I had to flee Gleba!

[coffee-factorio]

I was really responding to the other guy wondering where he saw the video. You're right, the splash screen videos are often trying to show players what not to do by providing glimpses of what's to come. For example the engineers stranded on Aquilo, the spoiling eggs, or the guy getting hit by lightning on Fulgora. I was just trying to answer his implied question. I don't even use land mines.

Eh, that's why it's tricky. You're plenty right. Just this plain text and lack of context thing.

Never used landmines before 2.0. Now they're the new defensive artillery turret for me. No shipping, no muss and if there's any fuss I have 3 qrf's of spidertrons on Nauvis. They're all nuclear capable so technically they all surpass Metal Gear?

Regular rockets and lasers are probably the worst defense to use against stompers, since their immunities are to laser, impact, and physical damage. So yes, explosives should work against them, as well as electricity, or even fire (https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies#Stompers).

You're right. But the mechanics aren't so clear and the wiki doesn't do justice to how bad the situation can get. Also, you need to be careful. Pentapods have resistances. Not immunities. And the reason why is someone could draw the false conclusion that you aren't right.

You are very right.

I think it needs to be driven home that stompers move at 41, 54, and 68 kph with a health pool that's up to 15000 deep. 68 kph means it can do 18 meters a second. Anything short of railgun won't one tap it, and it can cross into a rocket launchers deadzone in about a second. Each time the pentapod takes a step it applies an acid or impact effect that does 140 damage to unreinforced objects (tankasaurus laughs at this because has the DR to do so). That's every time it takes a step with any of it's five legs. Every second it can also do it's listed effect which is to shoot a giant gob of acid at objects it's head looks at.

What typically happens with energy based weapons in general is that yes, Coffee can throw a substation worth of lasers at a single big stomper in the map editor. The stomper will lose health but it won't even die: it's AOE stomp attack kills the substation delivering power. It often will blow up the power interface that gives you unlimited power in the map editor if you leave that nearby. That can also be belt lines of any kind of ammo or pipes delivering fuel.

So whatever you do, overdo it.

[angramania]

Flamethrowers are in the same boat: they should work great against the big stompers

Just try them with editor.

[BlakeMW]

I feel it's worth linking my Flamethrower defense on Gleba:

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... for_gleba/

Flamethrowers work great in roles like protecting an artillery outpost but you have to spam them not only using a few, in short a single Flamethrower turret does about 1/3rd of its damage through the "Sticker" (setting fire to the enemy), a third of its damage through the "Flame" (the fire patch on the ground), and a third of its damage through the "Splash", basically only the Splash stacks from multiple Flamethrower turrets the sticker can only be applied once and Flames are rate-limited in how often they can be intensified. So if you have say 20 Flamethrower turrets hosing down a Big Stomper, you aren't doing 20x the damage, but you are doing 7x the damage, and it's important to burn through the 15,000 hitpoints of a Big Stompers in 1/7th the time because they are very deadly.

I also ran comparisons between different types of defenses. Rocket turrets with normal missiles are garbage hardly worth using except maybe in a backline defense role to take out strays which get in. Rocket turrets with explosive missiles are about as effective as Flamethrower turrets when both are used at max density, however the explosive missiles are a lot more expensive (though it might not be expensive enough to matter), and you get a great deal of friendly fire potential which doesn't exist for Flamethrower turrets. For both it's helpful to have the backing of Tesla turrets, but it's more important for explosive missiles, if a Big Stomper gets up to the wall of Flamethrower turrets then a backline of gun turrets can just blow it away, while with explosive turrets a section of the defenses will disappear to friendly fire. Even without Tesla turrets normally Big Stompers pause in confusion in front of the defenses, not always, but most the time.

Tesla turrets also work well if you use a lot of them like a double wall, they're hella expensive in terms of idle drain though.

Flamethrowers are cost kings, as a turret made purely of iron ore they're practically free to build especially if you're using Foundries for the low cost recipes and their high health makes them very robust against being destroyed and they sip oil at such a low rate it doesn't really matter how crummy your oil logistics are, barrel it on Fulgora or Nauvis and ship it in, make it using Coal Liq, it's downright hard to run out of oil even if you're using a very lazy approach.