Attacking biters with turrets makes all weapons pointless

[Dasius]

How about a new type of worm that has long range, goes for turrets firsts and does lots of damage but cant hit a moving target to save it's life? This wouldn't make it harder for the player to fight but would take out turrets from long range preventing the turret creep. They could have high HP too as they wont be able to hit the player (unless you decide to lie down for a snooze) so they don't need to be destroyed until you mop everything up which makes rushing them and then using turrets harder.

[Teurlinx]

How about a new type of worm that has long range, goes for turrets firsts and does lots of damage but cant hit a moving target to save it's life? This wouldn't make it harder for the player to fight but would take out turrets from long range preventing the turret creep. They could have high HP too as they wont be able to hit the player (unless you decide to lie down for a snooze) so they don't need to be destroyed until you mop everything up which makes rushing them and then using turrets harder.

Certainly another solution.

[tralala]

Give turrets an "initialisation" timer that prevents them from firing for 10 seconds after they've been built.

I think that would help. I'm unsure whether one should disable the turret creep completely by making it impossible to place turrets near bases, but an initialisation time would make it harder (not impossible though).
Another option is to limit the amout a single pole can power. If a small pole can power not more than 5MW it would add another challenge to tower creep. If you limit the amount of power which can be transferred through a single line turret creep becomes really tedious (wiring up three different cable routes to spawner nests is no fun).

[hipscumbag]

Give turrets an "initialisation" timer that prevents them from firing for 10 seconds after they've been built.

I think that would help. I'm unsure whether one should disable the turret creep completely by making it impossible to place turrets near bases, but an initialisation time would make it harder (not impossible though).
Another option is to limit the amout a single pole can power. If a small pole can power not more than 5MW it would add another challenge to tower creep. If you limit the amount of power which can be transferred through a single line turret creep becomes really tedious (wiring up three different cable routes to spawner nests is no fun).

I'm generally against the idea of "balancing by tedium" -- leaving turret creep as the most effective strategy, but making it more tedious and less fun, doesn't solve the "problem" that it's still the most surefire solution. Attacking biter nests is already a tremendous hassle. I certainly wouldn't want to see it made more aggravating.

[Phy]

Lets us automate the alien killing process somehow, then go about nerfing the "cheese" tactics.

[samthesuper]

with this armor attachments, i dont even need sentries. unless there are more than 5 biter spawners. i just lure them away from their base to my little outpost outside of the factory
and then use my SMG on spawners.

[Khyron]

Attacking biter bases by turret creep is a painfully slow process*, even with builder drones and blueprints. Still, as someone above said, it's sure-fire. No risk. So people will do it.

Preventing buildings being placed near spawners is... ugh... cheese solution.

I'd rather see other changes, like worms outrange laser turrets, but rocket launcher outranges worms. Or better still, the closer you build to a nest, the more it aggravates all alien spawners and they start to send waves at all your bases (overwhelm the player's power grid).

Another change I think might be good to look at is making laser turrets big, slow firing things like an Obelisk of Light. Very good against the strong biters but too slow against swarms of smaller biters. Massively increase laser turret build cost and power consumption cost and building footprint. This would also create a role for regular bullet turrets. But regular turrets also need some other work to make sure they don't consume iron and copper so quickly.

*It's much faster to use the shotgun or rocket launcher and drones. Like 50 times faster. I suspect most people get turned off drones because they don't realise the distractor and destroyer capsules are actually a 5 pack of drones, and once again they're consumable. You can wade in to very dense biter nests (clusters of 6 at max evolution factor) if you have 20+ destroyer drones following you. Add a few personal laser turrets to your suit to supplement the firepower from your drones.

[ysor123]

I had hives, which you could impossible kill with only turrets. Even if you have the research far and place 30 or 40 of turrets, the bitters just kill one after another, because the turrets can't deal with that amount of bitters. The hive was far from my start location and i could not kill it very long time, so it grow huge. And the bad thing was, they spawned about 80% only large bitters. The wave is so massive, you can't go through to destroy buildings and they keep spawning once other bitters leave the location and you are somewhat close by. After MK2 armor with 2 fusion reactors, 3 exo and many shields I'v managed to clear it (combat gun with piercing ammo and 100% research on them). But it was not easy too. Destroyed two buildings and run away with about 300 bitters! .. clear them and repeat.. took about a hour to clear all of them. Kind of imbalanced too, if you have to hit run like that stupid. But lasers... wouldn't even have a close chance.

