Our 200-hours-base is overrunned - any ideas?

[Pascali]

Hello. We are playing since ~200 hours. We hade a huge pause. After the pause (so some updates between) our base is overrunned by the enemies. difficultylevel is normal.

Before the update the Laser-Towers fighted the creeps back. From time to time we driven over thier builidngs and they stopped attacking for while. But now they spit slime on our towers and they go down. They are more aggressive and stronger. And our research-tree is messed up.

We have sourrounded our base by laser-towers. We have normal towers, too but not enough ammo to feed them.

We have hundrets of granates, but only 20 of this attillery-bullets. We have not so many of the components to build them(7200 radars, 7200 dynamites, explosive tank bullets),

We have only 728 of steel and 7200 of plastic and as sais 7200 of dynamite. That´s what you need or the attilery-bullets.

We have 7200 normal grantes. We have tanks and 7200 of tank-bullets.

We have 1600 Landmines.

We have 7200 of explosive rockets. But if we use them we alway kill ourselves.

We have enough energy to build 4-times the laser-turrets we have, but we only have 11 laser-turres left to build.


If we go into the game the creeps are attacking and we have to act quickly. So we can´t create more ammo etc. They are coming in a few minutes after the game starts.

We build an attilery and put in the attil-bullets. We went into a tank and drove a long the laser-turrets so the creeps die. But they are coming again and from a second place where we loose laser-turrets, to. Not mentionted that some of our outposts loose laser-turrets, too.

We don´t want to loose our 200-hours save. But we don´t want to cheat, because we want to get the archievments.

Any ideas?

[DaveMcW]

Flamethrower turrets.

[Pascali]

Thank you. We don´t have any flame-towers at all. We have 7200 motor-units. But no iron plaets. Addionally they will need to much steel and time to produce - we have only 728 steel. And they have to be placed timintensive with tubes. Before we have set this up, our base is gone.

[Tertius]

Enemies spawn from nests. Spawned enemies attack your base, if they are touched by the pollution cloud or nests attacked by artillery. Spawning is infinite, i.e. killed enemies are replaced immediately, i.e. you are attacked infinitely, as long as there are nests inside your pollution cloud. Just killing incoming enemies isn't helping against them.

To actually decrease the amount of attacking enemies, their nests have to be pushed outside the pollution cloud and their density decreased. This can be achieved by either destroying all the nests inside your pollution cloud or by decreasing the pollution cloud. Just shooting incoming enemies is not enough.

Shut off everything that produces pollution. You rely on solar panels, so you still have power. Shut off your mines. Shut off factories that produce stuff you don't directly need to defend yourself, for example science production and research. Sacrifice the most far outposts. Very pollution intensive is mining and smelting and chemical plants and everything boosted by modules and beacons.

Activate the pollution overlay to see which nests are inside the pollution cloud and focus to destroy these. Use rockets for this if you have these, and you can stomp on the nests (drive over them) with tanks. The pollution cloud will shrink, as soon as you shut off the stuff that produces pollution, and this is what will decrease the amount of incoming enemies. Rockets are used properly by driving or walking near a nest and holding the mouse over the nest, then pressing "C" or left click. If you're near enough to reach a nest or a worm, the circle around the nest or worm gets green.
This way you're shooting at the mouse pointer location, not at the nearest enemy, which is bad if it is directly biting you. You're not killed by the enemies, you're killed by your rocket if you shoot wrongly. To practice aiming, I used my save with my sandbox lab environment and spawned single nests myself just for shooting.

In the future, watch the enemy nests outside but near your pollution cloud. New nests will spawn some chunks away from an existing nest, but only if the enemy density is not higher than the the maximum density defined at map creation, so after some time the only space available for enemy expansion is the area between your base and the nests outside. You need to monitor this space and destroy any newly spawned nests in there as soon as possible, or the nests will get nearer and nearer and the attacks will get more and contain more enemies. Artillery is very good for keeping new spawned nests away, but it needs to be set up properly, i.e. this needs time. You literally lost if the enemies managed to create nests and worms so near that the worms are able to directly attack your turrets and base - this must never happen.

You didn't tell about the enemy density you're playing with, but in the default settings, enemies should be quite easy to control if they are properly monitored and new spawned nests destroyed as soon as possible.

Expanding your base will usually expand your pollution cloud, so before you actually expand your base, destroy the nearest nests all around your base, so you will not be overrun by enemies that get touched by the expanding pollution cloud.

[mmmPI]

Hello. We are playing since ~200 hours. We hade a huge pause. After the pause (so some updates between) our base is overrunned by the enemies. difficultylevel is normal.

It would seem biters become stronger after an update and now your base defense need an upgrade all at the same time, but biters keep attacking after you reload right ?

you can type in game /evolution it will give a number between 0 and 1 that could give more information about the level of biters that are attacking. High evolution like 0.9 means bigger biters and different approach.


