0.18 DeathWorld

[evopwr]

Ok, I give up. I thought I was a bit of a veteran, but I guess not...
Didnt have any issues with 0.17 Death World.
Ive tried 0.18 DeathWorld multiple times, 3 different maps, with all the tricks I know.
"Getting as far as you can, blueprinting, then reloading from the start, and quickly just follow the blueprint".
Total focus on urgent automated turret, bullet, and wall production, with 5% of time/resources going towards "other". I hardly make it 30 mins in (even though I spend several hours attempting to get that far). From there on, I get mobbed by groups of 20+, every minute!!!
If anyone has any advice, let me know

[valneq]

You mean you tried DeathWorld before the biter pathing changes in the later parts of the 0.17 release cylce, right?
Technically, from 0.17.79 to 0.18, there were no actual changes on the biters.

[DerGraue]

Total focus on urgent automated turret, bullet, and wall production, with 5% of time/resources going towards "other".

This is your problem. Your pollution causes the biter attacks, so you build more ammo + stuff, so you create more pollution, therefor biter send larger attack waves, so you have to produce more ammo, so you create more pollution, you don't do anything else but defend, then you get overrun.

Here are a few hints for the very early game:

The pollution can not reach the biter nests. Ever!

If it reaches the biters you either reduce the pollution by removing a few miners or the biter nests die. Check the pollution statistics to keep track on that regularly.

Turret creep is probably the easiest way to kill off very small biter bases before green science. Later on, try driving with a car while shooting and throwing grenades. Then, whatever you like, you probably won't have any problems after you get oil.

[BlueTemplar]

^^^^

And yeah, what 0.17 are you talking about ?
Biter balance has changed many, many times since 0.17.0 !

[mudcrabempire]

Total focus on urgent automated turret, bullet, and wall production, with 5% of time/resources going towards "other".

This is your problem. Your pollution causes the biter attacks, so you build more ammo + stuff, so you create more pollution, therefor biter send larger attack waves, so you have to produce more ammo, so you create more pollution, you don't do anything else but defend, then you get overrun.

Here are a few hints for the very early game:

The pollution can not reach the biter nests. Ever!

This is one "tip" I don't quite understand / cannot verify from my own experience. I always do the exact opposite, playing turtleMCcastleman. With a good perimeter it works pretty decently. On high difficulties I find it barely even possible to do any reasonable expansion. Also destroying nests increases evolution and the biters will repopulate anyways (then again, making ammo creates pollution which also increases evolution... I didn't do the math).

For tips from my side:

Total focus on urgent automated turret, bullet, and wall production, with 5% of time/resources going towards "other".

Maybe change that up a bit. You technically don't need anything automated other than smelting. Automate mining, smelting, science and maybe two assemblers for ammo. Any further automation is just a waste of resources and produces pollution. Make as much in your pocket as you can (turrets are a prime candidate since you only need them once, not a stable supply). At the ~30 minute mark you shouldn't be facing anything other than small biters so make your factory as small as possible and just spam those turrets (for reference, I regularly use blocks of 12+ turrets (3x4) on contested borders). Walls are great but you don't need a lot of them, at that stage a single miner+smelter should be quite good (again, craft in your pocket).

[BlueTemplar]

In my experience, the turtling strategy starts to break down once Blue Biters show up with their armor of 8.
If you're still on piercing ammo at that point, you're in trouble. (Damage upgrades help a lot, roughly doubling damage per bullet at each tier, but there are only so many of them before you start to need blue science...)

On Death World, each subsequently killed spawner increases evolution less than the previous one (this is unchanged from Default). Whereas evolution from time is 5 times the default !

Here's an example of my Death World Marathon game (0.17.0 - 0.17.4 at that point) - note the low amount of defense turrets :

(blobheroes show the previous locations of defeated nests.)

[mudcrabempire]

I never actually use red ammo . The damage to resource ratio is terrible even after considering armor. The point about turtling is to always keep the defenses up to the latest tech, eg. you have to race flamer/laser before too many blues start to come. Point in case, I made it work for a DM world but that was before biters stopped dancing around each other. Currently trying again.

The evolution increase is diminishing for all sources (spawner kill, time, pollution) so I suppose to figure out the better strategy you have to calculate and compare the evolution created by:

preemptive strike:
-destroying all the nests
-pollution from producing the required ammo

turtle:
-producing hell of a lot of ammo

One also probably needs to consider the time it takes to actually keep a large area clean of biters and the resources "wasted" on ammo (turtling does take a toll on iron). Also it's kind of a timing thing, because when you hit lasers/flamers/green energy turtling is technically evolution free (other than pollution from producing tons of laser turrets).

