Attacking biters with turrets makes all weapons pointless

[Oktokolo]

Lots of alien nests and worms in sight and uranium nowhere to be found.

Try the flame thrower. I don't like it, but it's seriously op - so might help you remove that damn bitters from your property quickly.

[mrvn]

Lots of alien nests and worms in sight and uranium nowhere to be found.

Try the flame thrower. I don't like it, but it's seriously op - so might help you remove that damn bitters from your property quickly.

I use that in my player or tanks. Didn't have much success with it in turrets. When you are lacking behind the evolution curve and are constantly attacked using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves (which I didn't have) and when I tried the flame thrower burned down my own stuff. Guess it takes some experimenting and planning to get flame thrower turrets right. In the game where I had the problems I ended up catching some fish, building some red ammo and grenades and clearing some nest around my base to get breathing room. It was touch and go for a while. Since then I've learned to never let it get that bad but that kind of makes aliens boring.

[Oktokolo]

When you are lacking behind the evolution curve and are constantly attacked using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves (which I didn't have) and when I tried the flame thrower burned down my own stuff. Guess it takes some experimenting and planning to get flame thrower turrets right.

When it comes to flame turrets, the golden rule is: Build them so that no structures are in their range. They do not harm walls. Build dragon's teeth if bitters reach your walls too fast and you have enough stone to spare. Of course you need oil for them. But you can use oil liquification to get oil from coal and after switching to solid or even rocket fuel, there should be plenty of coal to "burn".

Since then I've learned to never let it get that bad but that kind of makes aliens boring.

The aliens are not the interesting part of the game. Factorio is not a shooter. You are expected to manage them from the start so you are always some steps ahead of their evolution. You are expected to be stronger than them because of your superior technology. The natives are only there to attach a price tag to expansion and a time-component to the overall gameplay. Without them, expanding is boringly cheap and there would be no incentive to not idle around in the stone age forever.
So if bitters are boring, you did it right. You can concentrate on optimizing your factory and expansion then.

[Aeternus]

To be honest, with Artillery and Turrets now, there's no real reason to build tanks anymore. Drive a 4 wagon artillery train to your desired expansion zone, protect it with a few turrets and just wait as the death-from-above does it's work. Added advantage is the artil targeting and revealing any other biter bases in the area, so you're never caught offguard while building an expansion.

[fiery_salmon]

using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves

afaik oil usage of turrets is absurdly low

[dood]

To be honest, with Artillery and Turrets now, there's no real reason to build tanks anymore.

It's a midgame kind of thing, obviously.
No point in carrying around a much slower tank you also have to fuel up that only serves to double machinegun damage if you have 10 nukes in your pants and run as fast as a train without those awful tank controls or inertia either.

[herkalurk]

I'd like a heavy turret the fires the tank cannon shells. Even at the rate of the tank, it would still be a good later game defense gun. It's not a huge range like the artillery, but would be nice to mix those into my defense architecture.

[thereaverofdarkness]

using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves

afaik oil usage of turrets is absurdly low

It is. You'll lose more oil changing your mind about where the pipe should go than you will to the turrets' usage. If you make a system of flamethrower turrets, fill their pipe line once and then disconnect it from your oil system, you might never have to reconnect it again. There was actually somebody who was convinced the flamethrower turrets were firing for free because he had disconnected one from its oil and it ran for several minutes while still showing itself at 100% full. The devs discovered it was because the turret had 2 reservoirs and only one was showing on the tooltip while the other was draining first. You can now see both, but it doesn't change the fact that you can run a flame turret nonstop for whole minutes after it has been disconnected. You think I'm kidding.

[herkalurk]

using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves

afaik oil usage of turrets is absurdly low

It is. You'll lose more oil changing your mind about where the pipe should go than you will to the turrets' usage. If you make a system of flamethrower turrets, fill their pipe line once and then disconnect it from your oil system, you might never have to reconnect it again. There was actually somebody who was convinced the flamethrower turrets were firing for free because he had disconnected one from its oil and it ran for several minutes while still showing itself at 100% full. The devs discovered it was because the turret had 2 reservoirs and only one was showing on the tooltip while the other was draining first. You can now see both, but it doesn't change the fact that you can run a flame turret nonstop for whole minutes after it has been disconnected. You think I'm kidding.

The usage is ridiculously low. I had a turret defense around an oil processing outpost and I learned about the bonus to light oil. So I re routed a light oil line to the turrets and just left the crude oil in the pipes. There are still some turrets that have over 100 crude oil waiting to be used up and refilled with light oil.

[4xel]

What about turret construction time?

You drop the turret and it takes anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes before being effective. Construction is automatic, it does not take any of your time, it is just a delay.

Turret are still just as effective as a defense but more tedious to creep with. It surprises me to have never seen it being suggested, construction time is how every strong defensive structures are balanced in RTS (along with cost, but what makes them defensive rather than offensive and OP is time).


Construction time and similar features (like ennemy force able to deconstruct your buildings very quickely in the first few seconds you drop them) would also be a nice feature for PvP.

[BlakeMW]

It surprises me to have never seen it being suggested,

It's been suggested lots of times.

