so who's done a Death World?

[gudge]

So, who's done a Death World game? How did it go?

I'm about four hours into my second game. Here's what I did:
* I made sure to start somewhere with lots of trees. This was sort of helpful but I still got attacked by biters.
* I made no effort to use green technology. The biters are evolving no matter what I do.
* I put down basic bullet turrets, and researched laser turrets as fast as I could.
* Around the 3h mark I started getting attacked by "medium" biters, which seem to be mostly immune to bullet turrets. I switched some of my turrets to use piercing bullets, and a couple of times I used load-from-autosave to defend a part of my base myself (with grenades).
* Around the 4h mark I finished my laser turret research. I promptly built 20 laser turrets and wiped out a bunch of biter bases.

So, I'm thinking: what now? One good plan might be to claim territory and build walls; I've never done that before but it could be important here.
I could focus on power and try to get a nuclear plant going (or a bunch of solar) to drop the size of my pollution cloud.
Or I could just put laser turrets on my base and keep going as I have for a while, maybe make some blue science packs.

I heard somewhere that biters won't build bases too close to my stuff, so I've been leaving trails of wooden power poles everywhere I go. I'm not sure if that will work but it can't hurt.

[Selvek]

I heard somewhere that biters won't build bases too close to my stuff, so I've been leaving trails of wooden power poles everywhere I go. I'm not sure if that will work but it can't hurt.

I believe that behavior was changed in 0.14, and biters will now happily build bases as close to your stuff as your turrets let them.

[Serenity]

Yeah, "victory poling" doesn't work anymore. I'm currently playing with pretty relaxed biter settings and even turning down their expansion speed I see them expanding somewhat aggressively. They are also sporadically attacking some of my far off walls (I'm playing with lots of water, so I can have narrow choke points). Those are way out of my pollution cloud. Maybe they are expansion parties. Not sure.

[Nasabot]

I am also in my second death world (after abandoning the first attempt) and come to similar conclusions. Laser Tower is incredible important. Yes, you can defeat medium biter, but then you need armor piercing bullets which are too expansive. You need to get lucky with the starting area. Another solution to early biters are radars + grenades + preemptive clearing of assault gatherings.

Not sure if nuclear power is the way to go, solar panels + coal/akkumulators are a good solution which is much earlier available.


I am not sure how the biter expansion works exactly but I didnt have a problem with it. Ingame you can press one of the buttons F5, F6 or F6 which show calculations and how the game operats. You see cycles in red/green which indicate if a chunk is available for biter expansion. It seems that some building(maybe operating furnaces) actually do block chunks for expansions, but as longtermsolution you probably want a wall + turrets anyway, because in order to expand, biters need to move.

[cpy]

Will we get explosive charges so we can build moats? Yeah and once you build moats you get to experience love from new... biter fish and mutal... ehm flying spitters that deal relatively small damage but they splash it over area. Just think about water biters as slow bigass boss level biters might not reach land might not have range but damn they can mess you up if you get close to water.

Once we get to space stuff will get interresting! (if ever)

[vanatteveldt]

I'm busy with a deathworld now, more hours than I care to admit.

Played a fairly normal game except prioritising military a lot more. I did put resource settings on very high so after getting my initial base carved out I was OK until tanks, and that helped me secure my first outpost. But my god you need so much iron to do military science...

I invested pretty heavily in a defense permiter consisting of (inner - outer) inspection railway, flamethrowers, belt, gun turrets, wall, space, maze:



The maze + flamethrower is an extremely efficient weapon. The biters don't attack the maze since they can path through it. It takes them very long, however, they often get halfway in, then turn around, get stuck, etc. It is just within flamethrower range, so everything 'caught' in the maze is roasted:



And everything that gets through the maze is gunned down quite efficiently.

I don't even bother having roboports to repair the wall, it hardly gets any damage, and I just drive around it occasionally with my personal roboport activated.

[Tev]

Great idea with the wall maze + flamethrower turret, will definitely use that when I'll build walled perimeter

I'm ~60 hours into my deathworld save, mass coal, some solar, figuring out nuclear right now. For start I remember rushing AP bullets, there were no attacks before I had them everywhere . . . then I just made classic rapid production expansion, laser sometime later. I introduced them slowly as they're quite expensive and initially quite weak compared to bullet turrets, because I research upgrades for bullets as those are universally useful. Tank was big jump in military capability, its cannon is awesome and shells seems quite useful now too, especially the shooting speed upgrade is awesome and you can one shot nests nicely. Upgraded explosive shells are quite nice against behemoths, problem remains in non-upgradable durability of tank (which is heavily damaged by explosive shells). So far only perimeter is standard big power pole + 8 lasers, placed in chokepoints so that turret coverages overlap.

It is quite challenging, everything feels much cheaper and faster (== MUCH less infrastructure) to make than old marathon mod, but biters make the space expensive and pollution costly (some attack waves are quite large). I like it

[solntcev]

Flame turret produces pollution. Does such wall causing constant attacks once activated?