Nice to see though that there are alternative strategies, wasn't aware that preemtive strike works well enough for DM.

EDIT: So, after writing the above I went on to play my world and got mauled by medium biters. Turns out blue biters are no longer needed to maul gun turrets+walls, mediums can do it, if there's enough of them.

Which made me think maybe talking about pollution is the wrong question. Which made me actually do some math. Roughly speaking, from my current save, I have produced 8k ammo (I'm neglecting turrets) requiring about 25% of my resources and responsible for about 25% of my pollution. Converting those 8k ammo into evolution is equivalent to killing about 10 spawners.
Those are just rough numbers, but I think the point is visible: Turtling does have a nonnegligible impact on resources and pollution but preemptive morderocide is much worse when it comes to evolution.

So yeah, evolution is not the question. I'm still probably not gonna win my current game though because there are just too many biters. So I think the solution to the turtle - preemptive morderocide question is probably something like: If you can't handle the evolution go turtle, if you can't handle the pressure go kill stuff.
Since deathworld marathon has a very high time evolution factor which is essentially dominating evolution for most of the early game (I don't remember but at least well until blue science) this basically means you don't need to bother with evolution in the early game, so for the good first part of the game it's probably better to kill bases wherever needed. Don't know about late, but there's probably a turnover when the area you need to keep clean just gets too large.

[evopwr]

Thanks guys, yes it was an early 0.17 version - cant remember what one.
I'll have another crack when I get home tonight, and will let you know how badly i fail

As a side note, I must have tried dozens and dozens of different map seeds.
30% of seeds had spawners ON the starting ore patches. Obviously that wont work, so skipped those.
And about 80% of seeds had cliffs zigzaging all across the ore patches. Skipped those as well.
I'd really like this reviewed a little bit. Pulling the starting ore patches 30% closer to the starting water patch would resolve most of them.

Note, I realize I can turn things off/adjust settings, but I am trying to do a Vanilla unmodified DW as my next challenge.

[evopwr]

Here's an example of my Death World Marathon game (0.17.0 - 0.17.4 at that point) - note the low amount of defense turrets :

I think this is the version I did my last DW in, and I found it very easy too.
I'm curious how you'd find 0.18.

[HadesSupreme]

I have a deathworld marathon going. Obviously a lot depends on the map so here's my string with totally unmoddified deathworld marathon presets. This is at 22 and a half hours, production stats are at 2M iron 1M copper smelted and 1.6M pollution generated, of which alien nests have absorbed 200k pollution. Evolution factor .7855, and I'm just now getting into purple science. Unfortunately kind of oil limited so its slow until I get coal liquefaction.

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Generally, I don't worry about evolution too much, just pollution. Just generally go fast and you'll get the stuff you need in time. Evolution is only really a problem in that Big Biters forces you to get piercing ammo, but by the time they show up you should definitely have a lot of piercing ammo and be getting close to Lasers. Normal ammo is perfectly capable of holding off lots of mediums so long as the waves aren't too big and you have projectile damage level 2 (level 3 is a waste IMO, it costs 1.2k piercing ammo that you are probably better off just throwing in the turrets).

Early game get around 1k ammo and 25 turrets on hand to clear out small nests. Spread out your smelting/power/production/mining as much as possible to help pollution disseminate across multiple nests rather than concentrate on a single nest, this causes you to get a lot of smaller waves rather than just a few really big waves. Clear out what you can to stop pollution from reaching the nests, especially early game. Obviously the goal is lasers and solar, once you've got them you are basically set. For bigger nests the rocket launcher can snipe the nests themselves while poison capsules deployed while driving around in your car take care of the worms. Whether you have to resort to these before getting lasers is obviously up to the map and how well you can build up a perimeter before the bugs decide to expand ontop of resources you need to get to lasers and solar. Solar is good to get even before blue science just to reduce pollution and ensure you don't run out of coal (in my map I was working with a somewhat limited amount of coal).

With lasers and solar it becomes a cakewalk, especially since advanced circuits also means efficiency modules which means your mining outposts go from constant attacks to almost never being attacked. Unfortunately its still really grindy cleaning out a few more mining outposts and oil spots that you need to finish teching up and get the tech that really lets you easily handle the big alien bases (namely portable fusion reactor + personal lasers and/or artillery).

