I used to do exclusively 2-4 trains for ages until I realized the slight speed advantage and being an even number weren't really worth it so I just do 1-4 or 1-2s now. Sometimes I'll even do 8 or 16 cars for ores.
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# ? Feb 25, 2023 02:28 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:33 |
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Thank you for the train help. Got that mostly sorted Now to figure out how to make the utility science packs, and probably break more stuff in the process
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# ? Feb 25, 2023 03:28 |
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Made some progress and I'm at 90% researched Rocket Silo, but we have a bit of a monster problem. I've largely been able to avoid combat besides exterminating minor colonies with the tank. However, I've slowly been surrounded by the enemy and not sure on best course of action. Do I make a bunch of explosive shells, repair kits, and take them out with the tank? Or do I make a wall of turrets and get the artillery cannon going? or something else I don't know about. Blue science setup Yellow science setup, I take the components and make the robot bodies and final product in a set of 10 assemblers close by
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 01:32 |
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My strategy for bug hunting is plop down a turret, and load it with ammo. Then put down another one closer, delete the first one and put it closer, until it's close enough to aggro. Run a little closer, fire some explosive rockets at the spawners, retreat into the safety of the turret coverage for the next wave of bugs, and repeat. Then run in with a flamethrower to clear up the spitting worms since they appear to be rocket resistant. I'd use the tank more, but it doesn't have enough range or maneuverability. I mostly use it for driving a path through trees, and wrecking havoc in my base because it takes forever to slow down
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 02:05 |
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goodness posted:Made some progress and I'm at 90% researched Rocket Silo, but we have a bit of a monster problem. I've largely been able to avoid combat besides exterminating minor colonies with the tank. However, I've slowly been surrounded by the enemy and not sure on best course of action. Biters and pollution exist to basically put pressure on you and prevent you the player from simply winning the game by very slowly researching and assembling a handful of things at a time. In order to outpace the biters, eventually you need to remote / automate defenses (turrets), construction/repair of your base and defenses (bots), and even permit remote attacking of biter bases (spidertrons). Incrementally, there are a bunch of tools that you can use to throw back the biter menace and clear bases out of the pollution cloud - combat robots are a mid-game consumable option that will permit you to manually clear out bases with the tank far more effectively, if you aren't ready to set up the wall + artillery, but ultimately the wall of defenses + artillery is the final defensive option, because artillery will prevent biters from expanding into its passive range, and you can (manually) use the artillery remote to clear bases out of a much larger area, to push the line of your defenses forward more quickly and safely than driving out with a tank. In short, you build up your defenses on a side, place (and supply) your artillery, and then use the remote to delete bases and clear an area. Then you can expand into the cleared area, build more defenses, place more artillery, and keep moving forward until you've cleared and expanded past your pollution cloud, at which point you can rely on your passive defenses outside the cloud to prevent biters from expanding into the cloud and getting aggressive. So, if you're close to the point where it would be feasible to get artillery manufacture and supply going, I'd prioritize that - even if you get the rocket research finished, you still have to construct the silo, construct all the components for a rocket + satellite, and then launch, which is a whole lot of assembly that you probably don't have done yet, and if you're unsure about your ability to hold out against the biters, you should probably consider rapidly reinforcing your defensive situation first, because artillery pays off in spades in terms of letting you handle things without having to spend time driving out manually clearing bases. edit: The General posted:My strategy for bug hunting is plop down a turret, and load it with ammo. Then put down another one closer, delete the first one and put it closer, until it's close enough to aggro. Run a little closer, fire some explosive rockets at the spawners, retreat into the safety of the turret coverage for the next wave of bugs, and repeat. Then run in with a flamethrower to clear up the spitting worms since they appear to be rocket resistant. Combat robots are kind of the final missing link. You can deploy them from vehicles, and even when you've gotten to the point where you can field a squad of multiple spidertrons, they're still tremendously useful if you want to manually go out and clear biter bases because the additional damage they put out for you makes advancing into and clearing biter bases much more rapid, and the faster you actually can move into and clear the bases, the less biters that spawn and the less incoming damage you have to worry about. The problem with combat robots is that, as consumables you're going to use in quantity, you really need to devote some assemblers to produce them in quantity and spend them, and it feels like some people find them wasteful because eventually they (and tanks) get obsoleted by artillery (and spidertrons). On the other hand, combat robots are fun and having a swarm of 100 destroyers annihilating everything in your path while your extremely resilient speedy robot delivers the death robot swarm is a satisfying and engaging way to manually clear biter bases. Olesh fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Feb 26, 2023 |