As Tertius explained, the polution is the important factor here, if there is a lot of it already in the air, it can take long time for it to disappear, too much time. Which might be the case given the stats in the screenshot and 200H game.

One method would be to try and save only what is the most important, letting some of biters deal damage in one part is a way to buy time to make another shorter perimeter of defense around the power production, secure fuel supply and at least 1 iron/copper patch. It's hard to tell if it can help without seeing the map. ( do you have room to fall back or are you under pressure near spawn/ power ? ).

It is unknown which level of military you researched already and if you have an armor with robots or shield. Depending on this different tactics should be applied.

laser turrets require research to boost their damage and speed to keep up with evolving biters, landmines can be very powerful, but not against swarms of behemoth coming from all angles, explosive rockets can be dangerous without exoskeletons.


It is also possible that there is no good solution.

We build an attilery and put in the attil-bullets.

One got to be careful with this. When you place arty-bullets, then the artillery will auto-acquire targets, and shoot. Then biters will come to retaliate. It always triggers waves of angry biters. Maybe the excess spawn of enemy can be avoided by not placing artillery until you strenghen your defense.

[Tertius]

One got to be careful with [artillery]. When you place arty-bullets, then the artillery will auto-acquire targets, and shoot. Then biters will come to retaliate. It always triggers waves of angry biters. Maybe the excess spawn of enemy can be avoided by not placing artillery until you strenghen your defense.

Yes, therefore it is important to monitor and control the nests right from the beginning. If you let the nests come nearer and if you don't clean them while you expand, you will be overrun by the waves that gather due to the attack of one nest. The crucial thing is that if a wave is gathering, the enemies around a nest almost immediately respawn. That means a wave isn't decreasing the overall amount of enemies - it is actually increasing. If you continue shooting with artillery and attack the next nest, the next wave as big as the previous is gathering, even if you didn't defeat the previous wave yet.

The waves will get smaller for every nest you destroy, so if you start to clean the nests near your base with artillery, you need to destroy only 1 or 2 nests, then defeat the attack wave, and only then continue to destroy the next 1 or 2 nests, again the next wave, and so on.

[Pascali]

The more nets you kill the more nests spawn? Because nests make the environmental pullution gogin down.

So the longer the game lasts the stronger the enemy get? Is ther a cap?

Do you use attilery behind you towers to attack new nests automatically - so you have more time for other things?

What´s the best tactic to destroy nests without attilery? They a spitting on me and i get slow and finished by them.

[mmmPI]

The more nets you kill the more nests spawn? Because nests make the environmental pullution gogin down.

Nest absorb pollution, removing it from the map, and spwaning ennemy in exchange.

Killing nests thus makes pollution spread further.

Killing nests like pollution also makes biters evolve, if you type in game /evolution it tells you how strong compared the maximum. It's not a command that disable achievements.

So the longer the game lasts the stronger the enemy get? Is ther a cap?

Yes, and yes. Cap is when you have reached evolution 1. ( it start at 0 and goes to 1 with time pollution and killing).

In game it means you have small biters spawing at first, then a mix of small and medium, then only medium, then medium and some bigs, then mostly big biters. ( that's the idea ).

Do you use attilery behind you towers to attack new nests automatically - so you have more time for other things?

What´s the best tactic to destroy nests without attilery? They a spitting on me and i get slow and finished by them.

That depend on game settings. A "classic" way to do is to have artillery turret inside your defense wall, those destroy new nest spawning from distance and the angry waves it triggers are killed by other turrets when they arrive at the defense wall like lasers and ammunition turret or flameturret, those are very strong when dealing with many ennemy.

That's for the base/factory defense. When you want to expand, in late game you can use your robots to build laser turrets, you can use personnal laser defense, explosives rockets or nuclear bombs, spidertron and i'm forgetting some .

before you have everything available it's a like a race-against-the-clock game. You need to try and keep your military technology level good enough to deal with the small/medium/big biters. ( and i think the updates plays against you here, since the biters grew stronger in just a reload ).

Poison capsules are very good to kill worms early on because they have a very big range when you consider the far end of the big gas circle it creates. You can kill them without walking into acid.

Landmines are also quite good because it's easy to automate, when they explode you need new mines , and when they are attacked, you also need new mines. Not like needing wall and amunition and new turrets sometimes and also inserters and power poles. You need new robots sometimes but in the main factory usually you already have robots.

If you have a modular armor you can use 1 exoskeletons with battery and solar pannel, to avoid the acid spits or keep a decent speed even when walking on it.

Or you can use shield on it and just tank the damage depending on the numbers and your preference .

Very early on you can eat fish ! they act like potions, you can heal yourself every 2 second or so which makes you able to resist almost infinite amount of small biters. or just save your life in a critical moment .

[coppercoil]

Very early on you can eat fish ! they act like potions, you can heal yourself every 2 second or so which makes you able to resist almost infinite amount of small biters.

There were nests I killed eating fish every .2 second . A fish is an underrated power.

