vanilla death world too hard

[meems]

Trying to play Death World Vanilla.

Is this mode balanced so that every game is practically winnable?

Starting in a forested area is tough but playable. However starting in a desert seems impossibly hard. Get alien attacks with the first couple of burner mines, 10 biters to be fought off with pistol, then 2 minute later 20 biters to be fought off with pistol. This is way before getting an electric power station built, let alone a research lab, or gun turret researched. Often the alien lair is either on top of, or adjacent to one of the starter ore fields, in the the desert!
Without hacks, this game mode seems impractical most of the time; is it the norm to random seed the map a few times until an easy start is found, or is the player expected to have one mine running for the first 3 hours until gun turrets are researched?

[jodokus31]

Desert maps are tough. If also the biters are very near the ore patches, it can be quite problematic.
You can check preview to avoid those maps.

If you still want to try it, here some tipps:
- Go first somewhere else and mine iron, either by hand or with burner miners. Here you don't disturb the biters in the starting area and the pollution doesn't pile up
- You also need a lot of stone, and handmining those big rocks is good, the ones with coal in it, even better.
- Mine also a bit copper for some research, etc. You don't need that much compared to iron.
- Catch some fish from a lake nearby. If you have the fish in hand you can click and consume it, which heals you
- Shotgun ammo is a lot cheaper than rifle ammo. You can use a shotgun to clean the nests, while healing with fish.
- Wipe out the problematic nest, when you have collected enough ammo and fish.
- Rush electric miners asap, they produce a lot less pollution.
- Don't waste time, death world is mainly time pressure. You need to win the race.

[meems]

this is a typical start on death world mode. First attempt to demostrate the absurd difficulty
no buildings placed, nothing done on world, only walked to coal.

standing near starting coal


spotted by aliens near starting coal, about to be killed by 20 biters


is this normal? Everyone else figured out how to handle this start?

[meems]

Desert maps are tough. If also the biters are very near the ore patches, it can be quite problematic.

Thanks for the tips. I've also seen players place primitive buildings as walls to funnel biters into single file arrangements. I consider this a hack, but seems desert starts are meant to be an amalgam of all the known hacks combined.

[meems]

> - Shotgun ammo is a lot cheaper than rifle ammo. You can use a shotgun to clean the nests, while healing with fish.

That's a long way into the game. It's the start, placing first burner mine, or even just picking some coal/ore by hand, that is the first long range goal that requires a lot of preparation to build towards.

[MiniHerc]

Desert maps are tough. If also the biters are very near the ore patches, it can be quite problematic.

Thanks for the tips. I've also seen players place primitive buildings as walls to funnel biters into single file arrangements. I consider this a hack, but seems desert starts are meant to be an amalgam of all the known hacks combined.

Furnaces as walls is a legitimate tactic. It's how the game works and how biter pathfinding works.

[meems]

death world play thrus on youtube typically have rare map starts where there's no aliens near the start resources. Looks to me like they browsed thru a few previewed maps and selected the unusual one.
e.g. this one from late 2022AD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_saoRBLjA

This does not give a good representation or insight into the typical death world start experience.

[mmmPI]

Is this mode balanced so that every game is practically winnable?

no, there is no guarantee it is winnable for 1 human player in reasonnable time

mode seems impractical most of the time; is it the norm to random seed the map a few times until an easy start is found, or is the player expected to have one mine running for the first 3 hours until gun turrets are researched?

If you play with other player it changes a lot as there is no difficulty increase ( aside for self inflicted teamate sometimes ). Solo you can also tweak the settings to have starting area i think, but it's probably more the spirit of death mode to force you to try several time different strategy on the same seed if it is a difficult one, desert without trees or cliffs and scarce water providing few fish and cover are the worst, and may not even be possible.
It helps running several time the same seed, because you can reload save/compare pollution re-use blueprints, counts things more accuratly and so on
The hardest part is the early game that you need to "survive" well enough to beeline key military technology, it's not uncomon to random several seed to avoid biters on the starting ore patch because it can be frustrating to try several time in a row just to get access to coal.

[meems]

well i'm game for a difficult start, but i wasn't expecting it to be this hard, or have nothing to do with the core gameplay of factory logistics. This is something else.
Also deaths aren't allowed. 1 death = end of game.

step 1. Ignore start ore patches next to aliens and instead look for big rocks for coal.
this is faster than stockpiling trees for fuel.


after a few minutes can have 300 coal.