# ? Feb 26, 2023 02:23 |
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Or you can go green and only use solar power and put efficiency modules in everything so you don't produce any pollution basically ever
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 02:26 |
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If you're still moving or crafting anything by hand by the time you have yellow/purple science, you need to stop doing that and automate it.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 03:26 |
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KillHour posted:If you're still moving or crafting anything by hand by the time you have yellow/purple science, you need to stop doing that and automate it. I feel like combat robots sit in this weird spot where it's early enough that people craft them by hand to try them out, are kind of disappointed with them, and never bother to invest further, especially seeing that the next "upgrade" in the chain doesn't even move and the defenders you start with are one robot at a time. Which is a shame, because destroyer robots are quite fun to use! But if you can research destroyer robots, you can almost certainly also research artillery and start working on a more permanent automated solution.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 04:40 |
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I was talking more about the part of that science setup where they're hand moving parts.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 04:48 |
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Shooting shells out of the tank is useful but maybe not fun. Instead I like to drive the tank through the middle of biter bases throwing grenades and poison capsules out the window at anything that isn't run over. Robo capsules are like automated grenades. You don't strictly need them with stuff like artillery and rocket launcher nukes but they're worth trying for funs sake because they tend toward more interesting than artillery and rocket nukes. Same with power armor laser defense. One is neat. Multiple are a bug zapper. Fill them in a spidertron grid, not because it's optimized but because it's hilarious.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 04:51 |
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Tank shells are pretty useful against worms. You can build a base of fire with turrets and then use the tank for luring the enemies to it, instead of having to kite them around while you kill them with the tank's machine gun.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 05:08 |
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One thing to keep in mind when looking at defenses is that damage upgrades (for most weapon types) affect both the ammo damage and the turret damage, which multiply against each other, so bullet damage upgrades end up far outpacing other types (particularly lasers) before you even get into endgame research. So if you're shooting red bullets out of your gun and don't think they're doing much, remember that turrets will do much more damage with the same ammo. And if you haven't done the damage researches then get them done and see how much easier your life gets. I think it's worth trying out all the offensive options and seeing what works for you, many people settle on the tank although I personally find it too slow and limiting.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 08:37 |
The General posted:My strategy for bug hunting is plop down a turret, and load it with ammo. Then put down another one closer, delete the first one and put it closer, until it's close enough to aggro. Run a little closer, fire some explosive rockets at the spawners, retreat into the safety of the turret coverage for the next wave of bugs, and repeat. Then run in with a flamethrower to clear up the spitting worms since they appear to be rocket resistant. Get the Helicopter mod and annihilate biter bases in screaming rocket strafing runs. It's the best.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 21:28 |
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goodness posted:Do I make a bunch of explosive shells, repair kits, and take them out with the tank? Early on it's mass grenades. Slightly later, a tank, but then there's a long-ish stretch of time where manually dealing with them is just going to be an attention tax and they'll spread again to where you can't see so you need more clearing. All that takes away from actually building so you're trading a brief moment of safety for an ever-increasing amount of clearing. Once you've unlocked and fully upgraded spidertron and having rockets you can just walk a path of destruction through huge colonies, but that's waaaaay later and used for clearing space for you to use as opposed to defending yourself. quote:Or do I make a wall of turrets and get the artillery cannon going? You're in a reasonably good spot there for walled defenses on the south, southwest, and east sections between bodies of water. Your main base is spherical by virtue of where you put it, which is good for bots. Keep the west as bug territory and worry about expanding east if you plan on going bigger. For walling I've only ever used double-thick walls. Early on there were shooty turrets, then alternating flame+shooty turrets when advanced oil unlocked, then eventually triple-thick lasers at the end with artillery backing. Remote outposts like your coal/iron/oil/copper patches were delivered via push-pull trains and had local defenses at the patch. It looks like your ore patches aren't producing pollution, though, so I'm not sure if they're unpowered or modded or something.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 22:46 |
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Only took 49 hours, but I did it. I launched a rocket.
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# ? Feb 26, 2023 22:58 |
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With which payload? I've got the game about 10 years ago but I've actually only launched my first rocket two weeks ago. I put some fish into the payload laika-style because I was done with my factory and didn't actually want to put up with building a satellite. There's an achievement for that.