Honestly the biggest problem early game is the conundrum of how to handle supplying your gun turrets. Either you have to dump 100 mags into every turret (incredibly wasteful if they start getting destroyed, might as well reload an autosave) or run an absurdly large conveyor all around your base with inserters to throw ammo in. I did the former in this game, gonna try the latter next game.

[BlueTemplar]

Congratulations !

I never actually use red ammo . The damage to resource ratio is terrible even after considering armor.

Good point early on - but I believe this is untrue for blue(/green) biters ?

If you can't handle the evolution go turtle, if you can't handle the pressure go kill stuff.

Sounds to be a good rule of thumb. At least as long as one doesn't stray too far from vanilla Death World presets ?

Though I'm even more curious about how much pressure one could handle by going turtle, with the 0.17.12 changes that ~doubled (?) the number of biters from pollution and the aforementioned 0.17.70 changes that made them not collide with each other any more...

Since deathworld marathon has a very high time evolution factor which is essentially dominating evolution for most of the early game (I don't remember but at least well until blue science) this basically means you don't need to bother with evolution in the early game, so for the good first part of the game it's probably better to kill bases wherever needed.

Uh, now that (since 0.17.60) DeathWorld Marathon is easier than DeathWorld + Marathon, we have :
Time Factor : DW : 5x Default ; DWM : 3.75x
As you say, if you go "full turtle" instead of trying to limit your pollution, and do manage to survive it, you should be able to scale and tech much faster ?
Pollution Factor : DW : 1.33..x ; DWM : 1.11x
(FYI, IIRC, Red+Green science ends up 8 times more iron&copper-expensive in Marathon.)
(Also : DW : 2x biters from pollution, DWM : 1.25x.)
Destroy Factor is unchanged from Default.

Don't know about late, but there's probably a turnover when the area you need to keep clean just gets too large.

Yeah, I used mines (+warning turrets) for a while against expansion parties, then got fed up with the maintenance of that and built a train wall.

[...]
As a side note, I must have tried dozens and dozens of different map seeds.
30% of seeds had spawners ON the starting ore patches. Obviously that wont work, so skipped those.
And about 80% of seeds had cliffs zigzaging all across the ore patches. Skipped those as well.
I'd really like this reviewed a little bit. Pulling the starting ore patches 30% closer to the starting water patch would resolve most of them.
[...]

Well it's funny because in 0.17.?? DW starting area size got much bigger : went from 50% to 75% !
(Unless other changes happened too ?)
And in the screenshot above, IIRC I literally just used the first map I rolled - though other people did seem to get unlucky with nests on starting resources... I should try this sometimes - pretty sure that if the spawners are so close, one could cheese them by using that free respawn ammo & health ?

I think this is the version I did my last DW in, and I found it very easy too.
I'm curious how you'd find 0.18.

I wouldn't say that it was "very easy" for me... especially for the first nests !
My next vanilla game will probably have to wait until 1.0...

I have a deathworld marathon going. Obviously a lot depends on the map so here's my string with totally unmoddified deathworld marathon presets.

Started on 0.18.0 ?

Obviously the goal is lasers and solar, once you've got them you are basically set.

I *also* decided to boycott solar/lasers/requester chests in my game. XD

Honestly the biggest problem early game is the conundrum of how to handle supplying your gun turrets. Either you have to dump 100 mags into every turret (incredibly wasteful if they start getting destroyed, might as well reload an autosave) or run an absurdly large conveyor all around your base with inserters to throw ammo in. I did the former in this game, gonna try the latter next game.

You could try using chests ?

[HadesSupreme]

Now that I go back and do the math Physical damage upgrades 3-4 are probably worth it even when rushing lasers since with that regular magazine bullets will deal more damage than physical damage upgrade 2 piercing bullets.

Started on 0.18.0 ?

Yep, date on the starting save is the 22nd

Obviously the goal is lasers and solar, once you've got them you are basically set.

I *also* decided to boycott solar/lasers/requester chests in my game. XD

Very brave. Though efficiency modules alone do a lot, I'd expect using those is the point where things started to go really smoothly for you?

Honestly the biggest problem early game is the conundrum of how to handle supplying your gun turrets. Either you have to dump 100 mags into every turret (incredibly wasteful if they start getting destroyed, might as well reload an autosave) or run an absurdly large conveyor all around your base with inserters to throw ammo in. I did the former in this game, gonna try the latter next game.

You could try using chests ?

