[2.1.14] Stompers on Gleba have gone from occasional annoyance to full-scale war

[TV4Fun]

Before upgrading to 2.1, Gleba would get the occasional stomper raid that my turrets could easily deal with. Since upgrading, I seem to get a horde of giant stompers coming and destroying my base roughly every minute. I know 2.1 added some new growth mechanics for enemies, and I appreciate wanting to make them a bit more challenging, but this is rapidly ceasing to be fun. I have taken out many stomper nests near my base, and more keep appearing, and they keep coming and destroying things before I have time to rebuild. I am having to completely neglect all of the other planets and focus full-time on personally defending Gleba from my spidertron. Nauvis now has no function other than to produce rockets to ship to Gleba, and I can't even think about expanding my defenses because they keep coming and stomping my production lines and power infrastructure before I can even get new defenses up.

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[Alfonse215]

I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

In 2.0, there was a semi-common bug that would cause pentapods to just stop expanding. They had available chunks to expand to, but they just didn't. This gave many people (including myself) that pentapods are bad at expanding or had been pushed back too far to expand. No, it turns out it was just a bug.

Now that 2.1 has fixed it, you need to actually control territory on Gleba like on Nauvis. Which artillery does a good job of. Toss in some stationary Spidertrons to absorb the attacks from those artillery barrages, and you should be good.

Just make sure to station defenses well past your spore cloud.

[TV4Fun]

I ha

I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

I have certainly considered and would like to do that. But you will note that both rocket and railgun turrets require carbon fiber, which requires yumako, which requires a very well-developed supply chain on Gleba. After stompers destroyed my base on Gleba while I was trying to sort out some unrelated issues on Nauvis, I returned to personally oversee the rebuilding of my base, and after the third time a stomper hoarde came, blew past my defenses, and completely demolished my base again even with me there in my spidertron to try and slow them down, the last of which you can see in the attached screenshot, I eventually gave up and evacuated Gleba. I couldn't produce rockets on Gleba because all of my bioflux was going to copper and iron bacteria, and every time that started to get going, the base would get stomped again, so there was nothing left for sulfur. I was importing huge numbers of rockets from Nauvis to the point where Nauvis was doing little else but building rockets (both the ammo and spacegoing variety) to send to Gleba. It still wasn't enough in the end. I have no idea how I am expected to build better defenses on Gleba when the very materials I need to make those defenses are the things the stompers keep destroying.

[worph]

Supplies:

Tesla Turrets, Artillery, Power(Nuclear Reactors, Fusion Reactors if you got them), Gun Turrets, Missile Turrets, Laser Turrets, Repair packs, Roboports, construction bots; in order of importance.
Bring all of it from outside.
Best to produce ammo and missiles in space. Time to upgrade your ships, if they can't support that.

Target priorities:

• Tesla Turrets: Stompers first, then strafers, fire at will
• Missile Turrets (normal): Strafers first, (then stompers, then rest) -- check for friendly fire
• Missile Turrets (explosive): Strafers ONLY -- wouldn't recommend, friendly fire
• Gun Turrets and Laser Turrets: Wrigglers first, then whatever else you struggle more with (stompers / strafers)
• Artillery, you can manually give it ammo, to limit how many attacks you provoke at the same time.
• Mines can be added as much as possible, just make sure to avoid friendly fire.
• Forget walls.

Preparation:

Do not plant, harvest or process any fruit AT ALL. STOP. Only those things provoke attacks.
Maybe wait for your pollution to dissipate more.
Setup a tiny bridgehead. Just a Cargo Landing Pad and as much of the above mentioned defenses as you can muster.

Offensive:

Make sure to keep the Artillery shells coming and keep the power online. You can even ship in rocket fuel if you cannot safely place reactors where they don't get stomped immediately and produce power by burning the rocket fuel with heating towers.
Use artillery to clear out the closest nests.
Try to only ever get attacked by one nest at a time, so micromanage the artillery (i would just give it ammo manually or on a timer, every 1-2 minutes).

Once you have cleared out most of the nests neraby and survived the ensuing attacks, you should expand your perimeter, so that you have a safe inner area. Tesla turrets really are your friend here, as well as gun turrets and missile turrets.

Expansion:

At this point you really need to start producing mad power, to support your tesla turrets and bot networks.

Only now can you start working with fruit again. And I would recommend: Keep the fruit production as low as possible. Start with one agricultural tower for each fruit. And only harvest when you used up your fruit.
I can usually keep my "pollution" cloud very small in the early game, while still producing enough to grow a base and get some science out.

Good Luck and take screenshots for us!

[Alfonse215]

I ha

I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

I have certainly considered and would like to do that. But you will note that both rocket and railgun turrets require carbon fiber

I didn't quite make that clear. I meant "using some artillery", not railguns or rocket turrets. You can import that directly.

, which requires yumako, which requires a very well-developed supply chain on Gleba.

You can make quite a lot of carbon fiber (and Ag science) off of just 3 Yumako farms with good prodding. You've got way more than that.

It's a bit counter-intuitive, but productivity modules on Gleba do what efficiency modules do on Nauvis. Because spores come from harvesting trees rather than construction, the fewer trees you need to harvest in order to produce X amount of stuff, the less spores you produce. Productivity modules therefore reduce spore generation on Gleba, so long as you are only using the minimum number of farms for your production.

[coffee-factorio]

A lot of good things imo, +1

I think your hearts in the right place. My version isn't much different:

I would focus on low power cost solutions, because the assumption I have (based on a 2.0 to 2.1 game I have) is that you essentially have an ambush condition. The pentapods essentially get the drop on you because you can only cover so much ground so fast. And in 2.0 it was viable to run without turrets. But that meant you had lower power requirements too.

