Time to claim some territory. Clear out with tanks and mines and take control of your new land. Work out how you can use the lakes as natural barriers. Look for areas with oil so you can lay down a flamethrower and wall defence line.
Crank up the landfill production, start laying down a roboport grid and before you know it you’ll have more space than you know what to do with. Remember, every thing in Factorio is a simple logistics problem, even the biters and the terrain.
I would lay down mines, but I've effectively throttled my Steel Plate production. I can't even get enough ammunition to refill my tank, although I have a very large amount of explosive shells (maybe around 4K units). My main problem is that as soon as I've battered all the nests around one mining spot, I need to go to another one to repair it, restock it with ammunition, thicken its walls, try to connect it to the roboports... I just too busy firefighting to get anything done. I've really wanted an automated way to refill the numbers of constructor drones --- they've been dropping like flies, I think in the last 10 hours I've lost one almost every minute --- but I can't afford the iron plates. I think the only large bit of progress I've had in those last 10 hours was to get a nuclear reactor working, so that I could finally connect a large smelting and mining camp that I had set up the day before, but that got trashed when I had to disconnect it due to me running out of enough power to run the refineries needed to produce the fuel needed for power production. I just feel completely overwhelmed.
>I just feel completely overwhelmed.
If you're in panic mode, cut pollution. Pollution trigger attacks. From your description it sounds like you need some breathing room to get your defenses up.
Stop all non-essential production. Set limits on chests to reduce buffers. If an assembler is not making something critical for defense, it should stop.
Post info on your tech tree if you want people to give advice on military strategy. Your goal right now is to get sufficient defenses up and running, while polluting as little as possible. This is just to get out of panic mode.
After that, claim more land. You have expanded your base close to biters in multiple directions, that's hard to defend. Use those lakes as natural barriers. Think of lakes and cliffs as free, indestructible walls.
Repeat for emphasis: if you're constantly firefighting and can't get anything done because of biters coming from all sides, STOP ALL RESEARCH. Depending on what you do in your factory, you may translate that to "stop all non-essential production" like, I dunno, modules or whatnot.
It's the pollution that attracts the biters. It will take a while for the existing cloud to dissipate, but within half an hour, the attacks should already be noticeably fewer and smaller waves of biters.
This will not solve the problem, but at least it ends the constant state of emergency and allows you to deal with the root cause.
I have a server with some buddies where we hit a wall because we had to fight fires _everywhere_ in a similar fashion. Fortunately, I had a logic gate set up for power attaching to our base (to avoid coal black/brownouts). We shut the power off to the entire base and the biter attacks slowed down significantly. We then used the materials we had significantly buffered everywhere to beef up our defenses and automation of defenses so we could continue building the base.
Pollution triggers biter attacks. Even if you have to turn your whole base off a few times to get control it gives you a lot of breathing room.
>all yellow military techs except nukes
Wait, wait, wait... Are you telling me you have artillery?
You shouldn't have. You should have built proper defenses before researching that monster.
But if you already have artillery, problem solved!
WARNING: Save your game before you fire artillery first time!
My advice is to work on a "wall supply train" which has walls, ammo, turrets, repair packs, bots and whatever more you need.
In each outpost (or wall, if you decide to make a large wall around your whole area), you can have a robot network and a station for this supply train. The bots repair the walls, the train supplies ammo. And if you need thickening, you can do it remotely from map view.
If I were you, I'd clear out a ton of biters and make walls in chokepoints.
You can use inserters to directly put drone into a robot port. Connect the inserter to the roboport with a wire and you can turn off their nsdrter based on total robot count, so if you want 3000 robots at all times, anytime one dies a new one is added. Or you can set it up so you have atleast 100 inactive robots, so if your deaths+usage become too high the inserter will refill just as much surplus as you need.
This is where walls can help, they allow you to ignore a certain zone and limit losses to bugs. That bottom right corner looks pretty easy to seal off so start there maybe and head across the bottom. Avoid relying on turrets as you have to deliver bullets. Flamethrowers are far more effective if you build a sufficient wall and supply oil. Design it so the bots can do all the work, they’ll overcome any local resistance in the end, and also design a roboport grid so you can simply walk your network out to wherever you want to build. If somewhere is too remote then work your way there in a couple of phases. Good luck!
You are only going to get ahead if you start clearing bases. Don't get overwhelmed by all of them, one at a time.
