So i have an issue with the alien things

[Malaras]

I'm out of raw iron ore and they are blocking me from setting up more production they seem to spawn really fast, And there (bases) have a ton of hps. So what i'm i suppose to do?

Thanks,

[tralala]

Fight!

[Malaras]

Fight!

lol, I figured that much. But my turrets and myself don't seem like we can do the job. I'm still on my first game and new to it so was just wanting some options. I'd imagine i probably need to do more research, at-least that's the way its looking.

[Sander Buruma]

Get a shotgun and sub-machine gun. Use the sub-machine gun to kill the initial wave of small biters with the machine gun and the shotgun to kill the spawners while keeping new biters in its line of fire.

[Bleda]

the spawners are impossible to kill with machine guns. you need a shotgun or a flamethrower for that. also get some capsules. poison capsules are good against worms (hit and run).

another strategy that works for small bases with just one spawner is driving in with a car, right through the spawner. Then finish off the biters while you drive away. but be careful, running over one spawner is just as much damage as a car can handle. you will need repair packs.

have fun!

[aviantdosda]

you can always turret creep if you're behind upgrades and production.

[Malaras]

Well having horrid luck or something, made a shotgun made some turrets. But there are allot of medium alien things. 3 come and wipe out my turrets then me have reloaded game at-least 50 times now
Guess not grasping the fighting aspect yet. Sadly.

[Jobeo]

Build walls around the turrets and they won't be so easy to wipeout.

[DaveMcW]

Gun turrets don't beat medium biters. Unless you have a huge numbers advantage.

Generally you want to fight small biters with gun turrets, medium biters with laser turrets, and large biters with destroyer bots.

[tralala]

Do you have laser turrets? If yes turret-creep with some walls takes some time but is easy to pull off. Just wire up to the base - place walls and turrets before the biter attack and advance gradually your setup into the spawners.

If you don't have laser turrets (you should get some) get a ton of poison capsules. Their damage stacks and enough of them kill medium biters within seconds which gives you enough time to shotgun down the spawners. But beware poisened areas as you'll loose hp in these areas yourself.

If you can drive the car (I can't) there are very elegant ways to do it. Drive by and shoot the spawners, retreat to your (hopefully) fortified base to get rid of biter hoards, repeat. I tried the bulldozing of spawners with the car. That works but you slow down and have to get away fast since after your collision the car is pretty damaged.

If you have already researched distractor capsules you can use a combo of posion and distractor capsules which is very effective and you can focus on running away from the biters while the bots do the work (protect the bots with clous of poison around them.

[Acet]

If the spawners are not in the trees and you have enough free space around, you can use a car to do a sort of drive by shooting of the spawners with your shotgun.

Just go around in circles and at the point nearest to the spawners fire the shotgun at them. Focus on the spawners as much as possible and just let the bitters run around in circles trying to catch you.

Note that once in a while you'll have to go away from the spawner area and just run around in circles while shooting back at the horde which will by then be pursuing you. It's probably a good idea to have a fortified island with guns in this area so as to speed up the process.

The more spawners you take down the fewer bitters and the less the time you spend just running around in circles getting rid of the bitters.

Keep in mind the following:
- The shotgun fires in the direction of your mouse pointer
- You'll need to do a lot of repairing of your car in between incursions into the spawner area
- You should bring at least 100 shotgun shells you you, maybe more. In fact, it's a pretty good idea to automate production of ammunition.

One more thing: if there are several medium or large worms in that nest you'll probably want to have rockets and at least distractor capsules before your try and clear that place up.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

What kind of militaristic research have you done?

I think yiur best course of action is to get as close as possible, then create a wall of walls thrn turrets.
Once you have that, the typical poke with the shotgun strategy works good against around 2 to 4 spawners. (How many spawners are there?)
If you dont have many spawners to deal with, run in and fire a few shots directly at the spawner and pull back to your wall, a turtle aproach when you dont have so much research or resources is a safe strategy.

[DarkenDragon]

hummm seems like everyone is missing the point of this topic,

he said hes out of raw iron. meaning hes limited on the items he can make

at this point I would say your boned and you should restart. there should be no point in the game where you are trapped without any raw iron. the reason being is that all military offensive items require iron of some sort. and if your out of iron, your pretty much going to starve to death basically.

always plan out where your getting your iron and build up military evenly with production, never just focus on 1 or the other otherwise you'll run into these problems. you should be researching each evenly and keeping up.

also do not over build. i've seen this problem happen so much. people blindly building things unnecessarily. only build as much as you need otherwise you'll just keep stock piling items that will never get used. and if they are not getting used then you just wasted those raw resources which could have been used for something else. Also if you go into your boxes, you can limit how much product gets put into it by hitting the X button inside the box and clicking a square in the box, once all the non red spaces are filled, inserters and mines will stop putting product into it, (though you can put items into the red spots manually yourself)

so for your next play through you'll want to plan out what you need and only make those items. this will help prevent wasting those resources.