But I agree with Zequez. It is a bit stupid if you have to use those tactics, because the actual weapon are so useless at that point. Takes one out of immersion, because it is unrealistic. Who would attack alien hives that way? Building poles and turrets ...

[KDR_11k]

Maybe worms could be made more interesting in general by making their attacks avoidable instead of guaranteed hits. That would also allow them to be nastier vs turrets without turning biter bases into an instant death zone for players. Or make biters prioritize taking out power lines...

For me an attack on a normal biter base (5-15 spawners) consists of carpet-bombing the worms with toxin capsules, shotgunning the spawners and then deploying the drones and cleaning up (only newly spawned biters will target drones so removing all spawners before deploying drones makes the drones live WAAAAAAAAY longer). Slow capsules keep the biters away from me. Laser defenses (swap for discharge on large crowds) and the occasional shotgun blast wear away on the biters, in bad cases I'll start blasting the crowd with explosive rockets.

[Steelwolf12]

Well you cant use that tactic any more. The piercing shot guns rounds are now slugs so no more burst effect and when you got spawners deploying large bitters faster than you can kill them your toast. Ive been trying to expand for the last 2 hours and can't do it. got over 100 laser turrets going, with triple walls, i might add, and their getting torn to shreds. I can hardly get close enough to the damn spawners to use rockets with out getting over run. Most spawn points on my map have gotten up to 20 spawners now and my pollution is almost nil and still getting big biters. To me spawn rates need to be dropped for large biters. only a little though, dont want to make it to easy.

[therapist]

Maybe the presence of human structures could cause a "biter spawner" to release some kind of corrosive cloud or spore cloud that moves towards the structures slowly, giving the player a small opportunity to pick up his structures and leave, or watch his structures melt into the ground.

I imagine the cloud would have no effect on the player or his vehicle, but maybe it could melt them as well if you really want to punish people who attempt to use the age old RTS style "turret creep".

[Calico]

Tower creep likely will not be possible after combat is redone (hopefully at 0.12). The Devs already stated that it's likely they will implement some "tainted land" like with the Zerg in SC2, making it impossible to creep close enough to just tower creep your way towards the nests (source: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... and#p19899)

Just another reminder before someone starts again that this would make Combat to hard: If you have trouble taking out nests (ANY SIZE really), try Distractor Bots + Power Armor MK I with 2 Exos+. You can deploy 60-90 Bots (3 each capsule) in about 20-30 secs while you run around the nest at a safe distance. You can easily take out even the largest Hives if you bring enough. 16-20 spawners, tightly packed together plus a dozen worms... 40-50 Distractor Capsules, even with only some basic research will take the nest out. It's really no rocket science to take out 15+ spawners and the biters spawned in about a minute. Is it costly? Sure, but resources are really not the problem, unless you play on VERY high difficultys.

OFC, combat is still very alpha and subject to change sometime in the future. Right now, it's dull with or without tower Creep.

[roman566]

Just another reminder before someone starts again that this would make Combat to hard: If you have trouble taking out nests (ANY SIZE really), try Distractor Bots + Power Armor MK I with 2 Exos+. You can deploy 60-90 Bots (3 each capsule) in about 20-30 secs while you run around the nest at a safe distance. You can easily take out even the largest Hives if you bring enough. 16-20 spawners, tightly packed together plus a dozen worms... 40-50 Distractor Capsules, even with only some basic research will take the nest out. It's really no rocket science to take out 15+ spawners and the biters spawned in about a minute. Is it costly? Sure, but resources are really not the problem, unless you play on VERY high difficultys.

Distractor bots and power armor is mid to late game technology, what about early game in high nest density worlds? Player has to be able to take out those as well. I think that 'turret spam prevention' should be based on the evolution factor, this way early game is not about getting bots ASAP and late game requires proper industry to get PA MKII rather than spamming turrets via construction bots.

[MisterSpock]

Atm: in some situation, the only chance to kill spawners is laser turrets.