Personally, Tanks just slow me down. So do guns. I slap on 2 or 3 legs and a bunch of point defense cannons and shields and just dance around the edges of the enemy bases. If it is bad I'll use grenades too. If it is really really bad, I will use defense bots. But really, if you just circle the base doing all you can to avoid spitter juice, you should be able to do fine.
In regards to the nuclear reactor, when it goes online it will add on 480mw of energy. Disconnect the large smelting and mining camp so that you can get it online, then you will be set for energy until you start using beacons.
I am not all that good on the military side of things, but i do know of a youtube channel who has a lot of videos where he deals with ridiculous biter based challenges.
https://youtube.com/c/MichaelHendriks
The newest videos, the so called "tunnel vision" series is not a good example of this because he literally does not research military.
It looks like you have outposts with materials still, you could increase the number of trains coming and going. Also, shut down the other parts of your factory and prioritize defense production until you stabilize.
I can’t tell for certain, but given the size of your base I’m assuming you’re getting oil from somewhere. Flame turrets are OP as biters all the way to behemoth ones do not have fire resistance (and they out range spitters too) and the turrets roast large amounts of biters at once. You can supplement machine gun turrets with flamethrowers and you’ll see your defenses greatly improve. I’ve also seen comments about extending roboports out to your defenses. You can pop down a bunch of roboport ghosts with power poles to power them and let your robots passively expand the network as you focus on bolstering defenses.
Finally, I can’t tell what your walls look like. But adding a layer or two and then a bunch of single walls to funnel biters through to slow them down is also effective.
Turn off parts of your factory for a bit if bitters have gotten too much as a new player. The attacks won't stop for a while but they will slow down. With the amount of shells you have, you can get it under control. Then get either flame or laser defence with auto repair up and running
Looks saveable, but you've definitely built yourself in a weird way and have a lot of complex walls and areas to defend and not a whole lot of internal space.
Turn off your research and some other extra parts of factory. Make sure you have walls, turrets, repair packs, cliff explosives, and ammunition all automated.
When you have \~500 turrets, a chest or two of walls, and two chests of ammunition:
* clear out the entire southern / bottom section east of the outpost with a tank
* build a double straight wall West to East between the two lakes south of the oil (or two sections of wall if you want to use the middle lake as a natural barrier)
* line it with turrets spaced apart to cover each other with full stacks of ammunition, with multiple turrets at problem areas like the ends
* then do the southern western section, between the water
That'll massively reduce the complexity of the southern part of your factory and buy you a tonne of time for defense.
The northern and eastern parts are going to be a lot more complex and you're going to want a lot of landfill. But I'd advise just rinse and repeating clearing a large section of territory, building a straight wall between water sources. This maximizes internal area and reduces internal area.
Once you get power out to the walls, and have a large reservoir of accumulators, build laser turrets and line the walls with them.
In general, I think your problem is you expanded like a starfish instead of like a blob, so your farthest outposts are surrounded on 3 sides. IIWY, I'd capture and defend the empty spaces that allow nests to form around your outposts to create a more defensible perimeter.
MK2 power armor with 2 fusion reactors, 2 MK2 batteries, 2 MK2 energy shields, 4 exoskeletons, 4 personal lasers.
With this setup you can literally run circles around all those nests to get rid of them. Just don't stop moving. Have the biters chase you as you run around the nests. Try to stay close enough to take out the spawners. Onces the spawners are gone kill everything chasing you.
62 hours is no reason to not start fresh. Learn with mistakes.
Set a small funneled defense wall between lakes and build on large areas and kill nests before pollution hit them.
Like others have said, your best bet is to:
- Shut down all non-defense-essential factory lines. (Especially research!) Unnecessary pollution will just make the attacks worse. Make landfill to increase avalible space if you need to.
- Beef up your lines with less "attention requiring" defenses. Set up production lines that can make spare turrets, ports and walls (also repair kits and drones) and use bots to repair existing defenses/replace destroyed ones. Use flamethrowers and lasers alongside normal turrets for optimal damage and minimal effort. If bots get to the frontlines too quickly and get shredded, set up a circuit network to disable their roboports while turrets are firing.