[Malaras]

I have plenty of iron still made up into sheets and what not stored. And found some more iron that's easier to get to for the time being. Researching laser at the moment to get military caught up. Been just doing production and storage mostly. Thanks for all the ideas/ input.

[therapist]

you need to skip producing ammunition for gun turrets. rushing your research to solar panels and laser turrets means youll have a cost efficient way of dealing with the biters.

let the biters wash up against your laser turret defense until you can get some powered armor 2, load up 6 exoskeletons, 2 batteries, 2 reactors, and a couple lvl 2 energy shields. Produce piercing shotgun shells and start attacking bases.

With 6 exo's in your power suit 2 you will be able to fire while walking backwards (forget the car, it just gets in the way) and easily kill giant biter hoardes. Let the lvl 3 biters get close to you before firing your shotgun, with full upgrades, 3 shots will kill a large blue biter but you have to let them get danger close so they absorb the whole spread.

For large biter bases, you can add some capsules if you like, (i never use them personally) just run into the base, kill the spawners first, then run out and recharge. run in and kill a few worms, run out and recharge. Don't let your shields drop all the way down and your armor won't even lose durability. I usually get to this point before I start looking into trains, flying robots, rockets, large mod-chip producing factories, or any of the other fun stuff.

If you really did iron starve yourself you're boned. Every bit of iron that went into bullets or capsules and not laser defense was a waste, concentrate on the asset light defense strategy until you have the fire-power to freely aquire the assets you need to move on with the final tiers of the game. Hope this helps.

[Khyron]

This thread contains 100% pure feedback for developers and I hope they're taking note!

1. The player should be coerced in to learning the basics of combat before evolution gets out of hand. This should be a consideration for the map generator and for the spawner-settler logic.
2. Learning how to be good at combat requires save-scumming. Many other games at the moment are roguelike and save-scumming is discouraged. This should be a consideration for balance testing. eg: force the player in to combat early and frequently, but in fights they can manage, then slowly escalate the threat.

Currently the game gives you "enough rope" (to hang yourself) in a few ways. Personally I find that fun, avoiding those strategic traps, but the majority of casual gamers will perish.

Incidentally, in an ideal game this would be the difference between difficulty settings!

[therapist]

This thread contains 100% pure feedback for developers and I hope they're taking note!

1. The player should be coerced in to learning the basics of combat before evolution gets out of hand. This should be a consideration for the map generator and for the spawner-settler logic.
2. Learning how to be good at combat requires save-scumming. Many other games at the moment are roguelike and save-scumming is discouraged. This should be a consideration for balance testing. eg: force the player in to combat early and frequently, but in fights they can manage, then slowly escalate the threat.

Currently the game gives you "enough rope" (to hang yourself) in a few ways. Personally I find that fun, avoiding those strategic traps, but the majority of casual gamers will perish.

Incidentally, in an ideal game this would be the difference between difficulty settings!

I totally agree, it is so tempting to construct your way into pollution oblivion before getting defenses up first.

I don't know how many games I spent when I was still new, making a giant square walled base with gun turrets all the way around, and then feeding them ammunition with a belt and robotic arm for each turret. Looking back on those bases makes me smile and laugh at what a naive fool i was. Seriously, i had a level 2 belt FILLED with AP ammunition around my ENTIRE base. The resources I wasted just to fight biters could have taken me to endgame rocket defense three times.

[Kazuar]

I don't agree with every sentiment here; I had made very good experience with submachineguns (in the early game, that is). The important point is: don't ever bother with regular ammo; try to go straight for piercing rounds magazines. Those deal 2.5 times the base damage, or, in less 'mathy' terms, are so incredeibly powerful that you can just walk into an enemy base (with up to 5 spawners), hit spacebar, then release spacebar once everything is killed. Depending on opposition and size of the base, calculate around 70 to 200 magazines for that.

Of course, this works in the early game; medium biters are a hard counter to gun turrets and the smg, and you don't want to mess with worms with that setup. This also means that, once medium biters become regular, every magazine of gun ammo (regular or piercing) effectively turns into industrial waste.

Still, in my experience, gun turret clusters (of 12 to 30 guns) loaded with piercing rounds can fend of medium biters, if walled (deploy them with two tiles of thickness: biters can bite 'over' a single tile of walls), until the next evolutionary step occurs, at which point you just die if you're still on gun turrets. And yes, relying on this as your defense will eat through your resources very quickly.

