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I completed my first hard mode game (after 2 unsuccessful tries), and have some mixed feelings about it.
I failed first attempt by overbuilding furnaces. Basically 5th smelter was causing biters attack that I couldn't handle. So, early stages of the game are damn slow.
Second attempt failed due to resources deficiency in more or less accessible area around starting point.
After that I was restarting the game for half an hour to get good enough starting point.
In hard mode you can't approach enemy bases on your own till you have power armor and distractor capsules.
I tried to use car. That wasn't even funny. I wasn't able to move close enough to throw something.
There is nothing to circle around and you can't even car-crash into spawner. The car will be destroyed before reaching it.
And turrets creeping is completely different then in normal game. That was probably the funniest part of the game.
Constant stream of biters is a huge strain for mostly solar energy network, so I had to rush my attacks during the day.
But biters are at a little disadvantage when there are A LOT of them. It seems that the game can't process all of them,
so often huge pack of biters might rush at you and then suddenly stop before walls and get killed by turrets without fighting back.
But even with this bug-o-feature I had to double all the walls even before big biters appeared.
The most boring part was building ingredients for rocket defence.
Amount of resources mined wasn't enough to achieve more or less acceptable production speed and further base expansion
was possible, but very cumbersome. When I tried to 'dig' into biters field I was always running back with huge company of fans.
And destruction of this fanbase could easily drain half of my batteries even during the day.
So I just left the game in background and was peeking at it periodically.
What I noticed - when you base is more or less big, it's not that important how much pollution your base produces,
but where your character stands. If you stand in the middle of the base you will get much fewer attack than if you
stand near the edge of the base.
Actually I tested this when I activated rocket defence.
I placed it right in the geometrical centre of the base.
And nothing happened after activation!
But when I moved closer to the edge, I've got stream of biters.
Big turrets pack was killing most of them before they were reaching walls, but despite the fact that I almost
doubled batteries and solar panels while waiting for completion of rocket defence research, this non-stop
shooting definitely could drain all the energy. So I retreated to the middle of the base again, and biters stopped the attack.

All in all, while hard mode definitely can provide unique experiences, there are also boring parts, at least in vanilla game.
Keep in mind that if you want to try it.

Interesting post, and I definitely agree with some of your points. However I think it somewhat depends on how you play. Also the point about where you stand is very interesting, I will also have to test that.

Anyway... I started a hardmode game a while back with Dytech mod, and the Warfare module enabled. The early game was not actually all that slow for me, simply because I wasn't particularly conservative with my building. Granted, this made things very stressful at times, running around refilling ammo constantly for my turrets, and almost resulted in me losing several times.

As for power, so far ( I think 12 hours in) I am still using 100% steam power, simply because I have no room for solar and was lucky enough to get a massive coal deposit in my starting area. So lasers aren't that big of a problem.

Now I do have the same problem with pushing out as you do. Even with my power I get wrecked. So unfortunately I have resorted to turret pushing, and even that is a long difficult process. I might give it another try though by myself once I get destroyer capsules and combat shotgun+piercing shells.

Yeah... the behavior about biter attacks depending on where your char is located is something I noticed a while ago.

I perfectly walled in 2-3 Spawners as close as possible without my turrets destryoing the spawners and made myself a little "turret test center"... just to test gun turrets vs laser turrets in various layouts.

Once I moved away far enough they don't attack the walls/turrets anymore even they are fully covered in pollution. Even when I placed a radar near my walls to keep the area active on my map.

At some point the "chunks" seem to be toggled inactive and biter attacking stops from there. ^^

I don't know if this intended or not but it makes the defense for a huge base much much easier because the biters will only attack walls near your char and nowhere else. Could be a bug though. ^^

@Xterminator - I guess power setup depends on available amount of coal and oil. Both were mediocre at best in my case, so I had to switch to solar early.
As a result I had to stick with supercompact and supermessy factory and all free space was covered with solar panels and arrays of batteries.

As for Destroyers... I didn't even researched them. Actually Distractors are so OP, especially in case of hard mode.
I think you need couple of dozens of Destroyers in order to even be able to move yourself close enough to damage the spawner.
With Distractors you throw 2 packs on top of spawner on the edge of activation zone, and that almost always kills the spawner.
I was like some kind of wicked Santa. Running beside forward spawners and throwing Distractors like Xmas presents

When I was playing my Romanesque Factory, the docile Biters was a rather common occurrence. My claimed territory is massive, and the only attacks I ever get when they happen are near the location of my character. If I'm back at home base, no attacks come from anywhere. If I travel to an area, the Biters are much more likely to attack.

Whether this is a bug, or the dev's way of limiting how much processing power is required to simulate actions and behavior of millions of different entities within the game is anyone's guess. All I know is that my mining drills far far away keep operating and the resources keep flowing in by train even if I never visit them again after setting them up.

so think like this post https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =11&t=4578