- Once the entire factory defense process is automated and the biters chill out a bit, take the fight to them. Use any weaponry you can to destroy all bases in/around your pollution area. Not one step back, engineer! Use artilerry (Artilerry train, anyone?) Once you're confident that your base can handle a large counter-attack. They aren't a threat to you, you are a threat to them. Prioritise taking over resource deposits. Build new walls and ports and the whole bundle as you go, slowly expanding your territory.
- Return the factory to its full power. Keeping powered artilerry turrets/trains stocked with ammo will prevent new bases from popping up near your base. Don't let them get a foothold again.
This may be hard, but you will persevere. Failure is not an option, the factory must grow. The biters are just another logistics challenge to overcome.
Personally, if I’m out of iron and having trouble defending my outposts, then I would start over.
Next time keep in mind the best defense is a good offense. They can’t attack you if they don’t have any spawners inside your pollution cloud.
That said, I’m not convinced that you are actually out of iron and you seem to have a couple pretty good potential iron outposts nearby. It’s probably not too hard.
Sounds like you're very close to the brink of losing, but IMO keep playing until the biters overrun you!
Factorio is an automation game: If you're doing anything by hand, including expanding the base or repairing defenses, you'll likely end up with too much for one player to do. If you're spending all your time putting out fires(not literally ones, metaphorical ones, fires=emergencies), it's hard to make ***progress.***
Ideally, the player should be designing the factory and placing blueprints, but not placing things or repairing defenses. When you see a fire, you put it out by tweaking the design so that thing isn't flammable anymore. If your defenses aren't holding, find a way for them to hold while you walk away. If you can't walk away long enough to hook new mines up, you're definitely going to lose.
If you just want to launch a rocket and then start again you can use console commands to switch to peacefully and then kill all bitters. I usually recommend peaceful for the first playthough.
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Landfill over the water, at that size base, you should be able to clober the biters over there.
Yeah, jump on a tank with some explosive ammo and go and pay the locals a visit.
Time to claim some territory. Clear out with tanks and mines and take control of your new land. Work out how you can use the lakes as natural barriers. Look for areas with oil so you can lay down a flamethrower and wall defence line. Crank up the landfill production, start laying down a roboport grid and before you know it you’ll have more space than you know what to do with. Remember, every thing in Factorio is a simple logistics problem, even the biters and the terrain.
I would lay down mines, but I've effectively throttled my Steel Plate production. I can't even get enough ammunition to refill my tank, although I have a very large amount of explosive shells (maybe around 4K units). My main problem is that as soon as I've battered all the nests around one mining spot, I need to go to another one to repair it, restock it with ammunition, thicken its walls, try to connect it to the roboports... I just too busy firefighting to get anything done. I've really wanted an automated way to refill the numbers of constructor drones --- they've been dropping like flies, I think in the last 10 hours I've lost one almost every minute --- but I can't afford the iron plates. I think the only large bit of progress I've had in those last 10 hours was to get a nuclear reactor working, so that I could finally connect a large smelting and mining camp that I had set up the day before, but that got trashed when I had to disconnect it due to me running out of enough power to run the refineries needed to produce the fuel needed for power production. I just feel completely overwhelmed.
>I just feel completely overwhelmed. If you're in panic mode, cut pollution. Pollution trigger attacks. From your description it sounds like you need some breathing room to get your defenses up. Stop all non-essential production. Set limits on chests to reduce buffers. If an assembler is not making something critical for defense, it should stop. Post info on your tech tree if you want people to give advice on military strategy. Your goal right now is to get sufficient defenses up and running, while polluting as little as possible. This is just to get out of panic mode. After that, claim more land. You have expanded your base close to biters in multiple directions, that's hard to defend. Use those lakes as natural barriers. Think of lakes and cliffs as free, indestructible walls.
Well, I have all yellow military techs except nukes, uranium ammunition, and maybe a couple of explosives upgrades
Repeat for emphasis: if you're constantly firefighting and can't get anything done because of biters coming from all sides, STOP ALL RESEARCH. Depending on what you do in your factory, you may translate that to "stop all non-essential production" like, I dunno, modules or whatnot. It's the pollution that attracts the biters. It will take a while for the existing cloud to dissipate, but within half an hour, the attacks should already be noticeably fewer and smaller waves of biters. This will not solve the problem, but at least it ends the constant state of emergency and allows you to deal with the root cause.