[MEOWMI]

I remember my 2nd run ever was a desert deathworld and it wasn't particularly difficult... but I wonder if that was down to different biter pathing in some ways? (They used to derp if large masses of biters aggroed at once due to collision detection making them get stuck on each other.) I do remember I had to drive around in a car a lot to kill nests. Early on tends to be the toughest and that's how it was in my memory too, still not too bad but enough that you have to be quite careful. I also wonder if my small base made it easier... I do know that trying to increase production rapidly early on in these settings causes huge enemy attacks. Random chance could play a huge role as well, in how close nests spawn to you, because that very dramatically affects how quickly pollution reaches biters and reduces natural absorption. I certainly don't remember having to hold off challenging attacks with just a few burner miners running.

[jodokus31]

step 1. Ignore start ore patches next to aliens and instead look for big rocks for coal.

Exactly. In case of your former map, you would not need coal/stone immediately and you could mine iron/copper first for some time.

You can also run around the map as you want. You only get detected by enemies, if you are too near. (It's very unlikely that you hit an expansion group in the beginning.)
If you find some iron, which isn't too near of a nest, you can smelt a bit and get some materials. Same with copper. You can even build a small base near an iron patch with electricity and haul some copper somewhere else. Handmining doesn't produce pollution and it's not so slow, that is unthinkable.
Enemies only attack, if they absorb pollution or you are too near the nest.

That way you can grind your way to get some research and ammo

I mean, of course, you can just reroll and search for a better map, but I would claim, that most maps are beatable. It's just a matter of grinding. The easiest maps are those, with a lot of trees.

There's also the marathon mode, which makes everything more expensive. That's really brutal, because you have to produce more pollution for the same products.

[quyxkh]

Trying to play Death World Vanilla.

Is this mode balanced so that every game is practically winnable?

As you get better the harder modes become less suicidal. There are people (I am not one of them, they must be Gods 'cause they're crazy) who like to play deathworld marathon, and I wouldn't be too surprised if there's people who do that with the Rampart mod (which takes the bugs several long strides towards "clever girl" smart) turned up.

But this ain't Skyrim where anyone with some gamer cred can crank it up to legendary even for their early playthroughs and rely on native smarts and caution to get by, planning to figure it out as they go. If you want to survive on the harder levels you have to already know how things work and be able to plot a course through the foreseeable consequences with room for a plan B if your luck turns bad.

The basic deathworld strat is keep the pollution low. hand mine as much as you've got time for early, smelt slow so the land and trees soak up enough that the bugs don't come investigating your stink before you've got the weapons to deal with an attack. I like E1's early midgame and on even on default maps, on deathworld maps they're your ticket to paradise. There's videos out there of people trying absolutely ridiculous settings, it's possible to crank all the dials to suicidal levels and those maps do require some RNG blessings.

Here, Death World Rampant, that guy's f'ing insane. "I've beatn death world multiple times as well as death world marathon and it always felt like it was testing my patience rather than my skill". Some where in there should be a "don't try this at home, kids" warning.

[aka13]

Trying to play Death World Vanilla.

Is this mode balanced so that every game is practically winnable?

Starting in a forested area is tough but playable. However starting in a desert seems impossibly hard. Get alien attacks with the first couple of burner mines, 10 biters to be fought off with pistol, then 2 minute later 20 biters to be fought off with pistol. This is way before getting an electric power station built, let alone a research lab, or gun turret researched. Often the alien lair is either on top of, or adjacent to one of the starter ore fields, in the the desert!
Without hacks, this game mode seems impractical most of the time; is it the norm to random seed the map a few times until an easy start is found, or is the player expected to have one mine running for the first 3 hours until gun turrets are researched?

I play only deathworld marathon since it got released. I have never "lost" a game.
The main trick is, not to produce stuff you don't need, not pollute to much, and prevent biters from settling.
In the beginning, turret "flowers" (4 turrets, chest, 4 burner inserters, a wall around them) work very well for defence.
Obviuosly, you should rush turrets.

After you have rushed turrets, you should be rushing flamethrowers, and occupy any oilfield for any amount of oil. After that, there is a period where you are bot-less, which makes automated defending tedious, but its not as complicated from then on. Desert is tougher, since you can't mitigate pollution that easily, but still doable.

Also, I suggest utilizing yourself as an assembler all the time, until you have flamethrowers, basically.

