Vic plays Factorio

[Vic]

Didn't feel right to shit up the main thread with my shitty base updates so decided to break it out here. The previous posts:

Decided to start a new Deathworld map, getting back into the game a bit to warm up for the DLC. My humble beginnings:

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I wanted to try belting gears and copper cable for the first time. When I first started playing ~8 years ago I was told to use a main bus and never belt those. Fuck it, I'm a rebel now. Also this is actually the first time where I got the brilliant idea to build my power generators not near the water like I usually do but pipe the water to my base so I can more easily defend it, genius, I know.

Let's see how far I can get before the biters get me.

PS: I just slapped shit in there, I know the designs suck, I wanted to try and build more liberal this time instead of optimizing throughput and such. It will all get scrapped once I unlock robotics anyway, so I'm not too worried about getting the early base right, but it will turn quite messy and spaghetti-y.

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The Biters are coming on strong. I had to rebuild several parts of my base multiple times already due to attacks. Finished a basic defense perimeter and hopefully they won't be able to breach it for a while until I can get better production set up.

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Expanded my walls now that I could work in peace and claimed more territory. I hope I have not wasted too much time building the walls because the biters are starting to send some pretty big hordes and medium biters started appearing. Going to start researching deeper into projectile speed and damage while building up my production.

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Should have the full fields mining (at least for iron, other resources probably aren't a bottleneck), full lanes of iron plates, at least 10 assemblers producing science (are you... hand crafting science? I don't see anything making it). I haven't really played Deathworld only Deathworld Marathon but it looks like you're way behind to me. Spending time building walls isn't really a great idea because the biters are just gonna expand around you and then you have to painstakingly push them away to gain ground, you're better off running out there and destroying their bases ASAP. Walls are more for very long term "I don't care about this area" decisions. For short term defense you're better off just placing a 2x2 or 3x3 turret setup with 2 layers of walls around them.

With regards to fighting higher tier stuff, there's a few things to do. The best is obviously flamethrowers, but that requires oil. You kind of want Damage 3 for turrets to have enough damage to beat med biters with regular ammo efficiently, below that you need the piercing ammo to have enough damage to overcome their DR.

Also having 124 mining drills in your inventory is way excessive, that's a lot of pollution/mining time wasted.

I knew there would be some guy who would be all "ackshually!".. that's why I said:

PS: I just slapped shit in there, I know the designs suck, I wanted to try and build more liberal this time instead of optimizing throughput and such. It will all get scrapped once I unlock robotics anyway, so I'm not too worried about getting the early base right, but it will turn quite messy and spaghetti-y.

As for the walls, they are a necessity I'm afraid, waves of 20-30 biters every minute or so with 3 nests nearby and the nests start of huge, no way to destroy them that early imo

Now that I have my walls I am going to start to actually get some production going, time to mine those ugly resource patches out of my base, improve my base's defensive capabilities and starting building.

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Finished the day by lining up turrets around my walls and expanded iron smelting a bit. Going to start on science tomorrow.

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Restructuring my base a bit to have more space for construction, considering that I have limited space to work with. I wanted to go for a compact, walled off factory. The biters are starting to grow stronger and able to destroy an outer wall in 2-3 assaults. I should start researching turret upgrades soon.

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[Vic]

mhh, am I overdoing it with power production? The boilers seem to create 30 pollution even if they're barely working. I hope this doesn't come back to seriously bite me in the ass later on.

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The spaghetti is coming along nicely.

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Science!

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[Average Manatee]

They only produce pollution proportional to how much they work, it's fine to overbuild.

 

[Jaedar]

They only produce pollution proportional to how much they work, it's fine to overbuild.

Yeah, I think this is how it should work, the boiler has an internal buffer of steam, and won't burn any fuel if that is full. There might be some fractional gains from rounding errors in not overbuilding, but I kinda doubt it.

 

[Vic]

Base slowly filling up, about half of the available space used so far. I'm probably going to build an outpost at the oil field in the north-west. I would like to avoid expanding my main base until I have construction robots, simply because I'm too lazy to rebuild the walls and turrets and I'd like to keep it as compact as possible too. Might have to rebuild some stuff inside if I end up running out of space, green circuits could be built a bit more compactly. The spitters coming through the woods wrecked the turret pair protecting the mining field. Might have to fortify my defenses on that side.

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I should probably invest in some lights at some point.

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Midnight visit by the biters. A bit risky to have my main water supply right on the front line. I'm going to have to change that.

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Steel and piercing ammo production. Together with the research upgrades my turrets should be packing a bit more of a punch now. I wonder if I should prioritize military science now and go deeper into combat upgrades. Another thing I want is to finally get rid of that ugly soil and have a nice concrete floor. Will I run out of stone? Expanding at this stage might not be the safest idea. I also noticed that I accidentally cut into my power block with the ammo assemblers. Didn't really pay attention to where I was building. Hopefully I won't have to expand my steam engines too soon, though there should still be space for another set on the right.