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# ? Feb 27, 2023 10:05 |
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No payload. I just wanted to be done by that point. I think the last 8-10 hours was mostly just waiting for things to be constructed. My factory was so very fuckered up, and the idea of fixing it was too daunting, so it was mostly just limping along to the victory screen. I plan on playing again, should go easier now that I have a roughly better idea on how to setup production lines. Missed out on 2 achievements by a smidgen. I only built one laser turret, and I don't think it even saw any action :vv: and I think I had 4 or 5 solar panels for an early game oiljack when I thought maybe I'd power each outpost on its own.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 00:05 |
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The General posted:No payload. I just wanted to be done by that point. I think the last 8-10 hours was mostly just waiting for things to be constructed. My factory was so very fuckered up, and the idea of fixing it was too daunting, so it was mostly just limping along to the victory screen. Nice! Way to go! Tons of people bounce off their first playthrough around Blue Science (adding oil is tough) and even less make it through to the end. Launching that rocket feels so good! There are generally two routes people taking after launching that first rocket: Either stay Vanilla and start achievement hunting (with There is no Spoon being the big one) or mod the absolute gently caress out of the game. Both are super fun! Building blueprints and learning how to optimize poo poo for a No Spoon run is super fun - I did it and it's one of my all time favorite Steam Achievements I've ever gotten. On the other hand, there's so, so, so many great quality of life mods that playing strict vanilla is impossible to go back to at this point. If you're interested in achievements you might want to hold off on mods for a bit for that reason.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 00:43 |
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I'm still itching to restart without biters and go for a proper megabase. I had the last bit walled in and sorted but I spent so many hours (and bot lives) building that massive defensive wall that by the time the trains where in place I burned out just as I was setting up a massive oil processing facility. Never even got to mess with LTN. :/ As fun as it was dealing with biters as a logistical problem I feel like once you've solved that there's no point in having them. Easier to declare victory, grab some block-aligned blueprints, and restart.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 01:22 |
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Mailer posted:I'm still itching to restart without biters and go for a proper megabase. I had the last bit walled in and sorted but I spent so many hours (and bot lives) building that massive defensive wall that by the time the trains where in place I burned out just as I was setting up a massive oil processing facility. Never even got to mess with LTN. :/ This is exactly where I'm at. Biters just aren't compelling gameplay. I'm constrained by the amount of free time I have and how much I can focus, and the tedium of biters doesn't add anything. Now I actually need to make the megabase.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 01:37 |
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For the bigger content mods I've taken to playing with biters enabled for the early game, and then getting rid of them via console command when they stop being a challenge and start being an annoyance. You can also turn off pollution at that point too, getting rid of both made a noticeable improvement to lag on a lategame pyanodon multiplayer base.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 01:47 |
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Personally im inclined to go with passive biters or maybe passive + some reduction on their expansion? It's nice to have an excuse to still engage with military, but I suppose even that can still turn into busywork.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 02:07 |
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Oxyclean posted:It's nice to have an excuse to still engage with military, but I suppose even that can still turn into busywork. They're an interesting problem to solve, initially. You learn what defensive structures work/don't work, you learn how to clear them out, and you tech up in the arms race to defend your planetary exploitation. In a normal just-launch-the-rocket game they can be a fun complication. It just stops being fun when they're a 100% solved problem. The end of my last game: I have no idea how many thousands of lasers that is, but it's a lot. Stacking another four reactors to ensure steady power for the megabase was planned, but I barely even got started building said megabase before I burned out from the insane number of hours building a border. If you squint my bots in the east are getting poached, which now means I have to expand further and at this point screw it just turn them off. Somewhere in the northeast is a flame turret that I was so proud of I built around it instead of tearing it down. It has something like 30k kills.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 08:10 |
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If you don't want a perfectly rectangular base but still want bot repairs the way to go is individual logistics networks supplied by mixed cargo trains. This also lets you ship in ammo so you don't need everything connected even with big lakes breaking up the walls and you can stick an artillery wagon on it as well.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 08:28 |
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New chip looking SPICY There's some bug with the chiplet affinity by default on the 7950x3d so wait for the 7800 next month but this should allow for megabases almost double the size? Spicy indeed.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 18:01 |
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For megabase biter defence I always use outposts instead of a wall. Just a small train station with artillery and defences. The artillery takes out all nearby bases and the biters attack the defence base instead of walking past in most situations. Specifically for at least as long as the defence strongpoints are outside of the pollution spread. It has automatic ammunition and repair delivery. And in case I miss something, I can dispatch a few defence spiders that can repair the tracks, strongpoints and each other. Though I haven't played with biters on for quite some time.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 18:45 |