[azesmbog]

My second map was (and is:) - Marathon of the World of Death. Without oil, at least in the immediate visibility - I think I would not start playing at all. But the first oil had to be won back from the biters, with a flamethrower it is already a little easier to run. In general, I launched a rocket in 96 hours - for me this is a very good time, because a marathon is a constant time pressure, a game with death ((
Laser turrets are quite useless at low levels, I completely abandoned flamethrowing turrets already at the level of laser somewhere around level 10-15.

[aka13]

My second map was (and is:) - Marathon of the World of Death. Without oil, at least in the immediate visibility - I think I would not start playing at all. But the first oil had to be won back from the biters, with a flamethrower it is already a little easier to run. In general, I launched a rocket in 96 hours - for me this is a very good time, because a marathon is a constant time pressure, a game with death ((
Laser turrets are quite useless at low levels, I completely abandoned flamethrowing turrets already at the level of laser somewhere around level 10-15.

Due to logistics and bot self-damage?

[azesmbog]

Due to logistics and bot self-damage?

Why did I give up fire turrets??
I have always considered them intermediate until the laser turrets reach a certain power. As soon as this happened, I dismantled the fire turrets, now there are several (tens of) thousand of them in the chests
upd: looked at the chests. 22,000 fire turrets. We stood close to the perimeter

[aka13]

Why did I give up fire turrets??
I have always considered them intermediate until the laser turrets reach a certain power. As soon as this happened, I dismantled the fire turrets, now there are several (tens of) thousand of them in the chests
upd: looked at the chests. 22,000 fire turrets. We stood close to the perimeter

I always considered laser useless on dw, maybe I should do as you say, and research laser for a bit, and see how it works. I only use fire for as far as I can remember, since AOE damage rips through anything artillery can aggro. The only downside is, that they never seem to sleep, and I have to drive light oil around.

[NoaAldritt]

Why did I give up fire turrets??
I have always considered them intermediate until the laser turrets reach a certain power. As soon as this happened, I dismantled the fire turrets, now there are several (tens of) thousand of them in the chests
upd: looked at the chests. 22,000 fire turrets. We stood close to the perimeter

I always considered laser useless on dw, maybe I should do as you say, and research laser for a bit, and see how it works. I only use fire for as far as I can remember, since AOE damage rips through anything artillery can aggro. The only downside is, that they never seem to sleep, and I have to drive light oil around.

Tbh, don't bother doing light oil to turrets. Just pump crude to the flamethrowers. Light oil does 10% more damage, but that's pretty insignificant when you could just add an extra turret and account for 10 extras just like that.

Michael Hendriks has a video series where he's doing the 'ultimate death world challenge' aiming to completely and 100% eliminate biters from the map, and he basically powers his entire base of hundreds of flamethrower turrets off a single minimum output pumpjack that he beaconed somewhere along the line and a buffer tank that he gradually expanded as time went on just to see how well it would do.. even after artillery incited attacks, he rarely troubled his reserves.

Thing is, a minimum output pumpjack outputs 2/s oil- But you're not being constantly attacked (by which I mean an incessant stream of enemies), you're only dealing with expansion waves that get too close to your wall, and the occasional pollution incited attack.

At the absolute minimum, the cooldown for enemy expansion is 1-5mins; On death world preset its 4-60 mins. So for every 2-5 second burst by a few turrets on your wall, you have a lot of time for even a single pumpjack to stack oil up for future attacks.

Really, there's a lot of neat stuff to learn from his video series, so here's the link:
Michael Hendriks' Ultimate DeathWorld Challenge
Episode 20 at 5:40 is one of the times he shows his single pumpjack and the oil it has gradually accumulated over time; Due to the expansion of his base it was finally starting to consume oil faster than producing it, so this is also the time where he upgrades it with beacons, and it pretty much carries him through the next 11 videos in the series.

TL;DR: Flamethrowers OP, and a nice mix of flamers and lasers is the way to go.(Imo)

[PunkSkeleton]

I've just tried deathworld again after some years. The biters are not a problem, you can kill them with pickaxe + fish. However the only copper nearby was under a nest and that proved too hard.
So yes, some deathworld maps are probably impossible.

[FuryoftheStars]

TL;DR: Flamethrowers OP, and a nice mix of flamers and lasers is the way to go.(Imo)

I feel like part of this is because of how little fluid flamers use per second.