It has to be understood that any fix will take at least ten minutes under those conditions and likely more like a few hours. And imo, the stuff Alfonse suggested looks like the end goal. Just needs a good opening.

So my operations playbook would be to triage immediately by cutting power lines and production to essentials on Gleba. Science going down is acceptable.

I would try and get a shipment of carbon fiber off Gleba onto Nauvis, because carbon fiber->missile turrets-> spidertrons is also an option. But the focus is for triage, stop losing turf in at least one place. And that's going to be the first two hours of my life if pentapods get on top of me.

I would also be looking at any transport going to Aquilo and thinking about whether or not I could convert the explosive to rocket production into land mine production. In comparison to losing a ship or a save, I need a ship going back and forth from Vulcanus anyways, so I'd go so far as to take the missile turrets off an Aquilo transport and use a bulk normal rockets + gun turrets to make firebase (assuming my yumako mash production was truly dead; this is a desperation move). And then put artillery behind that. We are talking about using 6 and 12 packs of gun turrets with post win damage upgrades, to target stompers and wrigglers. And walls of mines like 4-8 deep to kill the initial thrust of a vengence wave or give a box of spidertrons an idea of where to show up.

I'm going to try and get a pattern of 2-4 fire bases like that to cover the most important parts of my base. Which is orbital operations, power generation, and lowest priority an artillery complex. I would gradually shift artificial coal and explosives onto Gleba after I had a secure foot hold because the planet scales better than a space platform imo, and because I run mining ships. If my back were absolutely against the wall I'd be using rocket fuel from space for power even.

So does OP know how to squad up spidertrons and about the new patrol feature? Because a spidertron fires chainlinked rockets. A normal turret doesn't. And my general rule of thumb is that 4-5 spidertrons at once tends to kill everything. This won't be a solo fix to the problem, but showing up with 4 x 5 chain linked rockets is a lot different than showing up with 4x1 rockets. Shift+left click causes them to follow a unit. That can be another spidertron that you run off a remote to be in two places at once or hold the line. This frees you up to run a tank with uranium explosive ammo or a rail rifle. Just remember you collect pentapod eggs in your pockets if you go on foot.

Anyways, that's my opening. Keep in mind during the buildup you can tank steam. And make a version of the Space Exploration umbrella battery, one rocket fuel of steam at a time. But that all comes down to how you can work the surface. The pentapods don't like cliffs, but they will travel over them. So that's a consideration too.

[worph]

I'm really looking forward to an update on this one.

[Fletch]

It stinks and they do like it.
Perhaps be more efficient with "that which that stinks".

[TV4Fun]

Okay, so by popular demand, I landed on Gleba with a whole bunch of artillery. The first thing I noticed was that the arrogant bastards had built a nest right exactly where my main yumako farm had once been.

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A quick strike from artillery convinced them to withdraw from that area.

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I established a core defensive perimeter with artillery and tesla and rail turrets and my few remaining rocket turrets right around my main power production infrastructure. The stompers did not take kindly to this.

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They made a solid effort at a fight.

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But eventually they were repelled.

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My construction robots made a valiant effort to rebuild the factory in spite of the stomper onslaught.

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And I started using artillery to systematically eliminate the stomper egg rafts, starting with the nearest ones and gradually moving further away.

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Regular stomper attacks still continued.

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I continued to reclaim my yumako farm, bit by bit.

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With the immediate threat out of the way, we began the hard work of rebuilding defenses.

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More to follow.

[TV4Fun]

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I had established only very basic perimeter defenses, and the pentapods had built very close to my base, so the next step was to get them further away with heavy use of artillery strikes.

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During this time, Aquilo also had a minor issue with a few extra barrels.

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As I placed more systematic defenses, I in my spidertron and the few popup defense installations were all that stood between the stompers and my nascent base.

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We were going through rockets and artillery shells very quickly, so I had to make regular very large shipments from Nauvis.

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I created a blueprint I called the Gleba Wall, a regularly spaced interval of substations and tesla turrets, backed by a solid wall of laser turrets with a back row of accumulators. A problem my defenses had kept running into was that, while on Nauvis, biters and spitters rarely directly attacked power transmission infrastructure, on Gleba, stompers took them out almost immediately, and as soon as one substation was stomped, everything past it would lose power as well. I tried to address this with lots of redundant power poles, but this only temporarily slowed them. The accumulators gave each section of wall its own measure of independence, so it could continue firing long enough to destroy any immediately surrounding enemies, even if its neighbors had already fallen.

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Later revisions would also add a minefield in front of and around the turrets, which gave a quick boost of damage to anything that approached too closely.

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Whenever practical, I like to keep the stomper shells around, as a warning to the others.

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I ended up having to substantially expand Nauvis's production capacity just to be able to make enough rockets to supply all the shipments to Gleba.

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A problem I ran into in expanding my defenses on Gleba was that I was frequently limited, not my turrets, but by landfill. I had to substantially increase stone production to get enough to fill all the land my wall required. I had to restart my stone train ahead of schedule and open up many more stone patches.

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I had to separate out the parts of my power grid specifically associated with generating power (burning spoilage, feeding it into heat towers, all that fun stuff) from the rest of the grid, give it its own accumulator, and only open up the rest of the grid when accumulator charge, steam reserve, and heat pipe temperature all reached a certain point. Otherwise the whole rest of the factory that the construction robots were diligently rebuilding was quickly draining my power generation dry before it could get itself going. To start with, I supplemented with nuclear power flown in from Nauvis.

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[TV4Fun]

We gradually built walls around all of the important locations.

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Eventually, we got a perimeter all the way around our base.

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It took a lot of work

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But Gleba is mine again

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