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The issue with that I've found is every once in a while there'll be an attack triggered by a passing train and you'll lose the engine or even worse the power line which then shuts off defenses at the outpost. Probably making a kill squad of 6+ spidertrons loaded out with rockets then piloting them remotely is best. Either that or sinking tons of science into artillery range.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 19:57 |
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:The issue with that I've found is every once in a while there'll be an attack triggered by a passing train and you'll lose the engine or even worse the power line which then shuts off defenses at the outpost. Probably making a kill squad of 6+ spidertrons loaded out with rockets then piloting them remotely is best. Either that or sinking tons of science into artillery range. That is why you have normal turrets and emergency solars at the outpost. And once you got a few levels in artillery range, it stops happening anyway.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 20:07 |
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You can punch above your weight in artillery range with some train arty and pillbox blueprints. Or roving gangs of spidertrons. But you can also just type the delete biters command into the command line after your first gaggle of unlimited tech. I'd play with at least some biter toys before this point but most of the big brain arty and spidertron solutions are varying ways to just make biters not exist while not troubling the player not unlike the command line.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 20:26 |
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my LTN install got messed up somehow and now all of my stations are basically ignoring what they're wired to and just requesting poo poo without any regard for the quotas or limits I set between that and the Angelbob's update that changed the buildings needed for a bunch of recipes, I've been spending days just running around between my hundreds of train stations fixing up issues i'm in hell
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 20:34 |
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zedprime posted:You can punch above your weight in artillery range with some train arty and pillbox blueprints. Or roving gangs of spidertrons. Yes, I built that automated pillbox system in one game. With me planting down a blueprint and building the train stops from my inventory, and then trains automatically arriving and bringing turrets, ammo, walls and all that stuff. And in the next game I just turned off biters from the start. Though I actually enjoy designing late game defence automatisation more then I enjoy slapping down improvised walls in the early and late game. So turning off biters in the middle of the game is something I never did, except for ups reasons.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 20:49 |
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That does sound a bit like you would be able to turn on/off biters during a game? I'd appreciate that. I usually really dislike biters until I get laser turrets, because delivering ammo to gun turrets is tiresome. So i usually just end up with large starting areas to keep biters out of the early game.
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 07:09 |
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Darox posted:If you don't want a perfectly rectangular base but still want bot repairs the way to go is individual logistics networks supplied by mixed cargo trains. Since the bots being idiots is a technical limitation I just grabbed a mod that gives them a ton of energy. Generally gets them where they're going without worrying about localized networks. Once you have everything moving via train it's probably a lot more realistic, but my base was still in the phase where everything was built in a clusterfuck of a mall still and the bots needed to pull from that. I'll probably use localized nets for building efficient production facilities but that's once the train grid is up and running.
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 08:04 |
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What's a good way to take large screenshots? I've made a stupidly baroque forge that is too large to fit in one screen.
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 09:19 |
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Solumin posted:What's a good way to take large screenshots? I've made a stupidly baroque forge that is too large to fit in one screen. Open the console and type /screenshot X Y zoom This will take a screenshot of X * Y pixels (centered around your location). Zoom 1 is default, 0.5 is half size,etc... (the screenshot will still be X * Y, but you will see twice as much). The screenshots are saved in your user directory, where your savegames are.
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 09:39 |
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Excellent, thanks!
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 09:51 |
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Wipfmetz posted:That does sound a bit like you would be able to turn on/off biters during a game? I'd appreciate that. You can sort of turn them off with console commands by deleting all current enemies and then disabling enemy generation in new chunks. https://wiki.factorio.com/Console#Prevent_biters_being_on_newly_generated_chunks What I’ve started doing is low frequency with max time between expansions, and only destroying biter nests causes evolution. This makes them a non-issue early on but as I tech up and push out later game the density can ramp up.
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 15:37 |
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If I kill the biter buildings but leave the worms, do the buildings grow back there faster? Or does it block future buildings from being created there?
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 19:33 |
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As I build out a megabase and expand for resources, I get kind of annoyed at the work required to clear out territory. But I also enjoy the idea of having artillery on the frontier that's constantly pushing back against the expanding biters. But I'm currently playing with biter expansion disabled. And the range on artillery just isn't long enough to clear out areas based on how far part resources are with rail world settings. Hmmm, maybe there's a mod that will double artillery range or something...
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# ? Mar 1, 2023 21:08 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:33 |
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I really wish I could turn off (or strongly deprioritize) the missing construction material alert for concrete. I want to know what other materials the job site still needs, I know it's missing 600 concrete still.
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 04:12 |