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The biter waves are starting to get scary. I'm going to prioritize military science ASAP.

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[Average Manatee]

They only produce pollution proportional to how much they work, it's fine to overbuild.

Yeah, I think this is how it should work, the boiler has an internal buffer of steam, and won't burn any fuel if that is full. There might be some fractional gains from rounding errors in not overbuilding, but I kinda doubt it.

The dev team of Factorio is one of the few groups of people that I am comfortable assuming is too autistic to let something like this slip by unnoticed.

Steel and piercing ammo production. Together with the research upgrades my turrets should be packing a bit more of a punch now. I wonder if I should prioritize military science now and go deeper into combat upgrades.

There are a few ways to trivialize the defense game in factorio.

1. Flamers + walls/dragons teeth. Flamers are incredibly overpowered and melt whole hordes like its nothing while using practically no resources. Oil never runs out and even a minimal production well will easily satisfy the requirements of a huge base and replace needing literally hundreds of magazines per minute.
2. Lots of laser turrets. Laser turrets ignore most resistance which is the primary problem regular ammo has scaling up to harder biters. You need a huge number of them though, basically a solid wall. The upside is that there's no logistics needed and you can freely just throw down dozens anywhere you like. w/o solar power you're technically on a timer for running out of coal, but in practice coal still lasts longer than you'll ever need, and upgrading to solar isn't that difficult.
3. Efficiency modules on everything. This reduces pollution by an astonishing amount, practically removing your pollution cloud. By pushing your defensive line out just a bit you can have most if not all of your pollution absorbed by the environment so that no attacks are spawned.

Of course, you can combine these and probably should. The point is that by reaching one you've ensured your survival. But they all require oil, so oil research is the key thing to get. Without this defending with regular turrets is almost a lost cause. I say "almost", because physical projectile damage research does actually scale up really, really well. It first multiplies the bullet damage, then multiplies the turret damage as well, which means that if you can get to level 5 or so damage regular turrets far outscale lasers in DPS (and then Uranium ammo is literally insane), but this is well past the point of oil research.

 

[Vic]

I set up some military science production. Sadly I can't do more because the starting coal deposit is not big enough.

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But the issue is there is no coal nearby. There is a patch up north, but it's separated by water. I'll have to see if I can landfill a path to get to it. All in all the resources are very far away from my base and the biters are starting to become a concern.

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I'll sleep on what a good course of action might be in this situation, but I like the idea of building a "moat" around my walls to give my turrets more time to kill the incoming baddies and then probably start producing trains to get to the resources patches nearby. Eliminating the nests north and north-west to clear a path to the coal and oil field would also relieve some serious pressure off my base's defenses.

Bird's eye view of the base by the end of day two.

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[Vic]

My base is suffering from a coal shortage, which in turn leads to a power shortage. Producing grenades for military science is taking up too much coal, despite me having only 4 slow assemblers doing the work. Instead of going for military science I have to prioritize my expansion and go for the coal, or else this might be the end of my playthrough.

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[Vic]

Time to take out the nest in the north, they are growing way too bold.

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[Vic]

Done, turret creeped them and when I ran out of ammo finished them off with grenades. That should take care of the biggest threat to my base and make it easier to defend. Brings me also closer to the coal. I'll just have to landfill a path to get to it.

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[Vic]

My first death. Grew a bit too comfortable killing biters and didn't pay attention to where I was standing. That's a lot of dead biters, though.

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[Vic]

My first outpost! Stone of all things. I want to finally get nice concrete floors. But there's also oil just east of it. After securing more coal I'm going to start building up oil production. The attacks are much easier now. For some reason I thought that killing biters on Deathworld would be hard, but they are not much harder than in normal mode. I should've taken out their nests much sooner and saved myself the time repairing walls.

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[Vic]

Spotted the first Big Biter. I know now that I have to take out these nests quickly, so I guess it's Biter for dinner again.

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[Vic]

Man expansion is tedious. There are a bunch of biters protecting the precious coal deposit. But they will be no match for my autism!

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[Vic]

I see now where the challenge is in Deathworld. The nests are huge. I can't go for oil without first clearing out some pretty big nests in the area. Compared to normal mode at least, I'm quite at a disadvantage fighting nests of this size because I don't have access to advanced tech yet, most notably no blue science.

I died a couple of times trying to clear out one particularly large nest but I'm starting to get the hang of it. Maxing out turret research is a must.

The challenge in this mode is that the resources patches are further away from your base and at the same time guarded by nests large enough to appear only very far away from your base in normal play, so it can be quite tricky trying to expand with limited tech.