[vanatteveldt]

Flame turret produces pollution. Does such wall causing constant attacks once activated?

So does my power plant

I've not noticed more or fewer attacks than before the maze/wall was built. I guess if the wall is far from your base it might change things, but since everything is quite cramped the pollution from the base itself is more than enough to get unwanted attention

[PunkSkeleton]

I'm like 22 hours into my 0.15 game which happens to be Death World. Firstly I prioritized getting laser turrets then nuclear power. Switching off the boilers really decreased the frequency of biter attack. Now I'm making production science packs and getting ready for high tech ones. I spent a lot of time getting new territory, tank helped but still turret creeping is the way to go - I just use the tank cannon to kill things from further range but still use laser turrets to kill biters.

[Cerulean]

I launched the rocket in my Death World game just shy of 32 hours in. That's a lot of hours!

Here's the guide I wish I'd had:

* The evolution rate looked scary at first, but it slowed down considerably after a while, and even 32 hours in my evolution level was only like 0.84. This is with a reasonable effort to curb pollution (solar panels, efficiency modules) because I wanted to keep my pollution cloud away from the biters.
* I had to set up a laser turret perimeter around my base -- otherwise every few minutes a group of biters would run in and set up a colony. Even with the perimeter, sometimes a group of biters would set up a colony just barely outside the perimeter, and then the colony would see my laser turrets and go into attack mode. But for the most part this worked fine.
* I used groups of five laser turrets, set up so that each group just barely had the next group in range. If a group seemed to be taking a lot of attacks, I'd also put a concrete wall to slow the biters down.
* My power consumption at the end was 50MW including 9.1MW for maintenance of my 382 laser turrets. Still easier than keeping them all full of bullets. I wouldn't have minded switching to nuclear power, but spending 4000 blue science packs to research it was too expensive.
* Resource consumption was rough! I mined out most of five iron patches and I was actively mining another four, by the end of the game. Copper was less bad -- I mined out three patches and was mining three more.
* Green circuits were a major pain point. I mean, green circuits are always a major pain point whether Death World or not, but they were especially bad here because the cost per circuit nearly tripled. I had bases whose whole job was to make green circuits and send them to me via conveyor belt.
* (I went back and forth on the value of processing ore into stuff at my mining base, versus conveyor-belting it all to my main base. Doing it at the mining base makes it easier to ship (one green circuit takes the place of seven ore) but then if the mining base runs out of ore, all those processing machines go idle and have to be moved. I wound up doing some of each, because my base was still using a lot of raw iron plates.)

[Shokubai]

That powerline map

[vanatteveldt]

You know what I just researched on my death world? Nukes!

20k hitech was really painful, thank god I set resources to abundant.. MY base hase been consuming 10k+ iron and copper for a number of hours...

Good thing is I've been Kovarexing all the time as well, so I have >10k U235 waiting to be turned into nukes. Bye-bye bites



(Long term plan is probably a light far-out perimiter wall backed by ion cannos)

Edit: I love nukes! I must have killed myself at least ten times initially, but now I have a nice cleaning routine of one or two long distance nukes and bots+flamethrower for the incoming biters from outside the blast radius that were aggrod. It's nice that if you're careful you can just launch a nuke at a base before triggering the agro. About 50 nukes later a good part of my new northern perimeter is cleared..

[Tev]

You know what I just researched on my death world? Nukes!

God, I'm just in the first quarter of the research and it takes FOREVER.

Rebuilding entire base to smaller bot-powered blocks. Fooling around with automatically disabled train stops for mining expansions. Loving the game.

[vanatteveldt]

You know what I just researched on my death world? Nukes!

God, I'm just in the first quarter of the research and it takes FOREVER.

Rebuilding entire base to smaller bot-powered blocks. Fooling around with automatically disabled train stops for mining expansions. Loving the game.

Before:



After:



Soo much more relaxed

I don't think this perimeter will hold though, it's only 8 lasers with every large pole and there's a bit of pollution seeping through still. Maybe I should have put some walls around as well, I was hoping the distance would limit the amount of attacks. I guess I will have to either stake out a perimeter even further from my pollution plume, or send up some ion cannons...

[Tev]

Oh god I can't wait, I want it too!

Tbh I'm currently fine with using the same blueprint (big pole + 8 turrets), just sorrounded with walls. Assuming your pollution cloud won't overflow it should be enough, maybe with 1-2 space laser bonuses (but when I'll finally get those? ). I'm fine with it currently (evo ~96?), but I am a bit cramped and sometimes service myself the most damaged clusters, and add some more where needed. But my pollution is overflowing everywhere . . . No roboports for defences yet, I have barely enough robots to make new mines robo-based.