[mmmPI]

mmm seem like it's .2 second and not 2 second as i said, i checked the wiki it says "short cooldown" and it restores 80HP.

It is very powerfull indeed fish are very healthy even those you get from polluted water

[Tertius]

In general, destroying nests is the key to survival in the long run. Don't avoid killing nests "because that increases evolution" or "because that increases pollution". Evolution increases anyway, just over time, unavoidable. In a 200 hour game it will be quite high already just because of the 200 hours of elapsed time. And pollution increases anyway as well, because your factory ever grows.

Killing nests is the key, because nests spawn enemies, and enemies are what is killing you.

Nests don't get stronger over time. The enemies spawned by the nests are getting stronger, because evolution increases over time.

And don't forget to look in the "Enemy expansion" section of the wiki article that deals with enemies. It's quite easy to understand how enemy expansion works in terms of game mechanics, and if you know how it technically works, you can work out your strategy against it.

If you ask me, you didn't focus on the right things. Your screenshot tells you have 4100 laser turrets. That's excessive - it's as if you built a continuous wall around your whole base area and set a turret every other tile. This isn't necessary. Identify natural choke points built by water and cliffs and see where enemies will concentrate. Use single stationary artillery to keep nests away and set a few more turrets around the artillery to defend it. But in between you don't need that much turrets. Depending on the environment, you don't even need walls everywhere. Instead, provide a roboport infrastructure with repair kits and replacement items to repair damaged items and replace destroyed items automatically.

I built this little zoo in my sandbox to explore enemy expansion behavior and how strong turrets need to be to keep them under control.

Screenshot 2021-12-22 145940.png (725.14 KiB) Viewed 8110 times

Screenshot 2021-12-22 150044.png (559.97 KiB) Viewed 8110 times

This is the save (I assume not everyone is familiar with spawning nests and running in sandbox mode, so I provide the save and not the blueprint):

sandbox zoo.zip

(4.36 MiB) Downloaded 136 times

Don't do anything. Just let it run and watch (in map mode, watch for red dots appear inside the artillery range and see how artillery will react).
You will see how nice clean the artillery will keep its area automatically as soon as a new colony starts building itself. A few surviving enemies will attack, but the wave is very small.

In contrast, to see a large wave attacking, just aim and fire at some nest in the middle with the artillery remote. As far as I see it, the artillery density is exactly right (their circles just touch themselves), but the laser turret density is too high. One does not need this. Evolution is around 0.8. However, I don't yet tried with higher evolution factors when behemoth enemies start to appear. But I assume it's cheaper to supply repair kits, replacement walls, replacement turrets and replacement bots than to fill everything with turrets. Destroyed entities leave blueprints, and blueprints are built automatically by construction robots, so it's not that bad if something gets damaged once in a while.

My approach to not waste turrets is this: once in a while I walk and visit every turret. If you click on it to see its stats, you see how often it has fired. If a turret never fired even once after many game hours, it's not needed and the turrets in that area can be at least thinned, if not removed completely.

[gGeorg]

My approach to not waste turrets

Hello, turrets are more expensive than walls. I have made a wall pattern which makes bugs walk along but not attack. Usualy. Ass result, usual bug walk in range of your turrets longer, without eating. It means, efficiency of turrets is higher.

Would you test my pattern to confirm/denny my observation. Becouse of "self-assurance bug" . Thanks for help.
viewtopic.php?f=193&t=100826
I am talking about wall pattern, not turrets settings, use your amount of turrets to find out if your turret efficiency is better.

[Pascali]

I have 3 rows of laser turrets and in the corners a lot of more, but always the biters are killing them. It´s not an energy problem. I don´t have bots at all.

Normal turrets + laser turrets or laser turrets only?

Which turrets are stronger?

[coppercoil]

I have 3 rows of laser turrets and in the corners a lot of more, but always the biters are killing them. It´s not an energy problem. I don´t have bots at all.

You need sloped or rounded (with large radius) corners to reduce losses. It seems, spiters attack most protruding turrets.

[Pascali]

behind the sloped walls the laser towers? Or just straight walls(behind them the turrets) and in front of them sloped walls.

They are attacking the walls, the towers, the belts, the energy-towers. All things around the turrets.

[NotRexButCaesar]

behind the sloped walls the laser towers?

Yes, the goal is to smooth the corner out to spread the biters out: the problem near the corners is that every biter will attack the same place, but there are fewer turrets in range to defend it because they are behind the corner.

[Pascali]

So better slopes walls instead of checkerboard-walls?

[DarkIrek]

Could you post your save so we can see what exactly happens?

[Bauer]

get more players in to be quicker when saving the world.

[Premu]

As corners are natural weakpoints you might just avoid having them by exploiting lakes. Build straight walls between lakes! Also, if you have a lake you can use landfill to extend your turrets slightly into the lake so that any attack wave coming from the shore of the lake gets under fire from all sides.

You can see an example here: