Deathworld-Questions in Space Age

[baph]

Hi there,

I played on default settings before and now started to play in a death world on default settings since space age release.

A few questions to the community:

1.
Should I defend or attack? Or both?
I started to defend only, but biter attacks became worse. Then I attacked biter nests around me (killing them is no problem). The problem is, they repsawn very quickly.... so I build stone furnaces on killed enemy bases... but now the biters attack my stone furnaces (they are not covered by my defense). And so they build new bases... do stone furnaces produce pollution, even if they are not burning something?

2.
How should I conquer new mines, for example a new iron mine?
Does it make sense to make a little fortress around the mine and transport the ore to my main base where it can be smelted? Or is it better to expand my base to the mine? What is your experience?

My evolution factor at the moment is 0.8115 and I am worried about the upcoming behemoths....

Thank you guys and have a good time !

[baph]

any hints?

[Nefeskar]

You can use artillery, but if you didnt go vulcanus u cant use it. Whats your map contidion? Power? Production? Starvation any resources?
I'm curious about the situation too, I want to come and see the world. Can we do that?

[eugenekay]

Death World is tough but manageable. If your evolution is all the way up to 0.8 already it may be too late but…. Here are my tips:

- Build your perimeter wall first, and keep it well-stocked with the best Ammo you can produce - Piercing or Uranium bullets deal more damage per Turret, even if they cost more resources.
- Build a second Perimeter wall around that, or invest in a “grid based” approach to ensure complete coverage in case of incursions.
- Take all the Military / Damage / Shooting Speed research you can, before logistics or other “necessary” research.
- Don’t buffer intermediate resources - especially in chests. Overproduction will generate LOTS of pollution that you don’t need yet.
- Biter attacks are the result of Pollution - but scaling up the factory to make more Bullets to shoot more Biters leads to a positive-feedback loop of infinite attacks. Instead, use Efficiency modules EVERYWHERE to lower your Pollution per Bullet.
- Try a Ribbon World to simplify your Base plans - set a map Height of 128 or 256 which still leaves plenty of room for Resources to spawn. With a bit of luck (or Regenerating the Map Seed….) one side of your Base will be a lake; and the other end can be a constantly-advancing turret wall.


Good Luck!

[BlakeMW]

I've done two maximized enemies deathworlds in Space Age.

The difficulty will depend substantially on the map, with the degree of forestation, layout of the water, and the ease of access of oil and additional iron.

• Transition away from Burner drills to Electric drills ASAP, then tear down or defuel your Burner drills, the Burner drills just produce way more pollution per resource extracted and it's hardly worth using them considering the attention they'll attract.
• For default setting Deathworld especially on a forested start you may want to go on the offensive against nearby nests but take care with driving up evolution. For a desert start you might want to just defend against the attacks using a perimeter of gun turrets to avoid driving up evolution.
• Once you have Flamethrower turrets they can be used in conjunction with walls for a defense which will hold up to everything until behemoth biters. I'd only get 2 fire damage upgrades to limit the destruction of repair bots.
• I'd hold off on serious offenses until the Tank. Once you have the Tank you can pummel spawners with cannon shells, and use poison capsules for wormicide, you can use slowdown capsules to terminate the pursuit of biters and discharge defense to knock them back and kill them if their weaker (but the knockback is still great against Behemoths), basically the Tank + Poison Capsules + Slowdown Capsules + Discharge Defense is still adequate in the Behemoth era, not ideal, but it'll get the job done.
• Destroyer capsules are also a pretty solid solution to Behemoth biters, they're fairly pricey but keep in mind each capsule deploys 5 Destroyer bots.
• Typically in the late game you'll want to clear a lot of territory and set up solid defensive lines on choke points between bodies of water, claiming a large area of territory for your exclusive use while not needing too much length of defenses. Then use Artillery to prevent the biters setting up Big Worms in range of the defensive lines.

do stone furnaces produce pollution, even if they are not burning something?

Yes and no. When Biters are on an "anti-pollution rampage" they have a special hatred for any building capable of producing pollution whether or not it has ever actually produced pollution.

[baph]

Ok, thanks for your replies. Especially for writing about the stone furnaces.

For better understanding, I added my savegame.... (vanilla)

so my plan for the next hours is:
1.) Expanding and build walls between the lakes, at first to the north and west
2.) Build other walls... so without stone furnaces, only walls + laser turrets + flamethrower turret... dont know, but are rocket turrets worth it?
3.) Travel to another planet.. maybe vulcanus first, for the artillery turret?

Thanks for your tips !

Savegame:

BaseAttack02.zip

Savegame

(12.43 MiB) Downloaded 16 times

Map:

map1.png (1.14 MiB) Viewed 497 times

[R060]

Stop producing ammo higher than yellow for turrets and rush for mines. They are 4 times cheaper than yellow ammo and kill everything more effectivly even when dealing with single targets, not to mention that they kill multiple targets.
Red ammo is just a scam.
Lazer turrets take 9.6 MW each when recharging their buffer after shooting, so they will constantly flicker your entire factory into brownouts unless you build enough accumulators (32 per each lazer, since one accumulator is producing 300 kW max when discharging) just mitigate that bug (which is claimed to be "working as intended"). So maybe don't expect them to be that usefull in your wall design.
Flamethrowers are the ideal, since fuel for them is infinite and they consume so little, damage is great and they also damage multiple targets in the same path. But they are very, very very very very expensive in terms of production cost.
Also, once you have bots, just use mines again. Roboport with bots reconstructing blown-up mines outranges even behemoth worms. And dead robots planting mines and fixing walls still gonna be cheaper than red ammo, lol.

One other tip. Evolution driven by just how much pollution you have produced overall, not by how much nests consumed them. So there is no point in killing nests unless you have a problem defending that particullar place or thinking about claiming this area for yourself.

Also, tanks have personal grid. It's a freaking moving roboport (even better, since stacking just Mk1 personal roboports outranges a regular one) that you can relocate (with remote driving) as you wish and the only thing you need to do with them is just plant mines with construction bots. I love those things.

[BlakeMW]

so my plan for the next hours is:
1.) Expanding and build walls between the lakes, at first to the north and west

Looks good. I'd agree with claiming the entirety of the North, it's the obvious area which has large coastlines and chokepoints.

2.) Build other walls... so without stone furnaces, only walls + laser turrets + flamethrower turret... dont know, but are rocket turrets worth it?

Flamethrower turrets with dragon teeth walls, maybe a solid wall in front of them, and laser turrets to kill the forward biters. It's pretty much the gold standard.

Rocket turrets are pretty garbage vs enemies, especially with yellow rockets, red rockets are a lot more potent but have the obvious downside of causing massive amounts of friendly-fire if enemies get close. TBH even on Gleba you're basically better off using Flamethrower turrets and importing oil, but you need to use a lot of them, unlike Biters where the basic idea is to set them on fire so they burn to death, against Glebian enemies you want to douse them with like 20 Flamethrowers so the direct splash damage kills them. I just use a solid wall of Flamethrower turrets, they're cheap to build, cheap to run and since they're extremely durable using a solid wall of Flamethrower turrets means there's nothing weak like pipes to produce notifications of being destroyed.

3.) Travel to another planet.. maybe vulcanus first, for the artillery turret?

Going to Vulcanus is generally a good idea and since you've already acquired new iron, copper and coal resources you might want to do at a high priority. You can basically mothball your Nauvis base to minimize pollution and thus attacks and go have fun on Vulcanus. You can leave behind a Tank and use it in remote view to clear any nests which spawn close enough to your walls to be problematic.

The advantages of Vulcanus is not just the artillery, Foundries have the intrinsic 50% productivity and special "half-price" recipes for Copper Wire, Gears and (almost) Steel, without considering other productivity bonuses, you'll get 4.5x more copper wire or gears for your ore, and 3.75x more steel for your ore. You have to setup a freighter to bring calcite from Vulcanus but that's easy enough. Suffice to say that getting these massive multipliers means way less need to secure ore, and also way less pollution for a given level of production. Furthermore, big mining drills only consume ore at 50% the rate and are a bit less polluting per ore mined. Between the big drills and the foundries your ore patches last so much longer. You also get Coal liquefaction which can be handy if your map isn't generous with easily accessible oil.

So I'd say overall Artillery isn't nearly the best thing coming from Vulcanus, the "economic reasons" are far more compelling, but Artillery is good either for keeping territory clear if you use a little of it, or clearing territory if you use a lot of it.


Final thing to note: Glebian enemies aren't enhanced on Deathworld preset, though some parameters apply to both Nauvis and Gleba. You'll have a smaller safe starting area and faster evolution and your spores will spread further and enemies require only half as many absorbed spores to spawn. You want to be well-prepared when you land on Gleba, Artillery is extremely helpful and Tesla turrets are pretty great.