FYI, the main problem with the problem with the larger biters is that, if your damage type is 'physical' they just straight-up ignore a huge portion of the damage they receive. If you feel spoiler-resistant and interested, check these two wiki articles: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... Resistance and https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... le=Enemies


Of course, this is all theoretical for your situation, OP. It's difficult to give quality hints without good knowledge of the situation (map layout, completed research, size and number of enemy bases, frequency and size of enemy attacks, and so on), but, if you can access oil reserves, you might want to funnel as much of your iron as possible into the following techs:

Oil processing
Sulphur processing
Batteries
Optics
Lasers
Laser Turrets

Advanced oil prossecing & fluid management are recommended, but expensive, and can be postponed until your situation is a bit safer.
At first glance, the laser turrets don't seem to be that much more powerful (I remember my first thought while reading their stats was "how useless", but I was extremly wrong ), but they actually are an adequate, if not overpowered, base defense until the late game.

let the biters wash up against your laser turret defense until you can get some powered armor 2, load up 6 exoskeletons, 2 batteries, 2 reactors, and a couple lvl 2 energy shields. Produce piercing shotgun shells and start attacking bases.

That is an end-game example on how to deal with the enemy, and works very well, but can't even be researched without killing lots of enemy bases first.
I even dare to say that, if you survive the game to the point those technologies are researched, you don't need pointers on how to deal with biters anymore (just try and count how many purple beakers are consumed for the necessary techs, and their prerequisite techs, and how many artifacts you need for that in addition to those just to build the power armor mk2 plus the reactors).

The combat shotgun, along with piercing rounds, are obtainable much sooner than the rest, and works very well on it's own (with modular armor or power armor mk1), despite its damage type, on account of its huge base damage. Heck, if the OP can get the combat shotgun before even larger enemies appear, that might very well be an alternative to laser turrets, until more iron is secured.

This thread contains 100% pure feedback for developers and I hope they're taking note!

1. The player should be coerced in to learning the basics of combat before evolution gets out of hand. This should be a consideration for the map generator and for the spawner-settler logic.
2. Learning how to be good at combat requires save-scumming. Many other games at the moment are roguelike and save-scumming is discouraged. This should be a consideration for balance testing. eg: force the player in to combat early and frequently, but in fights they can manage, then slowly escalate the threat.

Currently the game gives you "enough rope" (to hang yourself) in a few ways. Personally I find that fun, avoiding those strategic traps, but the majority of casual gamers will perish.

Incidentally, in an ideal game this would be the difference between difficulty settings!

I'd like to add to this and point to X-COM:EU and it's tangible differences in difficulty between 'normal' and 'classic', as an examle for "an ideal game", even though its genre is completly different. Combat balance is very rudimentary right now, but I expect this to become a much smoother experience once the "fight revisit" on the roadmap happens (currently planned for 0.12).

(and yes, items on a developers roadmap just magically 'happen'! Don't try and tell me otherwise )


[P.S.: Wow, that post got out of hand. Sorry for the wall of text!]

[therapist]

Power armor 2 is def end game tech, but I cant recommend enough using laser turrets instead of investing in gun turrets, AP rounds, Shooting Speed, Damage upgrades, and all that mess. Solar panels (plus boilers not night time), Laser Turrets, and Shotgun let you skip alot of research that you can spend elsewhere. You don't even need a massive battery array if you keep the old steam setup for powering the turrets at night.

I did skip one important thing that you bring up though, you do need to kill biter bases while the game is just starting out and the biters are weak. I usually do this while giving a small factory time to work, as massive speedy over-production often means massive over-pollution problems. I think someone said it best when they said that you have to drive your car around in a circle firing at the biter bases. If they have many large worms defending, skip to the next biter base until you can afford some shotgun with AP or a few capsules. Laser turret creep is still a viable option in an emergency (massize biter base pops up close to your main production or smelting areas) but you will probably need repair bots to do a proper turret creep on a large base without losing too many turrets.

[Kazuar]

Power armor 2 is def end game tech, but I cant recommend enough using laser turrets instead of investing in gun turrets, AP rounds, Shooting Speed, Damage upgrades, and all that mess.

Yes, generally, laser turrets are much, much better, no doubt. My tangent about big-ish clusters of gun turrets was more aimed towards the OPs current situation; if you find yourself overwhelmed by medium biters, with a bunch of gun turrets at hand already, depleting reserves of iron, and a bit of research away from laser turrets, one can try to make a stand with gun turrets, and try to survive just long enough to get 'em lasers. In my humble opinion, that's more fun then just restarting, but it comes down to taste; I'm the kind of player who finds desperate, last stands fun, even when ultimatly overwhelmed.

And yes, experienced players can, and often will, skip gun turrets completly and go straight for lasers. I found one key to doing this to be...

[...]kill biter bases while the game is just starting out and the biters are weak

Again, it comes down to taste; using smg's with AP rounds, both of which are prerequisite (tech-wise) to AP-shell combat shotguns, one can just swipe the own surrounding area clean from enemies, so that "massive over-pollution" ceases to be the problem.
(Yet again, I'm the kind of player who doesn't see the point of reducing pollution; just build more lasers. Lasers fix everything. If they don't, you didn't build enough of them. And I' even ignoring (laser) turret creep, which I personally find boring. To each his own )

[Edit: Completed posting after accidently hitting 'submit' instead of 'preview']