Factorio Forums

Hey Everyone - I've been working on some solo games with biters on, and slowly building up to where I can handle full default settings. Early game goes ok - I rush power and Military 1, then Turrets, then either Body armor or Automation, while making a temp furnace onsite to keep the base footprint small enough to defend.

But it's always a slog and a half to fully transition to a full furnace layout (6 lines of standard 2x8 with room for in-line steel expansion) and get the main bus started (I put Iron, Copper, Steel, Circuits, Coal, Petroleum, Water, Lubricant, and Sulfuric Acid on the main bus - it's big, but boy is it nice) because it's such a large expansion of the base - frequently into occupied territory. I feel like it's almost necessary to create a full perimeter defense around your base footprint - I don't wall everything off until late game, but there generally aren't more than 30 open tiles between my turret batteries in the early game.

In the early game, even with an Assembler 2 cranking out turrets and a couple Assembler 1s building ammo, I spend almost 2 hours just securing the site of the main furnace and bus - once I've decided where to put it. I've considered dropping radars to create some funnels for the biters, since that really seems to draw their attention, but I've also noticed that biters leave me alone a bit longer when I don't bother with radars in the early game.

I've been through Negative Root's tutorial series, but the settings he uses aren't really comparable to what I'm looking at. I know a lot of folks don't play with biters on, but I wanted to see if there were any tips or guides that you could recommend, for those that use default vanilla settings.

I think your problem might be expanding too aggressively too early. I think you might play like I tend to do, which is figuring out how you want the factory to look at the end, and building that all right away. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're creating 6 smelting lines with 16 furnaces each? That will create a massive pollution footprint, plus all the pollution generated by the miners and power system. You could try scaling that back to only a half line each for iron and copper for your initial push from running around manually loading stuff to creating a bus-based factory. If you build up the smelters as you need them you'll probably find the biters to be a more manageable problem.

I think you should also put down radars. They are power hogs, but what's nice about them is you can see your pollution footprint once a tile has been revealed. So even if its grayed out (was scanned, but no active sight there) you can still see the pollution footprint, and even see the biter bases eating it (it will pulse on the map, where the tile with the base will clear up and then fill in with pollution again fairly rapidly). Depending on your playstyle, you can either try to manage that pollution cloud, or just take care of any biter bases that are inside or touching it.

Turret creeping is an option if you're ok with that. 4 turrets with 400-500 clips should handle any base you'll find early on in vanilla. I find it's not usually necessary, though. If you build slowly and keep an eye on your pollution cloud you can usually anticipate where attacks will come from and set up defenses at those points until you can research the tank. Once you have the tank the bases should be a lot easier to deal with. At that point you just need to kill anything inside your pollution cloud and you won't need to worry about static defenses at all