But turret creeping isn't considered a problem these days. The change which made regular bullets deal 5 damage instead of 2 and took away turret's damage multiplier means you can just go SMG down nests (when bullets dealt 2 damage and spawners had 2 physical resist that was a non-starter, also player hitpoints was a lot lower back then), also the Car MG has longer range and shoots faster so it's good at taking on larger nests. Once you have poison capsules and the Tank - which now does not take that much more research than laser turrets - you can easily cut a swathe of destruction through even very strong nests. And then in the late game there is artillery for somewhat automated nest removal and nukes for very rapid nest removal.

Turret Creeping is still viable but it's not like "How am I going to kill these nests without turrets?!", turrets are just one of the options you can use if you want. And that's fine.

[CJ5Boss]

Turret creeping is a long method of attacking a biter base, in my opinion.
I like to use the weapons as a combat experiment; a friend will go around diverting with a tank while I run around using a Combat Shotgun and stuff. I think the hand-weapons are just a fun way to get in some ground combat.

[Bunchie]

oof dident think some body had the same idea of killing natives bases.

[wahming]

using the flame thrower turret would require serious oil reserves

afaik oil usage of turrets is absurdly low

It is. You'll lose more oil changing your mind about where the pipe should go than you will to the turrets' usage. If you make a system of flamethrower turrets, fill their pipe line once and then disconnect it from your oil system, you might never have to reconnect it again. There was actually somebody who was convinced the flamethrower turrets were firing for free because he had disconnected one from its oil and it ran for several minutes while still showing itself at 100% full. The devs discovered it was because the turret had 2 reservoirs and only one was showing on the tooltip while the other was draining first. You can now see both, but it doesn't change the fact that you can run a flame turret nonstop for whole minutes after it has been disconnected. You think I'm kidding.

Ha! Nice to see somebody remembers that bug I found in 0.16.

[Cribbit]

I used to be very anti-turret creep, but after attacking more bases in other ways I don't think it's a big deal at all.

I think people don't realize that pretty much all weapons in the game are rather OP. Until you face larges, you can clear bases with just grenades and explosive rockets, and faster - approx same cost - as gun turret creep. By the time larges show up you should have personal laser defense, tanks, atomic ammo, capsules, etc.

What people forget about turret creep is that the bases are still constantly spawning biters and you need to either do crazy micro have have a ton of ammo to place many turrets. A rocket launcher can hit from way out of range.

Turrets are useful as a camp to fall back to and cover you but aren't that useful in the direct assault. And a smart mix of grenades to clear smalls, SMGs to efficiently clear mediums is just as effective to clear waves coming after you.

[Koub]

I think people don't realize that pretty much all weapons in the game are rather OP.

Also people don't realize that this thread has been running for over 5 years, during which the game has changed a LOT.

[Honktown]

I've been playing some mods, since the main-game chip scaling gets boring after the first or second time, and un-modded or non-threatening enemies make the game entirely factory focused... which is the exact same thing over and over.

Anything that increases biter threat usually makes the early and mid-game take much, much longer. There's still the aspect that only a few things like laser turrets make enemies a joke. In a game or mod where you're prevented from expanding aggressively, lasers are a lot more difficult to reach and use. I've been playing with 'advanced' boilers, which produce more energy and are a bit more efficient than base boilers. Downside? Pollution. Lots of it. Also makes solar look even less appealing when you don't have much space and/or would have to switch over 10s of megawatts. Unfortunately in general there's only three defensive methods in the game: bullets (don't scale), flame turrets (need oil and you take guaranteed damage because they can't track), and laser turrets (solve the game, although there's the issue of power and being behind oil).

I've been playing Warptorio2 (and an expansion mod) and it makes the game a lot more strategic. I'm still using some cheapy mods (Dark Matter Replicators .17 fix, The Ruins Mod, and Reverse Factory), but in terms of gameplay, since your 'base' warps from map to map, and you only have so much room to work with, you can't just spam buildings and scale indefinitely. Enemies reset evolution every time (mostly, minus a time or worlds-jumped factor) and get stronger the longer you stick around on a map. They also constantly attack your main "platform" if there's a single dang thing there. I don't feel the least bit bad for using mods that make the defense part tolerable. Still plan to play a game with normal settings (also trying out a randomizer mod - makes things interesting).

[ssilk]

It is already planned (if not coded) that we cannot built anything near to the villages.

AAI mod already has it. Although the result is bad with construction robots. They simply palce the items on the ground instead of building them.

What are your plans there? What happens when a ghost is to near a village?

Uh, that was a very old post. And did come from a comment from a dev, who mentioned that. For me it seems to be clear, that they experimented with this, but didn’t bring it into vanilla. Most probably, because it didn’t work as expected.

Never estimate theoretical discussions like this to be more useful than practical tests.

[Mylon]

I've been playing Warptorio2 (and an expansion mod) and it makes the game a lot more strategic.

Warptorio adds a ton of pollution as part of the scenario. Almost everything else about your experience means nothing outside of Warptorio because the scenario is designed to have oppressive biters.

[Honktown]

I've been playing Warptorio2 (and an expansion mod) and it makes the game a lot more strategic.

Warptorio adds a ton of pollution as part of the scenario. Almost everything else about your experience means nothing outside of Warptorio because the scenario is designed to have oppressive biters.

The difference is in a normal game biters are a joke. I regularly turn them up 2-4x or higher just so they are more than mosquito bites. There's different ways to make biters difficult, which have different impacts. Some good some bad.