I did some minor construction on my base and expanded it so I can mine all of the iron. Clearing trees is easy now with grenades. The rest of my playtime was spent fighting Biters. Not really much to show but here's still a bird's eye view of my main base at the end of day three with 11 hours playtime.

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[Average Manatee]

Death World resources are the same as normal. Not being able to get to oil is unfortunate. Rerolling maps until you have easily accessible oil is a good idea if you're going to restart. Depending on how the map gens you can have it really close by or far away, I think the game tries to spawn something close but if the area happens to be under water then you're just out of luck. You can probably get back to that level of development in half the time if you restarted which would make for a lot lower evolution level as well. What is your current evolution level?

BTW, if the oil doesn't have biters right ontop of it or next to it then you can basically stealth your way to drilling it and piping it to your base. A small handful of pumpjacks won't put out much pollution, and either the cloud won't reach the nests or they'll only have enough pollution to spawn a few small biters per attack, which a few turrets can handle.

Once you do get oil you also open up access to the tank and poison capsules (drive around nests in the car and use them 2-3 times and all the worms will be dead which makes bases pretty easy).

 

[Jaedar]

Not really much to show but here's still a bird's eye view of my main base at the end of day three with 11 hours playtime.

Seems a bit dangerously small at 11 hours, doesn't it?

Once you do get oil you also open up access to the tank and poison capsules (drive around nests in the car and use them 2-3 times and all the worms will be dead which makes bases pretty easy).

I also hear flamethrower turrets are a godsend on deathworld.

 

[Average Manatee]

I also hear flamethrower turrets are a godsend on deathworld.

They are, but using them offensively to clear nests is kind of hard due to the maximum firing angle, minimum range, and the need to run pipes (or carry a bunch of barrels and unbarrel them in the field). My usual strat is to set up turrets/laser turrets next to the base and do drive bys with the tank while the turrets clear the chaff.

Seems a bit dangerously small at 11 hours, doesn't it?

Yeah he's definitely behind the evolution curve, which makes taking out enemy nests a lot harder (spawning small biters while under attack is easy, spawning big ones due to high evolution is very hard to crack). For reference here's one of my deathworld marathon bases at 13h:

Note how my outposts have a fairly small pollution cloud and don't need much hard defending thanks to efficiency modules. Even at high evolutions, if you only have a very minimal pollution on a nest they can only spawn small/mid biters which turrets can take out easily.

 

[Vic]

Death World resources are the same as normal.

Oh yes that's right. Guess it only seems so far because of the Biter overpopulation.

Seems a bit dangerously small at 11 hours, doesn't it?

Probably. I would've expanded two hours ago but the Biters have other plans. A lot of my playtime was spent on defenses. I rebuilt parts of my base several times to optimize for space.

Taking out these nests with what I have available is quite tricky.

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I'm considering leaving them alone and just turtle up my outposts and rush laser turrets. Ammo is taking up a lot of iron and I'm starting to get low on both coal and iron. The closest deposits are quite deep in Biter territory.

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[Vic]

Welp, running out of coal for real. I'll not worry about trying to destroy the nests for now and just set up my outposts. Once they start becoming a threat I'm going to see about taking them out, but by that time I hope to have laser turrets so I don't have to worry about ammo supply to my outposts.

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I set up a preliminary coal outpost dangerously close to some big Biter nests. What could go wrong?

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Oil will allow me to get blue science and advance my technology. I'm not going to set up anything more than pumps here to not draw in more Biters than necessary.

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[Vic]

Red circuits, batteries and power armor stuff. Preparing to go and claim that iron patch in the south-west. After that I should be good to finish blue science, get lasers and then push for robots to redo my base completely getting rid of most of the belts... But that's plans for the future. For now I hope I'm able to establish an iron mining outpost in the middle of Biter country. I'm going to war, boys.

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[Vic]

The flamethrower is quite nice for taking out nests. Biters burn really well. And 3 shield modules in my armor give me some nice defense. This makes taking out nests MUCH easier.

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Iron secured and a lot of dead Biters. With this I'm ready to progress. I'll need a lot of iron to make engines for my robot army.

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[Vic]

Calling it a day for today. Didn't get much work done inside the base, just red circuits and some very basic oil processing outside the walls which isn't even worth showing. But I did manage to expand and secure oil, coal and iron. I expect to make some nice progress tomorrow now that I'm not hampered by lack of resources anymore. Current playtime at 15 hours.

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[Vic]

Blue science and researching lasers. Getting laser turrets means I won't have to worry about ammo supply to my outposts. But it will come with a high demand on electricity. Are lasers enough? Maybe I'll need flamethrower turrets too. Well, I'm tired of belting ammo so let's see how that goes first. Still no lights.

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[thesheeep]

Not enough spaghetti in your base.
Add more spaghetti.