remember that you then have to build the modules. You could build solar and accus for your lasers with those recources instead. My conclusion is that energy wise both turrets are fairly balanced, but gun turrets eat recources over time while lasers do not.

Gun turrets are good early game since can get them and standard ammo automated without much effort to build the first walls and just manually fill them rather than rushing lasers. Also one advantage to ammo over lasers is that ammo is like its own dense accumulator and you can generally have a good stockpile. On the other hand making a mistake on power and causing a blackout especially early on is all too easy and can allow the biters to cause a lot of damage while you try to fix it.

But once you start really building the ammo logistics becomes more of a pain. Each defense area will have a central ammo point (e.g. a factory or unloading station), but then you need to get that to the turrets. Various fairly simple ways but its still more effort over just dropping some power lines. And you likely used inserters so you still need those power lines anyway. Then you need to have enough trains to distribute the ammo from your factory out to outposts, so another thing.

Also when considering power for gun turrets, you also have to consider any logistics bots and inserters, etc. you have along the way to get that copper and iron turned into bullets and delivered to the turret. And those extra iron and copper outposts you need, what about the time and resources spent building and defending them? Not run the math but I bet the laser turret is actually cheaper in terms of energy over a pretty short amount of time.

Its a good fun challenge to do on a large factory, but laser turrets certainly always end up feeling "better" everything considered.


As for solar? Solar is way too cheap/easy. Steam can go a long way easily (say one active reasonable sized coal mine at any time), by which time Ive always found a good location with existing biter barriers (e.g. water, and outposts I already built, so need relatively little wall to complete). Solar generates no pollution so wont attract many attacks anyway. Run a train to it delivering construction materials (panels, accumulators, power poles, roboports, etc.), then make a blueprint and paste it as many times as desired since solar farms are easily tileable. The train/bots will now build it and take over all the coal/steam power in a short time.

d4rkpl4y3r wrote:Lets calculate the energy consumption for gun turrets to kill one behemoth biter with fully upgraded turrets & ap rounds:

The vast majority of damage late game will be done against Big Biters which have significantly less resistances to physical damage, behemoths are relatively rare (I'm not sure I've ever created enough pollution to see one in vanilla come to think of it) so using them as an example skews the results.

Besides in addition to the 800kJ per shot, they have a 24kW drain so every 33 seconds they passively consume as much energy as firing a shot. If you have 1,000 laser towers they consume 24,000kW, the equivalent of killing a behemoth every 3.8 seconds.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:The vast majority of damage late game will be done against Big Biters which have significantly less resistances to physical damage, behemoths are relatively rare [...] so using them as an example skews the results.

At an evolution value of 1 the spawn rates for biters are 12.5% medium, 50% big, 37.5% behemoth. If we multiply those rates with their health, we find that 90.5% of the health will be for behemoth biters.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:Besides in addition to the 800kJ per shot, they have a 24kW drain so every 33 seconds they passively consume as much energy as firing a shot.

This thogether with the high spike of energy you need to fire them (hard on steam engine setups without accus) are IMO the only real downsides of lasers.

Gun turret downsides are that you need to manufacture & supply the magazines and the way lower health (400 for gun, 1000 for laser) combined with their low range. Because of the short range, spitters can get a shot or two in before they die and the turrets low health means the construction bots have a shorter time to repair the turret before it blows up. 8 shots from behemoth spitters is all it takes to blow up a gun turret. On top of that, a dead gun turret is worse than a dead laser turret, since your defense will loose more DPS that way.

Gun turrets have a neat DPS on paper but the physical damage resistance of behemoth biters makes them obsolete. They also lack the range to properly deal with spitters which has the same effect much earlier in the game. Additionally, setting up the logistics to supply a wall of gun turrets outside your base is just crazy.
So it's no surprise that gun turrets become pointless past a certain progression mark and there is no reason to ever build them again. Not even their research upgrades can fix that even if there were an infinite amount of them. (Yeah right, who wants to feed a gun turret with 30 upgrades in fire rate anyway?)

Laser turrets may be more expensive but the extra cost is more than worth it. The biggest hinderance is research level and setting up a working oil refinery for once anyway. In return, they have the necessary range to deal with spitters, ignore all resistances and are trivial to set up and hook to your power grid. Yes they require a good amount of accus going before you can use them but the benefits clearly outweight this.

If the game should ever go beyond that (and it rarely does) you could add flamethrower turrets. They have area damage and insane fire rate / damage stats and supplying them is a lot easier than supplying gun turrets because they're worlds apart in ammo efficiency. The problem is that the game doesn't ever pose a challenge where such a strong turret would be the clear answer. Instead of bothering to be efficient, you can just massproduce laser turrets at home and then double or triple their amount at your walls.
They're basically an upgrade to your laser turrets but the game never requires you to update. Additionally, their groundfire damages your repair drones which is just bullshit imo. I just use them because they're fun to watch but I can't say that there was ever a real reason to do so. Balance and difficulty simply fail to create that niche.
The problem is their delayed projectile impact and massive overkill of small targets makes them good against large and beefy hordes by design. The kind of alien hordes which wouldn't usually get vaporized by your laser turrets at max range. However, such hordes simply don't exist in the game. It's like if we were able to build flak turrets for anti air but there are no flying aliens either. The same kind of pointlesness.

