Difficulty: Laser charge delay, biters destroy all poles

[Plawerth]

To increase the game difficulty, it should be possible to modify server behavior to make laser assaults on biters much harder to do:

• Add a construction delay option for poles and lasers, they don't just appear instantly when placed
• Add option that lasers need a short time (adjustable) to absorb power before they can first fire -- no firing instantly when placed
• Biters currently ignore poles near them, which allows power to lasers to defeat them. Add a server option so that biters will not just walk past poles and ignore them, but will immediately destroy all poles on sight.
• Biters also currently ignore lights. Add option for lights destruction as with poles, as this benefits them if it's dark and you can't see.

[ssilk]

Difficult, but for me this is a balancing question.

[Aeternus]

One thing to take into account with making poles a target is that this will make mining outposts hard to power - since biters will wreck the usually unprotected power lines heading to those outposts. That makes a rail/ore outpost strategy all but impossible to do in vanilla games. In early game, if your power station is a fair distance from your initial factory, it could be even worse. Having to deal with biters blacking out your factory before you even have turrets would be... frustrating.

A charge time for laser turrets with a substantial draw is not a bad idea (giving those turrets an internal capacity to have them be able to selfpower in case of blackouts for a short duration would be neat), but will not halt the turret march with construction bots plopping down a full square of laser turrets, big poles and a center substation.

[Ranakastrasz]

There is a mod that adds a delay for turret activation. Also, there is a mod that improves biter AI and also makes them attack poles. (Among other things, like train tracks)

Can't remember names tho.

[Engimage]

Turret activation delay will be added in 0.15

[steinio]

Turret activation delay will be added in 0.15

Source?

[Engimage]

Turret activation delay will be added in 0.15

Source?

I can't actually find the source. Last thing I found was in FF

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-169

There is also one thing that we always talked about trying to remove: turret-creep (destroying biters base building turrets closer and closer). This method is very powerful and usually doesn't cost anything. So far I believe that we did not find a simple, fun and fair solution. Ideas include: large power-up times(annoying and also weakens base defense); simply not allowing turrets to be build near biter bases (makes the player feel cheated); underground anti-turret worms (sugar-coated version of the previous idea).

However there is no direct mentioning of this as a final solution. But I still do remember it was said somewhere. Sorry if this will not be confirmed but I am positively sure it was somewhere. Sadly there is no forum feature for a dev tracker (find all dev posts).

[Deadly-Bagel]

They mentioned directly nerfing turret creep in FF166 but what you quoted is the result of experimenting and finding that by fixing combat, turret creep won't be an issue. They seemed to understand that the problem isn't turret creeping being OP, it's that it's sometimes the ONLY way to progress. I mean if you're a relatively new player and you've taken your time familiarising yourself with everything, probably used default map gen settings, it's likely that most oil deposits will be covered in biters before you build the tank. Then what? You're nowhere near Power Armour, the Combat Shotgun also requires blue science, and everything else is a joke.

Once you've got the tank, it's a massive leap to power armour, especially for the inexperienced. Once big biters start showing up the tank has limited uses as you need to keep moving, not always possible with trees everywhere. It's safer and more reliable to creep turrets up, especially laser turrets which are about on par with the tank in difficulty to get (and don't require ammo).

And anyway if I'm turret creeping in my game, what's that to you? It doesn't affect you whatsoever, there's no economy and even in multiplayer you aren't forced into a strategy. The only problem with it is that there is a lack of viable alternatives.

[Aeternus]

... the tutorial missions should really cover tank controls. I swear, I built that thing and couldn't figure out for half the game why the main gun was always shooting backwards - and couldn't hit the broadside of a battlecruiser, let alone a biter nest or worm. I ended up driving in reverse - then got bored with it and just slapped 5 roboports along with a substation/laser turret/big pole blueprint in instead. Along with some shielding for personal protection. Eventually I figured out that the flamethrower is better suited to wiping out Biter nests then the tank is...