FFF explained this problem of very hard biters very well when it said:
Actually no, it isn’t so hard for new players. It is hard for veteran players. The attack system emulates Freeplays pollution system. If you pollute hard, you are attacked hard. The only difference is that the 'price' of a biter is lowered inversely to how far you are through the final research.
This lead to a big problem in my base in the NPE: I had stacked everything into running 6 labs at full speed, like I would usually do with a science focus rather than a military focus. Note that I've usually played on rail worlds, so the biters only attack where they're still in a polluting area and do not return. I will still usually leave my mine sites defended with turrets rather than go wipe them out, so the threat of biters isn't entirely foreign. Thus, in the past, my military strategy has been almost completely reactive, rather than proactive, since the difficulty of sandbox is easy to manage with speed and damage upgrades. So the NPE was quite harsh on me as a long-time player but combat noob.
Quite far into the NPE, I found myself in an unfeasible situation: As soon as I finished shooting speed 1 and switched my labs to researching green science, I was met with unmanageble waves of biters quickly consuming all my ammo.
Before: Producing just the right amount of ammo to start with, as dictated by the production requirement. Actually it looks like I'm slightly under, possibly due to pollution.
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After: It became impossible to ramp up ammo production fast enough to deal with the biter menace:
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The rather inintuitive solution, it seemed to me, is to stop researching so fast, so that the biter attacks won't ramp up as fast. Again, from FFF:
the 'price' of a biter is lowered inversely to how far you are through the final research
I returned once more to my 'doomed' save and turned off circuits and research, also reducing labs to 3 for when I started the research again. I started building 5 ammo assemblers per side of the base, only to find I had neglected to manually feed my turrets enough and they were quickly overrun. It's just not fun or intuitive to be getting this many biter attacks for what, in 0.16 sandbox, is a negligible-sized factory. I see a big problem with this: now that I have a doomed save, I have no inclination to go back and replay the rest of the highly manual, artificial 'factorio' just to try setting myself up properly and beating this challenge.
Back to the mechanics of how the NPE difficulty works, as said before: pollution, PLUS research. In sandbox, the research only coincides with the difficulty, most as a penalty or bonus for your pollution. It is emphatically
not tied to the research. If the developers' intention is to teach
how to play Factorio, then I feel like they've failed because they're teaching new players how to play an escalating scenario with limits and boundaries, not how to play the main mode of the game, sandbox. Honestly, if I was new to the game, I'd be tossing up whether to refund it as soon as I got wiped out (actually, I'd be kicking myself that I couldn't because even as a (low-end) experienced player I spent more than 2 hours getting to the point I'm up to; hopefully I would then try sandbox to see if it's better, but no guarantees as this is hypothetical anyway). I can't think of much that's more painful than re-playing through a learning experience because I failed the 'test' at the end.
To sum up my gripes with the artificiality of the tutorial:
- Research progress should never affect biter difficulty.
- You can't take the fight to them: Their nests are non-existent to the east and probably the west (as in they may or may not actually be spawning at the nests we see them make after wiping out our old base).
- It's much easier to put yourself in an unwinnable solution than the sandbox. This may have newbies thinking the game is more of a biter defence game.
Hopefully there are a few other sore losers to sympathise with anyway. After all, it
is the 'too hard' thread