[Fact_3011]

Why are laser turrets a big problem? Ok perhaps they are really a bit to strong. It is already a difficulty to get enough power and the laser turrets. In my opinion, sometimes turrets should still be the best option for combats sometimes, but more variation would be great. So I rather think, many other weapons are to weak. For example the flamethrower is just completely useless for me. It is not easy to get one, and then the shotgun is already much better. Same thing with almost all the other weapons. And the weapons should have a more specialized usage. Otherwise it could be impossible to give each of them an important use case.

However, many suggestions sounds ok for me but I really really hate the idea of an area which prevents building. I know that from other games. It is just so annoying often. Please don't add such a thing! There are enough other opportunities.

[Zourin]

I think the problem is with the inadequacy of regular turrets, which require routine resupply and are only effective against small biters, better than nothing for mediums, and completely inneffectual against large biters.

Laser turrets are tough to obtain, but once hooked up require zero maintenance (other than making sure you have enough accumulators to burn a swarm) and are fully effective against all incoming enemies.

And, as far as the OP goes, EVERYTHING makes weapons pointless. You have a gun, but it's a distraction, since you should be using Distractors and Devastators bots for offense, and laser turrets for defense.

I go so far as the submachine gun, and then generally stop weapons tech and push for lasers and bots. Bullet upgrades are a waste of time (and resources), as are munitions such as grenades, landmines, and flamethrowers. When you're dancing with a swarm, your handheld is useless.

Offensive towering is advantageous, but still a lot of work. I'd like to see better upgrades to gun turrets and player weapons so that the player can at least reasonably "remove threats" to himself, not just "defend and hold out" with power armor. Especially when faced with obscene respawn rates found in your average biter spawn camp.

[Marconos]

I think the problem is with the inadequacy of regular turrets, which require routine resupply and are only effective against small biters, better than nothing for mediums, and completely inneffectual against large biters.

I don't find this to be correct at all. I actually have virtually no laser turrets and running all gun turrets with ammo supplied (some areas zero laser turrets). They chew through larger biters like the don't exist. The only advantage I have found for lasers late game is they have a longer range but the damage output of the gun turrets is through the rough. I'm primarily using gun turrets as I don't use the OP solar panels so I can't afford to have 5k lasers around (keep running out of coal and I don't have enough oil to make the plastic / batteries I need).

People really need to get the top end ammo and see how it does.

1st level ammo, destroys small biters easily, very inefficient on mediums
2nd level ammos, destroy mediums easily, efficiencies against large
Level 5/6 damage on 2nd level ammo really owns up the large biters.

Top end lasers 11 dmg, 4 shooting speed
Top end guns 24.2 dmg, 10 shooting speed

So at a 50% damage reduction due to armor(I believe that is the level for large) ... guns do 12.1 dmg with a shooting speed of 10
Laser no damage reduction (I believe) .... lasers do 11 dmg with a shooting speed of 4

no taking into account the speed difference ... the lasers shoot 2/5 of the time as guns

Same time period ... lasers do 22 dmg, guns do 70.5 dmg

That's math, watching them kill things, large biters just evaporate at the walls.

[Zequez]

How about a new type of worm that has long range, goes for turrets firsts and does lots of damage but cant hit a moving target to save it's life? This wouldn't make it harder for the player to fight but would take out turrets from long range preventing the turret creep. They could have high HP too as they wont be able to hit the player (unless you decide to lie down for a snooze) so they don't need to be destroyed until you mop everything up which makes rushing them and then using turrets harder.

I like this idea. A slow-long-range worm that is easily avoided by the player, but can blow away buildings.

[MalContentFL]

I totally agree. But even smarter enemies would also help. very often they only need to destroy a single electric pole to disable all turrets, but they are just not smart enough.

Then again, they are conscious-less mutants who run around on 4 legs. Making them smarter is like making them human. Don't make the biters themselves smart. Create an overlord that controls broods of Biters that is the intelligent creature. That's how it is in Starcraft, and with all hive-minded creatures. They can't really make decisions by themselves, they have an Overlord commanding them through psychotic mind powers. A hive mind, like Ender's Game and the Zerg Swarm. Killing the overlord dumbs all the underlings. The different broods of Biters would fight each other, and you are just the person getting in their way. A colored band of skin, like in Starcraft, would tell which brood they belong to. Hence, Brood Wars!

[Ohlmann]

Actually, I would be much happier with them being like ant. In other word, not having a strange and artificial overlord, but having each being individually a bit smart, and the intelligence emerging from that.