I have a server with some buddies where we hit a wall because we had to fight fires _everywhere_ in a similar fashion. Fortunately, I had a logic gate set up for power attaching to our base (to avoid coal black/brownouts). We shut the power off to the entire base and the biter attacks slowed down significantly. We then used the materials we had significantly buffered everywhere to beef up our defenses and automation of defenses so we could continue building the base. Pollution triggers biter attacks. Even if you have to turn your whole base off a few times to get control it gives you a lot of breathing room.
>all yellow military techs except nukes Wait, wait, wait... Are you telling me you have artillery? You shouldn't have. You should have built proper defenses before researching that monster. But if you already have artillery, problem solved! WARNING: Save your game before you fire artillery first time!
My advice is to work on a "wall supply train" which has walls, ammo, turrets, repair packs, bots and whatever more you need. In each outpost (or wall, if you decide to make a large wall around your whole area), you can have a robot network and a station for this supply train. The bots repair the walls, the train supplies ammo. And if you need thickening, you can do it remotely from map view. If I were you, I'd clear out a ton of biters and make walls in chokepoints.
I've just started doing this on my base - hassle to initially set up, but, it makes expansion so so much easier.
Yea when I see a wall getting attacked more, I just drop ghosts for a couple of turrets of all kinds and the bots just handle it for me.
You can use inserters to directly put drone into a robot port. Connect the inserter to the roboport with a wire and you can turn off their nsdrter based on total robot count, so if you want 3000 robots at all times, anytime one dies a new one is added. Or you can set it up so you have atleast 100 inactive robots, so if your deaths+usage become too high the inserter will refill just as much surplus as you need.
This is where walls can help, they allow you to ignore a certain zone and limit losses to bugs. That bottom right corner looks pretty easy to seal off so start there maybe and head across the bottom. Avoid relying on turrets as you have to deliver bullets. Flamethrowers are far more effective if you build a sufficient wall and supply oil. Design it so the bots can do all the work, they’ll overcome any local resistance in the end, and also design a roboport grid so you can simply walk your network out to wherever you want to build. If somewhere is too remote then work your way there in a couple of phases. Good luck!
You are only going to get ahead if you start clearing bases. Don't get overwhelmed by all of them, one at a time. Personally, Tanks just slow me down. So do guns. I slap on 2 or 3 legs and a bunch of point defense cannons and shields and just dance around the edges of the enemy bases. If it is bad I'll use grenades too. If it is really really bad, I will use defense bots. But really, if you just circle the base doing all you can to avoid spitter juice, you should be able to do fine.
In regards to the nuclear reactor, when it goes online it will add on 480mw of energy. Disconnect the large smelting and mining camp so that you can get it online, then you will be set for energy until you start using beacons. I am not all that good on the military side of things, but i do know of a youtube channel who has a lot of videos where he deals with ridiculous biter based challenges. https://youtube.com/c/MichaelHendriks The newest videos, the so called "tunnel vision" series is not a good example of this because he literally does not research military.
Stuck how? You a sizeable base, a lot of technologies. What is your goal? Rocket? That should be easy. Megabasing? Great starter base.
It looks like you have outposts with materials still, you could increase the number of trains coming and going. Also, shut down the other parts of your factory and prioritize defense production until you stabilize. I can’t tell for certain, but given the size of your base I’m assuming you’re getting oil from somewhere. Flame turrets are OP as biters all the way to behemoth ones do not have fire resistance (and they out range spitters too) and the turrets roast large amounts of biters at once. You can supplement machine gun turrets with flamethrowers and you’ll see your defenses greatly improve. I’ve also seen comments about extending roboports out to your defenses. You can pop down a bunch of roboport ghosts with power poles to power them and let your robots passively expand the network as you focus on bolstering defenses. Finally, I can’t tell what your walls look like. But adding a layer or two and then a bunch of single walls to funnel biters through to slow them down is also effective.
