Strategy issues

[smaraGdine]

Hey lads, I have a question, what sort of defense set-up should I do if I want to have my Nuclear Complex and Desolate Rift maps not get conquered after I beat those maps? I keep upping and upping the amount of turrets and defenses and re-beating the maps, but they keep getting defeated after I leave them alone for a while. It is getting INSANELY annoying.

Also, how do I beat the harder Attack maps? There was this one map where I was setting up an attack against a base with Foreshadows and Ripples, but they started sending Horizons and I had very little defensive power while building my army of T3 ground units. How do you deal with Air units effectively, and what units beat Foreshadows and Ripples with shields?

[PunCrathod]

Originally posted by Shrekker:

Hey lads, I have a question, what sort of defense set-up should I do if I want to have my Nuclear Complex and Desolate Rift maps not get conquered after I beat those maps? I keep upping and upping the amount of turrets and defenses and re-beating the maps, but they keep getting defeated after I leave them alone for a while. It is getting INSANELY annoying.

To stop the ever increasing waves from happening you have to destroy enemy bases adjacent to the sector.

Originally posted by Shrekker:

Also, how do I beat the harder Attack maps? There was this one map where I was setting up an attack against a base with Foreshadows and Ripples, but they started sending Horizons and I had very little defensive power while building my army of T3 ground units. How do you deal with Air units effectively, and what units beat Foreshadows and Ripples with shields?

Use higher tier units/towers/ammo. Also certain enemy air units will prioritize different targets. For example power generators and batteries etc. So if you build a bait generator and a bait battery in your main defensive position it will bait those units. Also ammo combos are a thing. For example if you spray water on enemies then electric attacks deal more damage. Or cryo fluid and blast or tar and fire.

[lonesh33p]

Disclaimer: no right or wrong way to play, the fun is in finding your own path, blah blah. But some paths are probably quicker than others.

Infinite Defense: AFAIK, the only way to stop an adjacent enemy base from taking your sector back is to capture the attacking base. Otherwise the waves the enemy sends just keep getting stronger and stronger until your defenses are crushed. (What is the plural of corvus, anyway?)

But you can't go wrong with lots of sped-up foreshadows. At least in the shorter term.

The quickest way to complete the campaign is probably to just let Desolate Rift, Nuclear Production Complex, and Impact 0078 fall, then optionally recapture them and the adjacent sectors after you've unlocked everything. But it is a bigger (and hence better?) challenge to capture the adjacent sectors first.

Harder Attack Maps: @bojinah has a lot of good advice in v6 common questions and answers His suggestion of mass Quads seems to work very well. Almost like cheating. Each core sends one boss; if you can destroy at least one core before the first boss wave, you can get by with substantially less defense.

[InvalidError]

What wave are you losing Nuclear on? Last time I lost it was on wave 350+ because a couple of bosses decided to slip by the northern edge of the map, outside my defences' range and they were too far for my eclipses to catch up with them by the time I noticed.

On the plus side, once you have a solid base going, reconstructing is a simple (though annoying) matter of setting up a poly factory in a relatively safe location near necessary resources, launch resources from wealthy maps to make sure reconstruction doesn't run out of materials and then you are all-set for another 300+ waves with little manual effort beyond restarting your most critical infrastructure.

For conquering tough optional sectors, you'll definitely want to launch a core design with a couple of RTGs and at least poly manufacturing baked-in to get the construction speedup ASAP. I do the bulk of clearing using a turret creep strategy until hail and ripples prevent further ground progress, then send the air forces to clear some ground, rinse and repeat until the construction exclusion zone. After that, Horizon swarms have been the most effective thing I've tried. They get wiped out by heavily defended cores but cause enough damage and distraction for other units to live long enough to finish the job.

[smaraGdine]

Originally posted by InvalidError:

What wave are you losing Nuclear on? Last time I lost it was on wave 350+ because a couple of bosses decided to slip by the northern edge of the map, outside my defences' range and they were too far for my eclipses to catch up with them by the time I noticed.

