Defence Tactics Advice

[bbutle01]

So I'm getting into mid-game now and spending more time trying to automate shipping back products from Fulgora and Vulcanus. It's close, I AM shipping back science packs and tungsten, but the volume is still a bit low and it's taking some manual choosing of what to launch into space and driving the ship.

The problem is back on home. The bugs are closing in. I find myself going back to the map and driving over my tanks that have most of the stuff needed to repair each outpost. And it's to the point where I'm spending more time pushing them back than I am working on my other planets. I need to make this more resilient.

So some things that came to mind...
1. Build walls around ALL of it, and throw up defensive weapons around the whole perimeter. That seems wasteful and soon I'll have to expand to more copper, so it really doesn't seem tenable either.
2. Fortify each outpost and the main base separately and don't worry about what spawns in between them (since they don't seem to attack power poles and railroad tracks)
3. Have a train that just takes around a single car that's stocked with walls, health packs and replacement laser turrets. Assuming they get damaged, but everything gets repaired.


How are you guys doing it? If I can't find a way to make this place quite a bit stronger I'll never have time to get to the other planets.

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[NineNine]

I'd wall it all in with lasers, and start placing artillery in places along the border.

[bbutle01]

Whew, at least there's some natural water barriers West side of the map. But the east is going to take a lot of walls and lasers!

[NineNine]

If you do lasers, you don't need walls. And yeah, it's a lot, but if you put production modules 2 in your laser assemblers, that'll make it better. And, since you've already been to Vulcanus, you've got foundries which will make the lasers a lot cheaper!

I don't know if a better way to do it unless you want to have to babysit your borders all of the time, and that's tough to do when you're working on other planets, too.

You can do it with a single layer of lasers in mid-game, because the biters take a lot longer to evolve now (compared to 1.1). I'm also mid-game, and I'm trying to get artillery in place ASAP because I know a single layer of lasers alone won't continue to work as the biters evolve.

[bbutle01]

Ok, that'll help a lot. I've already got some automated laser turret creating, so this should take so long. And I'll probably overlap so each one protects it's neighbors.

I haven't done much work with higher quality stuff but maybe I'll try to make some higher quality lasers to increase the range

[tlix]

Since you have gone to Fulgora, teslas (especially higher quality ones) are amazing at killing hordes. Highly recommend bringing some back to Nauvis for defending your active outposts (instead of flamethrowers, since they don't need ammo). Definitely bring them to Gleba though.
Also you might want to leave a closer base alone so that you have access to biter eggs for biolabs and prod3s before aquilo. Maybe wall 3~4 nests in with pipes after clearing out the biters with target-filtered lasers.

[Tertius]

At some point I wall the Nauvis base in, with laser turrets as defense. I also added flamethrower turrets, but this doesn't seem necessary so far, so I didn't provide oil supply for half of the wall.
Previously, I built a bunch of turrets around the outposts that were usually attacked, but sometimes some patrol appears at the main base and I'm not able to determine from where they came, and this means the biters build nests in areas I cleared previously. To be absolutely sure where biters could attack and no attack to any production site, I don't see any way around building some kind of defensive wall around all. You can defend the main base and every mining outpost separately, or you can simply wall everything in with a large perimeter defense wall. The former is faster, but the latter gives you room to expand freely within the cleared area and you don't need to think about it.

I used the water strategically and used it as natural borders to build less walls. Either I was lucky and half of the perimeter is behind a natural water border by chance, or the new 2.0 terrain generation is better with building this.

I explored as far as possible, until the enemy bases got to their final size that's not comfortable any more to clear without spidertron or artillery. I did this before even going to the first planet.

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(the red circles inside are the remains of the previous on the spot defense)

[wizcreations]

I use a service train with repair packs, turrets, walls, etc needed to repair defensive outposts. Use combinators to specify the quantity of each item you want at each train stop so it only unloads what is needed.

Based on your map, you should also spend an hour driving around and killing all those biter nests in your pollution cloud so that you don't have to build as many walls.

[jdrexler75]

One more thing people underestimate: Efficiency Modules.

When you get your drills to -80% power usage, their pollution is also negligible. That makes defences much much easier, generally only small groups on an expansion trip, rather than pollution-based attacks.

[WOOL]

Yes I am a big user of the efficiency modules for Nauvis, you only need t1 modules and you significantly reduce the biter attacks as well as evolution.

As well I just wall the full base in on Nauvis and don't have outposts.

My next plan is to move all (possible) science production to Vulcanus and ship it in to further minimise pollution or having to expand to new ore patches

[NineNine]

The flip side to using efficiency modules to reduce the amount of pollution is to use red productivity modules in everything in the hopes that you don't have to expand out to new ore patches. (That's what I tend to do on Nauvis).
I think that both green and red modules are good techniques to avoid biters.
Blue speed modules, on the other hand only stand to exacerbate the biter problem.

[bbutle01]

So I put in the line of lasers to the west and south, between the natural water barriers. I also started clearing out the nests to the north and east. They've already come and taken out some of those lasers so I'm going to have to find a way to bolster that.

And I had no idea about the blue modules causing more biter problems, I'll swap them all out to green immediately

[jdrexler75]

The flip side to using efficiency modules to reduce the amount of pollution is to use red productivity modules in everything in the hopes that you don't have to expand out to new ore patches. (That's what I tend to do on Nauvis).
I think that both green and red modules are good techniques to avoid biters.
Blue speed modules, on the other hand only stand to exacerbate the biter problem.

Switching to the big drills from Vulcanus asap is much more effective that productivity modules, since it has that "50% resource drain" (or even less with quality), so it will get twice as much out of one patch. Also red modules increase pollution per ore much more unless you pile on beacons with green modules.

Speed modules on the other hand barely affect pollution per ore, the "per minute" number goes up only a little more than the extra ore from the speed bonus. Whereas productivity modules slow it down and create extra pollution, so per ore you're looking at twice the pollution or more. If you want to make your ore patches last longer without a lot of pollution, the mining productivity research is more effective imho. Or just bombarding the planet with unlimited ore from space...