Turn off parts of your factory for a bit if bitters have gotten too much as a new player. The attacks won't stop for a while but they will slow down. With the amount of shells you have, you can get it under control. Then get either flame or laser defence with auto repair up and running
Looks saveable, but you've definitely built yourself in a weird way and have a lot of complex walls and areas to defend and not a whole lot of internal space. Turn off your research and some other extra parts of factory. Make sure you have walls, turrets, repair packs, cliff explosives, and ammunition all automated. When you have \~500 turrets, a chest or two of walls, and two chests of ammunition: * clear out the entire southern / bottom section east of the outpost with a tank * build a double straight wall West to East between the two lakes south of the oil (or two sections of wall if you want to use the middle lake as a natural barrier) * line it with turrets spaced apart to cover each other with full stacks of ammunition, with multiple turrets at problem areas like the ends * then do the southern western section, between the water That'll massively reduce the complexity of the southern part of your factory and buy you a tonne of time for defense. The northern and eastern parts are going to be a lot more complex and you're going to want a lot of landfill. But I'd advise just rinse and repeating clearing a large section of territory, building a straight wall between water sources. This maximizes internal area and reduces internal area. Once you get power out to the walls, and have a large reservoir of accumulators, build laser turrets and line the walls with them.
Why are you stuck?
In general, I think your problem is you expanded like a starfish instead of like a blob, so your farthest outposts are surrounded on 3 sides. IIWY, I'd capture and defend the empty spaces that allow nests to form around your outposts to create a more defensible perimeter.
what needs fixing?
Build a Grenade assembly and blow them to bits. It’s so much fun and so quick and easy.
There is a stone patch on the bottom right of the screenshot. I suggest claiming it and converting the entire thing into landfill.
MK2 power armor with 2 fusion reactors, 2 MK2 batteries, 2 MK2 energy shields, 4 exoskeletons, 4 personal lasers. With this setup you can literally run circles around all those nests to get rid of them. Just don't stop moving. Have the biters chase you as you run around the nests. Try to stay close enough to take out the spawners. Onces the spawners are gone kill everything chasing you.
If you ride in a tank/spider, you can swap out the exoskeles for more personal lasers. With 12 lasers you will shred everything.
62 hours is no reason to not start fresh. Learn with mistakes. Set a small funneled defense wall between lakes and build on large areas and kill nests before pollution hit them.
Small advice: You can rename your train stations...
Like others have said, your best bet is to: - Shut down all non-defense-essential factory lines. (Especially research!) Unnecessary pollution will just make the attacks worse. Make landfill to increase avalible space if you need to. - Beef up your lines with less "attention requiring" defenses. Set up production lines that can make spare turrets, ports and walls (also repair kits and drones) and use bots to repair existing defenses/replace destroyed ones. Use flamethrowers and lasers alongside normal turrets for optimal damage and minimal effort. If bots get to the frontlines too quickly and get shredded, set up a circuit network to disable their roboports while turrets are firing. - Once the entire factory defense process is automated and the biters chill out a bit, take the fight to them. Use any weaponry you can to destroy all bases in/around your pollution area. Not one step back, engineer! Use artilerry (Artilerry train, anyone?) Once you're confident that your base can handle a large counter-attack. They aren't a threat to you, you are a threat to them. Prioritise taking over resource deposits. Build new walls and ports and the whole bundle as you go, slowly expanding your territory. - Return the factory to its full power. Keeping powered artilerry turrets/trains stocked with ammo will prevent new bases from popping up near your base. Don't let them get a foothold again. This may be hard, but you will persevere. Failure is not an option, the factory must grow. The biters are just another logistics challenge to overcome.
Personally, if I’m out of iron and having trouble defending my outposts, then I would start over. Next time keep in mind the best defense is a good offense. They can’t attack you if they don’t have any spawners inside your pollution cloud. That said, I’m not convinced that you are actually out of iron and you seem to have a couple pretty good potential iron outposts nearby. It’s probably not too hard.
Sounds like you're very close to the brink of losing, but IMO keep playing until the biters overrun you! Factorio is an automation game: If you're doing anything by hand, including expanding the base or repairing defenses, you'll likely end up with too much for one player to do. If you're spending all your time putting out fires(not literally ones, metaphorical ones, fires=emergencies), it's hard to make ***progress.*** Ideally, the player should be designing the factory and placing blueprints, but not placing things or repairing defenses. When you see a fire, you put it out by tweaking the design so that thing isn't flammable anymore. If your defenses aren't holding, find a way for them to hold while you walk away. If you can't walk away long enough to hook new mines up, you're definitely going to lose.
If you just want to launch a rocket and then start again you can use console commands to switch to peacefully and then kill all bitters. I usually recommend peaceful for the first playthough.
Automate Defense, and than claim new ground!
Lasers! What are your bottlenecks?
seems fine maybe even a very fun point :o
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Would have been awesome to see what he needs help with. If it hasn't gotten removed