Stop Bragging about Playing on Death World!

[BlakeMW]

The tank takes some damage from the fire but it's a lot less than the enemies will do to it if I don't kill them with fire.

Enemies almost completely ignore a vehicle once you get out of it and almost exclusively target the player, so there's not terribly much point in using a vehicle as bait except when using a flamethrower turret and sitting inside the vehicle. If you have to get out of the Tank to burn the biters you may as well just draw them away a little then burn them, or burn them around the Tank: there's no advantage to making fire patches under the tank itself, and the flamethrower has a significantly larger splash radius than fire patches so you can easily splash everything surrounding the tank, applying the "on fire" debuff, while not creating any fire patches which burn the tank. Remember it takes only the barest splash to set fire to the enemy which deals 100dps, even maximally intensified fire patches deal only 78dps to enemies standing in them and fire patches can't even set fire to enemies, only direct splash can do that. Fire patches are really only useful for burning down structures.


On the topic of Videos, I made a couple of Videos of my Deathworld strategies, both videos have all tech unlocked which don't require High Tech or Production science, and an evo factor of 0.85:

Poison Tank: https://youtu.be/zF-lXt4zMbU
Power Armor + Flamethrower: https://youtu.be/lplkrD-7rcI

It should be noted that the Tank strategy is much better at this tech level, in particular, the Tank strategy can continue unabated until running out of repair packs or ammo or inducing the evolution of Behemoths. With the flamethrower, I had to stop once the batteries were drained - though still wiped out a lot of spawners and it should be very clear that endurance not firepower is the problem. It becomes a lot better with Power Armor II and fusion reactor, though still IMO not as good as Tank with Personal laser defense.

[eradicator]

Seein that you're going into numeric analysis now i've made a small mod that shows (final) damage numbers in-game. For frame-by-frame analysis you'll probably want to set the time-to-live for the numbers to one tick via mod options.

showdamage.jpg (421.29 KiB) Viewed 3510 times

[Edit: As it was requested i herby dedicate this mod to the public domain under CC0.]

er-show-damage_0.0.1.zip

(2.28 KiB) Downloaded 128 times

[thereaverofdarkness]

Thing is, the submachine gun _isn't_ as strong at that point. Even with uranium ammo it does about 20% less DPS vs spawners than the shotgun, and it eats ammo like candy, 4-5 times faster,

Did you take into account the spawner's armor? Even so, you're not counting the missed pellets, or the pellets that hit the enemies between you and the spawner. And that's at BEST a 25% damage increase. The ammo isn't much of a concern; even the submachinegun is cheap to feed.

The point of the video, which I rather criminally failed to bother just saying, my apologies, was simply that you don't have to do any of the things you complain of being forced to do.

But you were doing this at a considerably higher tech level than when I am being forced to enter combat. I set my world up with, and I believe I have mentioned this, ensuring that I have to move past the starting area to get oil. Despite having the maximum possible distance between nests, I nonetheless am generally unable to set up a single expansion outside of the starting area without clearing 100+ spawners. If I don't clear any, I'm either setting up a tiny outpost or I'm lining the walls with so many turrets I might as well just turret creep the whole nest.

eradicator was right when he said your evolution factor is way too low for your tech level. I play with far less pollution than I've ever seen anyone else play with, yet I've always been dealing with big biters long before I get nuclear power, let alone high tech science and power armor mk 2.

I also should apologize. I didn't mean that my strategy was the only way. I meant it was the only effective way at that tech level without doing turret creep. And actually I was referring less to any specific tactic and more to the basic concept that I must find a way to deal exceedingly high damage constantly, thus forcing my strategies into tiny margins and removing most combat strategies and technologies from the drawing board.

[quyxkh]

Did you take into account the spawner's armor? Even so, you're not counting the missed pellets, or the pellets that hit the enemies between you and the spawner. And that's at BEST a 25% damage increase. The ammo isn't much of a concern; even the submachinegun is cheap to feed.

I've always been dealing with big biters long before I get nuclear power, let alone high tech science and power armor mk 2.

As I said, I shouldn't have put the green ammo in that setup, you can sub in the red ammo and get the same result. Really. The rest of it, pa2/fusion/blue shells, la la, costs surprisingly little to research. I'd forgotten how much the armor reactors cost to _build_, though.

I did the damage math just to put a number to the difference in kill rate. Switch to the SMG against spawners, you slow down, even with green ammo. Check back and you'll see I did put the -2 in, not sure what the 15% applies to but it either cancels out or nearly so, the ratio works out to about 20% difference either way and that matches my experience. The production cost isn't so much the concern with the ammo, it's the inventory slots. Run out of ammo, you have to go home. Lose the blue shells, you go home much quicker.

I set my world up with, and I believe I have mentioned this, ensuring that I have to move past the starting area to get oil.

I did miss that. I focused instead on the voluntary choice of vlf bases.

Despite having the maximum possible distance between nests,

Are you talking about the vlf here? I don't think it works out that way, I think it _starts_ that way, but having that big empty distance between camps means it's more likely expansion groups will find a spawning point between the (much larger) existing camps...

I didn't mean that my strategy was the only way. I meant it was the only effective way at that tech level without doing turret creep. And actually I was referring less to any specific tactic and more to the basic concept that I must find a way to deal exceedingly high damage constantly, thus forcing my strategies into tiny margins and removing most combat strategies and technologies from the drawing board.

Well, BlakeMW's poison-tanks vid shows the best way I've ever seen to clear camps at low tech, by far, what do you make of that? And as I said, the only reason you're having to deal with such a relentlessly threatening landscape is, you literally asked for it. It seems to me the wonder isn't that you're backed into a tight corner with few options, the wonder is that corner's still there at all. I say kudos to the devs for making even the most extreme options playable.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Are you talking about the vlf here? I don't think it works out that way, I think it _starts_ that way, but having that big empty distance between camps means it's more likely expansion groups will find a spawning point between the (much larger) existing camps...

It remains constant after you reach a certain distance from the origin. It's not much more than with default frequency, but it's more, and it just marginally makes it possible to escape the starting area without killing spawners--although I can only take a peek at the world and not really touch it until I do combat. I turned down the expansion rate so that hasn't been a huge issue.

Well, BlakeMW's poison-tanks vid shows the best way I've ever seen to clear camps at low tech, by far, what do you make of that? And as I said, the only reason you're having to deal with such a relentlessly threatening landscape is, you literally asked for it. It seems to me the wonder isn't that you're backed into a tight corner with few options, the wonder is that corner's still there at all. I say kudos to the devs for making even the most extreme options playable.

I just watched the video and I'll say it's far more effective than I expected. I didn't know you could layer poison to deal damage faster. My rudimentary tests seemed to suggest the opposite.

I put myself in that situation trying to find some middle ground between having to play most of the game completely safe in the starting area, versus having to be forced to live immediately adjacent to nests. I want to be able to explore and find clearings, rather than having to destroy spawners to go outside the starting area. That is essentially not possible, and that's what frustrates me.