[Mojo]

Iam now at hour 5 in a standard death world after completing the game on regular setting for the first time. So far it is brutal. constant attacks pretty early on and the need for Iron is quite strong. i just finished automating military science and will now have to clear out a oil field for blue science, which will be tough since there are a lot bitters between me and the oil field.At least my defenses are now up well enough so bitters cant just walk in my base.

[mtilsted]

II have tried it, and after something like 15-20 hours things were going ok. I had an effective laser defence and was thinking about starting the last research tier. And I got my tank and power armor and some other things.

But then I stopped, because there are far to many biter bases,

I was really unlucky with uranium, only got 30K in total within the area I could reach. And If I need more, I will need to kill about 100 bitter buildings. And Attacking that many bitters without access no nuclear tech is so boring, so I kinda stopped there.

I really liked the general pacing of research, buildings and base defence. But there are far to many bitter bases and that makes expansion to new resources take hours, just to clear them -(. But I think I might start work on a mod with where the purpose is that there should be the same amount of bitter attacks and bitter evolution as on death world, BUT the amount of bitter bases should not be much bigger then they are on standard settings, so you

I am still hoping for an expansion of factory after 1.0 where the combat is automated. Because combat is currently the only part of the game which can't be automated. Not to turn the game into an rts, but in the perfect would I would just define a "perimeter", and all my fighter robots would then walk/fly/drive around the perimeter, and kill all biters and bases they meet. That way expansion would be a question of producing enough robots to push back the biters.

[BlakeMW]

I'm on my thrird Deathworld actually a "Deathlier World" as I increased the biter size and expansion parameters to make the world even thicker with biters.

One thing I've found when starting a new Deathworld is that it's a good idea to quickly make some turrets and pre-secure resources in the starting area, especially oil and iron - it's easier to stop them setting up nests on the oil in the first place, than to drive them off the oil without having oil to make better weapons. So I pre-secured oil and iron all over the starting area with just enough turrets to wipe out expansion parties. Turrets and ammo are cheap, it's research that is expensive.

Early through mid game I mainly use flame turrets for defense, I found funnels to work better than mazes:



My experience with mazes is that biters find their death a frustrating experience and they sometimes lash out at the barriers. A funnel encourages the biters to line up for orderly incineration and execution - the basic idea is to always keep the shortest path to the flame turret open so the biters don't want to chew a new shortest path - and to make them come in single file so the gun or laser turrets can execute them individually and also to guarantee that following biters will be walking through a fire trail. This setup is extremely effective even against behemoths but I eventually transitioned to double layer laser turrets for new defensive borders purely out of laziness.

I did most the mid game clearing of nests with the Tank + Poison Capsules, just spam a lot of poison and everything dies, except the spawners which can be obliterated by the tank machine gun. Once behemoths evolved I was forced to transition to laser turret creeping for bulk clearing.

The map was unusually uranium starved but I still invested in a 160MW fuel-saving nuclear reactor once my usage was about 80MW, due to the low amount of uranium I continued to run my 80MW of coal, and added 40MW of solar. Being able to use all these power sources simultaneously was very helpful for the laser turrets. I now have plenty of uranium, and am building my second 480MW nuclear plant (not even a fuel saver, since I have enrichment now). I think though, that I was still overly-concerned about running out of uranium, even though it took me a long time to find any big patches, the few small patches I acquired provided way more than enough uranium. My inclination in a new game would probably be to go full nuclear regardless of uranium availability, and just focus on grabbing any small patches which are convenient. A fuel-saver design still seems worthwhile though.

This is the current state of my map:


I recently walled in a large area then cleared it (yes, in that order: plowing a railway + laser turrets through biter territory, completely enclosing an area of land, then clearing all the biters from within). You'll note I used a kind of "follow the coastline" approach.

For the most part I've walled the biters out of my pollution cloud with the exception being to the east. My factory uses productivity most extensively including prod3+beacon down as far as the iron and steel. However I religiously use eff1 modules in the mining drills, this really, really helps with lowering the number of attacks biters launch on the outposts. Not that it really matters with the comprehensive defensive wall but biters that aren't swarming the defenses, also aren't causing any damage to the defenses.

I'm halfway through researching the Nuclear Bomb, something I've been putting off due to its extreme cost.

[Valrandir]

I started with DeathWorld preset, without changing anythings.

First, I used some strategically placed gray ammo turrets,
Then I rushed to red/green/military science.
With this now had upgrades turrets with upgraded red ammo, with huge damage and rof bonus.

Then I walled a huge area. Two rows of walls, one row of gun turrets (no space between turrets), one transport belt with red ammo.
Then I cleared all the biters inside the walls, using gun turret creep and jeep run by.

Now with a huge secured area, I went to blue science, trains, a thousand of each type of bots, and further upgraded turrets with blue science research.

With this my next step is to hugely expand my walls, this time with gun turrets and flameturrets, and start a much bigger smelting area to feed my new base.

Evolution has passed 0.9 a long time ago, but big biters are melting to my upgrades wall of gun turrets.

DeathWorld is resolved.