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Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2016 6:57 pm
by Gnarflord
I'm currently playing a save I call "Apocalypse" in which I use RSO with biter settings maxed out and very low resource settings. The biggest problem is oil at the moment so I build a self-repairing fully laser-powered rail to the next big oil field. I hope this is what you want. I have to admit that I'm also playing with late research which I used to boost the damage and fire rate of the laser turrets, so you'd need more turrets in general if you wanted to employ this design with normal lasers.
Railway Defense System
As you can see I have two lines for normal traffic and a seperated line for the supply train (which is the only dual-headed train in my system btw). The repair stations are completely seperated logistic networks with combinators which tell the filter inserter what item it should grab (used the design from the FFFs). Also a signal will be send to the train station if the outpost doesn't need new items. In this case the train will only stop for a short moment because it shouldn't waste any time waiting there if another station has an emergency.
Blueprint String
P.S.: I'm quite surprised about the length of the blueprint string. As this is my first time I post my designs I could have done an error (like accidentally uploading my credit card credentials) so please inform me if it doesn't work.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 3:05 am
by etcetera
Yeah that string doesn't work: entity not valid for blueprint, straight-rail.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 1:12 pm
by Gnarflord
Are you sure? I've tried it with the latest version of factorio (v. 14) and Foreman and it seems to work. I suspect you're using Factorio 0.12 because they changed how rails work so there is now a different entity for them which the old version can't import.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2016 1:06 pm
by ssilk
Impressive... should be in Show your Creations... :)

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2016 5:51 pm
by Hannu
ssilk wrote:
Impressive... should be in Show your Creations... :)
OK. I put it in with a savefile when I have uploaded it (my network connection have slow upload speed). I have expanded my base and separated smelting to independent units.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2016 10:30 am
by vanatteveldt
Gouada wrote:Hey,
Quick question here... I've been trying for hours to make an invincible wall: one where even the gigantic biters with full evolution won't damage any part of the wall when they attack. It can use whatever weapons or defenses you want, the only catch is that no robots should be involved, I want to use belts/power lines to supply resources and NEVER need to use repair packs.
Don't care if this wall will be a huge resource sink, in fact that's probably better for my 150 hour factory :D

So any ideas?

EDIT: New challenge is to come up with the most efficient robot repaired wall, since a simple kill the biters before they damage you tactic appears impossible...
Reddit disagrees with you :) https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... r_defense/

The idea is to have the wall around max flamethrower damage, but use a maze instead of a solid wall. That way, biters get confused, take a lot of time inside the maze, and get scorched there.

Because I'm paranoid I added a second line of defense near the flamethrowers, and add some laser turrets behind that some any biter that gets through the initial maze gets targeted by the laser turrets as well. It's imporant to keep the line open so biters can path through, otherwise they start attacking walls. As a sidenote, this probably quite certainly abuses the pathfinding system, which I assume only gives a fixed amount of CPU time per tick to the biters: you can seem them storming to the wall, and once they get in range they get "confused", stop, and wind slowly through the maze. Note to biter: try to do your pathfinding while still outside flamethrower range :)

Image
blueprint

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 7:41 pm
by aober93
If like some offense systems. Automated of course. Because the ritual of manual biter extermination is boring after a while.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 9:07 pm
by vanatteveldt
aober93 wrote:If like some offense systems. Automated of course. Because the ritual of manual biter extermination is boring after a while.
Haven't used it, but https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio might be what you want. Also Ion Cannons ( viewtopic.php?f=93&t=17910 ) are great both on offense and on defense.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 10:44 pm
by orzelek
vanatteveldt wrote:
aober93 wrote:If like some offense systems. Automated of course. Because the ritual of manual biter extermination is boring after a while.
Haven't used it, but https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio might be what you want. Also Ion Cannons ( viewtopic.php?f=93&t=17910 ) are great both on offense and on defense.
You can also look into vehicle equipment - bob's mods have a pretty big set. There are also few simplier mods that allow mounting of armor stuff in vehicles.
I'm not sure how much help this is for very heavy enemy bases - didn't try it much yet.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 12:29 am
by vanatteveldt
I don't think attacks are difficult, a combination of power armor, shields, combat robots, flamethrowers and cluster grenades is highly effective against biters at max settings and max evolution. It just gets really boring after a while, base nr 99 is mostly the same as base 100. The spirit of the game is that there's a lot of stuff you need to do (mining, smelting, manufacturing etc), and you need to do it manually at first and then automate it, to the point that everything works automatically. Defending works that way (walls, turrets, logistic bots, supply trains, etc). The only thing that doesn't (in vanilla) is the offensive game.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 12:34 pm
by mrvn
Isnt the best solution to get the aliens not to attack? How about building a wall so far away from your base that pollution has tapered of?

Personally I have a simple straight line of laser turrets, one next to the others. Walls in front, power poles in the back. Belts outside the wall if I feel like it. Roboports in a line way inside the wall but close enough to repair the wall. I see some huge power spikes and messages that 40 turrets are getting attacked but I nothing seems to get destroyed. Maybe my base is still too small. When I expand I go out and clean out all the nests near the new wall so it takes a while for attacks to start again and they start slow.

I had some brownouts early on so now I have 4 electrical networks with accumulator driven switches to power them on or off depending on available power in the following order: 1) everything for power generation including the coal mines, 2) the turret wall, 3) the roboports for the turrets, 4) the rest.

Note: After a black start power demand for laser turrets is huge till they are all fully charged. I am producing about 500MW and after a black start it switches power on and off a few times because the laser turrets keep draining the accumulators. They need more to recharge. Then roboports come on and their recharge needs are astronomical. So it again switches between powering 1 and 2 and 1 to 3 a few times. Once even the internal roboports are chared power settels to around 250MW unless aliens attack.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 1:54 pm
by Hannu
mrvn wrote:Isnt the best solution to get the aliens not to attack? How about building a wall so far away from your base that pollution has tapered of?
The best may vary. If you have really big base, you need tens of square kilometers area and tens of kilometers walls. It take huge amount of time to build such system and powerful computer to run it. It is also more interesting to have huge attacks and strong defenses.

Re: Permanent Biter Defense

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 3:00 pm
by MrGrim
Hannu wrote:
mrvn wrote:Isnt the best solution to get the aliens not to attack? How about building a wall so far away from your base that pollution has tapered of?
The best may vary. If you have really big base, you need tens of square kilometers area and tens of kilometers walls. It take huge amount of time to build such system and powerful computer to run it. It is also more interesting to have huge attacks and strong defenses.
Indeed, I intentionally builds mines near my perimeter walls, and I stuff the miners full of prod3 modules because I enjoy watching the biters fling themselves at my wall of fire and steel. What's a few hundred magazines/hour compared to that show? :D

Besides, I have 7 steel chests full of artifacts from the clearing I've had to do just to get my walls out that far. Pushing out past prod3 mining pollution would probably require me to nearly quadruple that, and I'd just want to tap the new deposits that I opened up in the process.