Seeking a Challenge

[eberkain]

I'm the type of player that usually plays games on a hard difficulty. I've spent a couple hundred hours with Factorio so far and usually I get bored with the lack of challenge. So this time I'm going to amp up the biters and cut down my resources and see how far I can make it. Here are the map settings I decided to go with.



My thoughts are with the iron / copper, I will get big patches that are spaced out but not contain a crazy amount of ore.
lots of small patches of stone worth a couple thousand each.
A few really big patches of oil.
And the biter bases should be thick and nearby the starting area.

As far as mods, I'm going to use the longer nights and scary nights (scary nights is disabled until its updated)
Going to allow myself a few convenience mods, a 3rd toolbelt row, Autofill, Boxing, Barrels, EvoGUI, YARM, Initial Scan and Landfill.

Here is the map exchange string if anyone is interested.

>>>AAAMAAwAAAACBAYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAMDAgoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
AgUBCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAEEAgoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAQUECAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlAgUBBQAAAHN0b25lBAECIDxd//VHAADDDAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ACAA9u/Tc=<<<

I usually go for a coastal spawn that I can easily defend, so I decided to not do that this game, the starting are should not be overloaded on resources and should have little water to work with. My opening research is going to be turrets, automation, military and armor, from that point I'll automate research and kind of grow the factory in stages. Stage one will be walls, turrets, general main bus layout and red research.



Ok, so I decide to go for it with this start. First goal is to get some turrets up and working. I chop trees for fuel. One burner for Iron, stone and copper. I build a single steam gen with one pump and two boilers, one lab, one power pole and ten red potions. Set it up and get turrets finished, I move my copper burners to iron after I have 100+ and make my first turret. Just before getting attacked for the first time. One turret, three biters and my pistol. Were ok for now, if the first wave was 3 then it wont be long before they are sending 10 and its going to take more than one turret to do anything about it.



I really feel the pressure. I move my stone burner to iron too and setup some coal burners since I've nearly cut down all the trees at this point. I get a second turret out and then here come six biters.



I feel like I'm ahead of the curve, I get out more and more turrets and start setting up stone mines to make walls. I've got burners making fuel and I expand the power generator to handle electric drills. Things are going good, I have a few groups of 2 turrets around the edges of the base, and then here comes a swarm of like 20 biters. More than 2 turrets can handle, I finish them off with my rifle, but I lost some resources and ammo when those turrets were destroyed. I make more and start putting a circle of walls around them.

I finally feel like I can rest, I have a perimeter of turrets that are circled with walls, and I guess that I have enough firepower that the biter attacks are slacking off. I still am getting occasionally attacked, but nothing like it was in the beginning.



To actually enclose the base I decide to build the belt that will eventually carry ammo and relocate all the turret groups to a spot on the wall, then I can just connect the walls around the turrets and were golden. I want to get as much of the starting resources in the initial base as I can, but I can't go too big since I'm limited on turrets (still hand making them) and my stone is quickly running out.



To be continued...

[Mr Sunol]

If you want a challenge, have you tried bobs mods?

[eberkain]

If you want a challenge, have you tried bobs mods?

I played alot of dytech a couple versions back. I may give bobs mods a shot if this game does not pan out.

[V453000]

=D good luck!
I did something similar once, my main problem was conquering new resources - clearing out the huge bases early-ish is not exactly easy I did not leave my base without 200+ laser turrets in my pockets. Anything else was just not cutting it; combat robot upgrades were not done by then.

[Xterminator]

This looks quite interesting and fun! I have done some similar death world runs before and quite enjoyed myself. Those bases you have around you are massive, will be a challenge to clear out. What is your plan for thinning out the bases? I feel like turrets will just get surrounded if you try and turret creep.

Also yeah if this game doesn't pan out or once you finish then I would also suggest Bobs Mods. It may not be super hard combat wise (at least not at the point I'm at in my playthrough), but it provides a much bigger challenge than Dytech in terms of actually building and automating everything.

[eberkain]

What is your plan for thinning out the bases?

I'm thinking I'll just leave alot of it, they are going to be insanely hard to take down until I get late game weapons, so I'm just going to focus on building a strong defensive line and make a couple remote outposts to send back ore, running rail lines between the swaths of bases. Have to build a car and go exploring for a lightly defended large iron patch, hopefully there is one. ::crosses fingers::

[V453000]

That sounds like a big wish in deathworld XD

[eberkain]

Got a chance to play some more. I automated red and green science, and starting setting up my main bus layout. Got turret production automated and starting circling the entire base with turrets. Moved my right wall over to the water edge to grab some more land for the production line, ran out of space on main iron one. Expanded the left side to capture the small oil field and get some space to process oil.

Grabbed this pic when I saw what a mess I was making with belts, I promise it makes sense to me.


Last game I built a 5,6,12:12 lab and research went so fast I couldn't get assemblers setup as fast as I was getting new stuff to build. This game im going for 4-6 labs. Quick and dirty red and green setup.


expanded the smelter to do some steel.


expanding the right wall


taking out bases with grenades, shotgun and turrets (thank you for an autofill update)


Look at how close they are to the right size of the base, going to have to push them back some at some point.


Showing the new footprint of the base


Good shot showing how I setup the assembly lines.

[eberkain]

Did some exploring with a car to see what the area around looks like, not finding what im looking for yet.


Ran out of my starting area copper, so I expanded the walls to cover that big unprotected patch nearby.


Found some friends while exploring.


I worked on pushing the biters back a bit on a couple sides.


Built a proper oil processing area.


And a new centralized smelting area.


Expanding the southern wall so I can add a couple more production lines and have room for proper research labs.


The oil in my starting area did not last long, so I decided to push down to the closest patch and pump it back to the base.


Easily captured the oil wells and setup a couple pumping stations to send it back. Need to go back and build walls around stuff.


New overview of the base after a good play session. My next issue is going to be coal. I've got a stockpile to run the power generators, but I need some to put on the bus and to build air filters. Iron is also going to not last at this rate either. I may setup some kind of remote post and truck it back with the car, using the boxing mod to load more at once.

[_cyro_]

im going to give this a try

[Brambor]

I tried something like this:
Only base mod
Enemies at max (obviously) not the artefacts thought
Iron, Copper, Coal at the minimal so I still can play it
Oil at absolutely min
Stone, I do not remember that one, but I do not usually use walls

I had to generate quite a few maps, some vere unplayable, because I did not have access to Fe, Cu and C at the same time.

Tried with bobs mod as well
Minimal settings at ores... And so on
I had to generate even more maps this time (actually it was before the upper super hardcore run)
I had no access to stone so I needed to use one furnace for a loooong time (3h I think) before I made a raid for a stone deposit just about covered with bitters.
The interesting thing: while the ore was mined and smelted thru by one furnace I went for dinner, when I came back, there were two bob's mod worms just about in the starting point [0, 0] or so. I came to them during night and got killed not even noticing them , 3h of simulation would be wasted if it was not for autosave! (Not sure if the last sentence is right, english is not my native language, but I saw it at the end of "The Imitation Game" movie)