Gleba Petapod Perimeter Defense?

[schorsch_76]

Hi,

How to build a proper perimeter defense against the pentapods and their speedy friends? Only viable option: Rocketturrets? Its locked behind gleba science. Whats the best option before they are available?

Just for reference about their might:
YT: Factorio and why you should respect the pentapods

[Daid]

Initially, I build a wall with piecing ammo turrets behind it, one turret every 4 tiles. That can keep the small ones reasonably at bay. They will however, take out parts of the line from time to time.

I upgraded to a full line of laser turrets behind that. Those laser turrets did wonders. Small ones no longer stood a chance. Did have to import a 1000 from Fulgora, as I don't see how I could have produced enough of these in time on Gleba. I am producing them now on Gleba, but that's mainly to restore the destroyed ones. Yes, you will keep losing parts of the defense, you need a robot network to repair and rebuild things. Yes the enemies have pretty decent resistances against them. But, they are easy to maintain, as power isn't a huge issue on Gleba. You do need to ensure that taking out a single powerpole won't cripple your laser defenses.
Compared to gunturrets, they also have more range, so more will attack, and will take out the small enemies before the gunturrets will even react, concentrating the fire of the gunturrets on the bigger guys.


But, as evolution keeps going, I'm now facing medium stompers, and those... stomp. So I now have rocket turrets behind the lasers every 12 tiles. But with a laser turret defense you should have ample of time to research those. So far they haven't made much of a dent into that defense yet.


While they only target your harvesting area, they do walk through everything else to get there. So I just surrounded my whole base with this turret line.

(note that the video shows the biggest stompers)

[schorsch_76]

Still a little anxious to turn the breeding on ....

[jdrexler75]

I'm considering just defending my harvest areas as far as the spores reach. So that no new nests settle there to get spore crazy, and I only need to take out the nest settlement groups instead of actual attacks. They won't settle too close to the production hub and in any case don't care about it.

Does this have a chance of working, or is it a stupid idea that I will regret?

[HadesSupreme]

Turret-wise you really need either the Tesla turrets from Fulgora (best option) or missile turrets to defend against stompers. If you are stuck long enough on Gleba trying to figure out production and stompers come before you get missile turrets then... RIP.

[territrades]

Build a tank and take out all the nests in the spore cloud. That is way more effective than trying to build a traditional wall around your base using gun and laser turrets.

[jdrexler75]

Build a tank and take out all the nests in the spore cloud. That is way more effective than trying to build a traditional wall around your base using gun and laser turrets.

That's what I did, but of course they will soon try to build new nests there. So you need to stop the expansion parties, or eradicate the nests they make (which accelerates evolution). Hence trying to fortify around the spore cloud to stop that, still wondering if it will work properly.

The advantage is, I'm thinking, that expansion parties always have a relatively similar group size whereas spore attacks can get very large.

[Moikle]

Build a tank and take out all the nests in the spore cloud. That is way more effective than trying to build a traditional wall around your base using gun and laser turrets.

They expand too quickly for this to work. You will be spending 100% of your time taking out new nests as they place them

[jaylawl]

After lots of struggling with Gleba for the longest time, i came to realise that tesla turrets are extremely effective in slowing down the pentapods and turn them into target practice for other turrets. I have a small Gleba base and a respective fruit harvest site each a couple hundred tiles away from it. The main base has been undefended for the whole time, as pentapods never attacked it. The harvest sites are now defended by a bunch of tesla + rocket turrets in every cardinal direction with electric weapons damage level 7 and stronger explosives level 9, which is self good enough for now at evolution factor 0.77.

Until you can place rocket turrets (which really is the damage dealer you need against the big bois), just spam gun and laser turrets. But what you really want to do in that that pre-rocket turret phase is just run around with a rocket launcher and a tesla gun and destroy the nests nearby.

[jdrexler75]

They expand too quickly for this to work. You will be spending 100% of your time taking out new nests as they place them

It helps to plop down a bunch of walls (just a dozen or so per chunk), which greatly decrease the likelihood of expansion into that chunk even if they'd be useless in an attack. After doing that I've never had an attack at all, wasted all that time building a defense... maybe if the population pressure gets too intense it may fail to deter them though.