Fine when you only need 4 uranium-bullet turrets, can't really be as easily done when you need dozens of turrets to cover an area. I suppose you can set up an isolated belt of magazines fed from a chest but at that point might as well just throw down another 200 belts to get ammo everywhere without needing to refill it yourself IMO.

[bobucles]

A gigantic ammo belt looping around the base can get pretty messy, but a mini belt to feed guns around an outpost works just fine. Just keep in mind that the pollution cost of ammo is VERY high, so simply fighting off biters will create enough pollution to spawn even more biters. It's generally better to keep nests outside of your pollution zone, also fire and laser can output much more damage with a smaller pollution footprint.

[evopwr]

Well, I had much more luck on a new map last night. My 4th attempt.
I tried to focus on pollution a lot more as was suggested.
Picked a map which has a high concentration of trees in the start area (so annoying!!), and tried to keep pollution down.
Havent cleared any nests yet, but managed to build a full perimeter wall, with belt-fed turrets. Just yellow ammo atm.
The base itself is still small, with only 2* red and 3* green science, so only about 20-30 spm.
Tonight i'll add in grey science, and look to try and reach some oil.
If I can do that, generally I find it pretty easy after that, by alternating flame and laser turrets around the entire perimeter. (and dumping the gun turrets)
Thanks for all the advice

[Durentis]

I know your troubles are coming from later on, but the beginning is super important.

Aside from juggling your early pollution cloud, don't forget that you can lay waste to moderately sized biter bases in the beginning with your axe and a stack of fish if need be. (Early armour that would otherwise generally be skipped will help with this a lot.)

[HadesSupreme]

I know your troubles are coming from later on, but the beginning is super important.

Aside from juggling your early pollution cloud, don't forget that you can lay waste to moderately sized biter bases in the beginning with your axe and a stack of fish if need be. (Early armour that would otherwise generally be skipped will help with this a lot.)

This is an interesting idea, so I tested it. My conclusion is that not having light armor is definitely suicidal and unless "moderate sized biter bases" means 2 spawners you'll need more than a single stack of fish.

On the other hand, using a shotgun rather than the axe really ups your kill rate to the point where a stack of fish can finish off a decent sized 10 spawners with 4 worms. Shotgun ammo is super cheap so this is probably the best method to reliably clear some land out.

[Durentis]

unless "moderate sized biter bases" means 2 spawners you'll need more than a single stack of fish.

I probably shouldn't have used such a vacuous and relative term there.. sorry. My thinking is in terms of the spawner base I faced in my sig. Sure, there were some bullets involved but in the end all I had was the axe and I was pretty impressed at how effective it was. My point is to raise awareness that you're not entirely screwed if you run out of ammo. Yes, you need a lot of fish.

I do agree though that pairing fish with a shotgun would be very cost effective.

[User_Name2]

A gigantic ammo belt looping around the base can get pretty messy

I did this in one of my old games - ammo+coal belt looping around the whole base with burner inserters feeding gun turrets off the belt.
It had a maintenance station: roboport, train stop and some logic.

Maintenance station would repopulate the belt with ammo and coal (otherwise one hot spot that gets many attacks will starve all downstream perimeter of ammo), repair and replace anything that gets broken, and request a resupply train if anything gets below 50% of ideal reserve, which is set for a whole perimeter by a green wire and a single constant combinator.

Pros: cheap, reliable, zero tax on power grid (just roboports).


Cons: Even with blueprints, expansion was a pain in the ass. Sometimes burner inserter would grab too much ammo during the initial build, get stuck, and require a manual refueling.

[mudcrabempire]

I keep getting the suspicion that up to a certain perimeter length, regular manual repairs and refilling with ammo takes less time than the time it takes to build these sorts of self-sustained defenses. And I also usually switch to lasers ASAP to avoid needing that kind of stuff (among other reasons).

[astroshak]

I admit, I’m not playing Death World. So ... forgive me if this isn’t really applicable.

What I usually do if I need to wall off an area for defense, and I want to use Turrets instead of Laser Turrets (which are longer ranged but a bit weaker at a given tech level, or given parity in researches), is to use the belt driven system, but I have an inserter taking off the belt, To put the ammo into a box. That box is limited to one stack, and there is a stack inserter taking ammo out of the box to put into the turret.

This DOES mean that it takes longer for downstream turrets to get their ammo when initially setting it up. However, it ensures that each turret has a reserve of 200 ammo in case things get hot and heavy upstream.

I understand the use of burner inserters to feed the turrets their ammo, but halving the ammo resupply going down a long belt, imo, is not a good thing.