Surviving While Idle

[Grobert]

About my base: I'm probably around 20 hours in, and I'm achievement hunting.
I have around 230MW of solar power, most of which is being used for building green circuits for the 20M achievement.
The biters are Large size; I haven't seen any Gargantuan yet but I assume they're coming.

Here's my plan: my base is producing close to 400K green circuits per hour.
I'll set up some defenses, make sure I have plenty of storage space available, and leave the game to idle overnight.
I have the impression that circuit count is total across all games, so in the morning I'll reload my game and do it again.

Here's my question: what will it take to survive the gargantuan biters that are going to attack me overnight?
I've been building clusters of 8 laser turrets surrounding a large electric pylon. Is that enough?

As I clear out enemy bases, I've been trying to leave a couple of worms alive at each one.
I heard a rumor that, if you do that, the base won't respawn. (Or, rather, no other bases will spawn near it.)
Is this true?

[Grimakar]

well you could mix some stuff. do flamethrower turrets, laser turrets, walls. I am not sure if it still works, but you could also use fast belts, in front of your walls, so that will slow down your enemies. maybe you could show a screenshot before and after overnight

[ChurchOrganist]

Make sure you save the game before you go to bed!

PS I'd not heard that about the worms. What I do know works in early/mid game is to leave a turret fully loaded with piercing ammo at the nest site once you have cleared it. That successfully kills the little critturs that attempt to build there.

[Mehve]

Existing spawners/worms don't prevent new nests from forming, but they do reduce the chances of that section being chosen for any expansion attempts. You can get the same results from placing your own stuff, though. Just a bunch of walls can severely reduce the chances of the biters trying to settle there, although it won't do anything about nearby nests that are close enough to try expanding to a section beyond the wall's influence.

For long term/overnight survival, do what you can do limit biter interactions to expansion attempts, rather than outright attacks due to pollution reaching the spawners.

If you're running mods, use something like EvoGUI to tell you the evolution level. The biggest biters/spitters don't start showing up until 90%, everything before that is child's play in comparison.

[Grobert]

K, here's what I've got.

I started with my "research all the science" base which was 19 hours old. I then spent another 19 hours (!!!) running around building green circuit factories everywhere. (also clearing biter nests)
Here's an example:
This must have been one of my earlier bases because it had mostly run out of iron by the time I was done building.
My later bases had efficiency modules on the mining drills (to save pollution) and the furnaces (to save power) but not on the assemblers.

When I felt like I'd done enough, my base was producing 500K chips/hour.
I had a few false starts where I went idle in the wrong spot and got killed by biters, but eventually I figured out I should go idle surrounded by laser turrets.
I went idle for nine hours and came back to mixed success.
Some of my bases had been overrun by biters -- apparently my laser turret barrier had some gaps in it.
Some of my bases had simply run out of storage (or of inputs) and stopped producing.
Some were still going.


But overall it was a success:

I had roughly 2M chips (lifetime total) before I started my going-idle project. This idle run, my base made 3.5M chips in ten hours. Now I just need one more run to get the achievement.

Amazingly I never saw any gargantuan biters. I pulled up the console and typed /evolution to check, and my evolution index was .88-something when I started going idle and .8977 when I came back from idle.

[Deadly-Bagel]

This is more a passive achievement but I'll probably not play long enough in vanilla to see this. Still, have at least one more vanilla game I want to try when 0.15 comes out then will prob do a circuit run.

400k an hour isn't that many circuits really. It's about 55 per minute, which is what, 40 t3 assemblers? Less? I'll do a dedicated run. Lots of huge resource patches, huge starting area and small enemy bases. Thinking something like 400 t3 assemblers, which would be 4,320,000 circuits per hour. You get something like 25 assemblers per belt so that's 16 belts of iron and 24 belts of copper, which is a fair bit but feasible. Would need a huge furnace array to process that much, I think around 70 furnaces service a single blue belt so almost 3,000 electric furnaces? But could easily set up to be tiled, iron column, three copper columns, another iron column, middle copper column gets split between its neighbours. The width of those five furnace columns is accommodating for two circuit production columns which is perfect.

16 belts of iron and 24 belts of copper go in the top, 327 tiles later 16 belts of Electronic Circuits come out the bottom and get munched up by a huge chest array of up to 2,000 chests (depends how many I still need). Will need big trains to bring in the ore, copper would ideally have five wagons, iron only needs 3.

Might do this playing with a friend I've got signed up, he's keen on some multiplayer...

[Hannu]

If you enclose everything with triple walls and continuous line of laser turrets and make well organized bot construction system for all lines, they can not probably break through. Of course you have to make sure that you have enough all resources, your train network works flawless etc. If there will be one train jam or blackout, you will get nasty surprise at morning. In any case, make backup copy from your save file at evening.

[alaeth]

Think: Tower Defense games... A solid wall is less effective than a wall of interlocking "L" shapes...

This abuses the pathing, and rather than chew through your walls, the biters and spitters path through them.

Have your damage units (I use a flame turret paired with 2 laser turrets) at least 8-10 spaces behind the walls... both enemies with path around your defenses, barely touching them, while your damage is dealt.