Really hoping this is something the devs are gonna fix with the military rebalance. I wish gun turrets would serve a niche purpose in late game and I wish the attack waves were threatening enough to justify flamethrower turrets. Perhaps one solution would be to add a laser resistance to behemoths biters (and those ALONE). Though, don't forget to adjust laser turret targeting priority then.
Additionally, gun turrets should be flat out stronger than laser turrets in late game because they're much harder to supply. Perhaps give them a 3rd tier of ammo which pierces damage reduction or add a 3rd research providing this bonus.

If gun turrets had 400hp->2000hp it'd mean a single line would be adequate defense late game, which would make them... terrible still but better and more easily supplied! I think that'd be a neat change since it'd give newbies a bit more warning when their lone turret is getting wrecked by 40 small biters.

Probably mix of laser and flame thrower if you have the train network to supply crude oil. Aside from that put a wall maze to amplify flamethrower effectiveness. Also put 4 or more laser in front of flame thrower so that the flame thrower doesn't waste oil trying to shoot biters just a little bit out of its range. And then put a layer of wall in front of lasers to prevent flame thrower to burn the lasers.

I would not say that other is best. It depends on player's personal game style and settings. If I launch just one rocket I probably do not face behemoths at all. Such base does not need advanced defense lines. Local walls and gun turrets are certainly enough. But if I make a megabase which processes hundreds of millions of raw materials during several hundreds of hours, lasers are certainly the best in engineering sense. Their investment is negligible compared to thousand rockets. However, gun turrets can also be used and they may provide extra challenge which makes the game more interesting and entertaining.

I have had a massive base which consumed up to 19k red bullet magazines per hour. It was more than 10 square kilometers enclosed with triple walls and a continuous line of gun turrets. Supply and construction were fully automatized. Maintaining of the gun turrets was an interesting logistical and management addition to straightforward vanilla rocket production.

Personally, I use gun turrets because it's still there when you have a power outage. And a power outage can be 'total' for 1 min when you only use solar pannel & accumulator. But I'm agree that laser turrets are better, because long range, no bullet to create, no complex logical system to set-up to fed turret...

waiting for better amor/range on gun turret on 15 to balance laser vs bullet. Gun turret should be better because it's more complex.

d4rkpl4y3r wrote:At an evolution value of 1 the spawn rates for biters are 12.5% medium, 50% big, 37.5% behemoth. If we multiply those rates with their health, we find that 90.5% of the health will be for behemoth biters.

An evolution factor of 1 cannot be reached, and it looks like those figures are on a scale rather than just "you hit 50% evolution, time to spawn 12% more big biters". Behemoths start spawning at 99% evolution, probably at MUCH lower rates than 37.5% and possibly comparable with total big biter health. And by the time you near it you will have suffered a hundred hours (at least) of Big Biters.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:

d4rkpl4y3r wrote:At an evolution value of 1 the spawn rates for biters are 12.5% medium, 50% big, 37.5% behemoth. If we multiply those rates with their health, we find that 90.5% of the health will be for behemoth biters.

An evolution factor of 1 cannot be reached, and it looks like those figures are on a scale rather than just "you hit 50% evolution, time to spawn 12% more big biters". Behemoths start spawning at 99% evolution, probably at MUCH lower rates than 37.5% and possibly comparable with total big biter health. And by the time you near it you will have suffered a hundred hours (at least) of Big Biters.

Come on man, try to give correct information:

Okay, technically due to rounding I guess it can. Geeze how long is that save file?

@Deadly bagel, even though 1.000 is supposed to be impossible as a straight up evolution amount, you're also forgetting the shift factor, which makes effective evolution higher than 1.0 commonplace. Common end-game effective evolution at your base's borders I'm guessing is in the 1.2-1.3 range, although it might just cap at 1, I'm not sure.

greep wrote:Okay, technically due to rounding I guess it can. Geeze how long is that save file?

It is a 230h save file. But I have a couple older versions of it. At 64h evolution was 0.9991 and at 156h (I have no saves in between) it was already at 1.

Escadin wrote:Gun turrets have a neat DPS on paper but the physical damage resistance of behemoth biters makes them obsolete.

Gun turrets have problems but their damage application on behemoth biters is not one of them. They do more damage per second on behemoths AFTER damage resistance is factored. Less range, constant supply requirements, difficulty of supplying them vs just power poles for lasers, less health are all valid issues of gun turrets vs lasers but not damage. They are flat out better in that aspect.