On the plus side, once you have a solid base going, reconstructing is a simple (though annoying) matter of setting up a poly factory in a relatively safe location near necessary resources, launch resources from wealthy maps to make sure reconstruction doesn't run out of materials and then you are all-set for another 300+ waves with little manual effort beyond restarting your most critical infrastructure.

For conquering tough optional sectors, you'll definitely want to launch a core design with a couple of RTGs and at least poly manufacturing baked-in to get the construction speedup ASAP. I do the bulk of clearing using a turret creep strategy until hail and ripples prevent further ground progress, then send the air forces to clear some ground, rinse and repeat until the construction exclusion zone. After that, Horizon swarms have been the most effective thing I've tried. They get wiped out by heavily defended cores but cause enough damage and distraction for other units to live long enough to finish the job.

I believe it was Wave 120 or something like that.

Yeah, I have tried 226 like 5 times, I get to a point where I can build a dozen T4 units, but usually the attack falls short and by the time I'm ready to attack again, it's wave 100 and the enemy has the same strategy of going around with a T4 Quad and nuking my infrastructure. I can't afford to build so many Meltdowns around my factory.
Is it even possible to get to a T5 by wave 60? Should I attempt that? It feels more of an arms race than anything. I mean, there's no way 6 Spectres, a Meltdown, a few Fuzes and a dozen Salvos can deal with a T5 crawler and a few T4s.

[smaraGdine]

NO WAIT NEVERMIND I LOST IMPACT 0078 LOOOL

[InvalidError]

Originally posted by Shrekker:

Is it even possible to get to a T5 by wave 60? Should I attempt that? It feels more of an arms race than anything. I mean, there's no way 6 Spectres, a Meltdown, a few Fuzes and a dozen Salvos can deal with a T5 crawler and a few T4s.

You can technically get T5 right off the bat if you launch with the necessary resources to feed everything from the core and funnel resources from multiple sectors to keep it going until you can build self-sustaining local infrastructure, though it'll be quite a few waves before the first T5 comes out and you still need to setup a few necessities such as 90+/s of cryo fluid.

When re-capturing a map, you should also be able to get back to T5 early as long as the necessary infrastructure is far enough out of the bosses' usual path for a quick poly reconstruction. If you have secondary T3 air unit factories, you can switch the additive building's direction (drop a copy of the building directly on top in the new desired direction to change its orientation, instantaneous and free, doesn't even lose progress on the current unit) to pump out some polys before going back to its normally intended T3 or greater units.

When I lost Nuclear Complex, I think I was back to pumping out Eclipses and Octs by wave #50. I set up my core to pump polys, let the polys deal with overall base reconstruction while I got enough defences back up to handle early waves, cleaned up some crap around my destroyed base before polys attempt to rebuild it and got a head-start on reconstructing the most critical spots ahead of the poly fleet pitching in.

[smaraGdine]

Originally posted by InvalidError:

Originally posted by Shrekker:

Is it even possible to get to a T5 by wave 60? Should I attempt that? It feels more of an arms race than anything. I mean, there's no way 6 Spectres, a Meltdown, a few Fuzes and a dozen Salvos can deal with a T5 crawler and a few T4s.

You can technically get T5 right off the bat if you launch with the necessary resources to feed everything from the core and funnel resources from multiple sectors to keep it going until you can build self-sustaining local infrastructure, though it'll be quite a few waves before the first T5 comes out and you still need to setup a few necessities such as 90+/s of cryo fluid.

When re-capturing a map, you should also be able to get back to T5 early as long as the necessary infrastructure is far enough out of the bosses' usual path for a quick poly reconstruction. If you have secondary T3 air unit factories, you can switch the additive building's direction (drop a copy of the building directly on top in the new desired direction to change its orientation, instantaneous and free, doesn't even lose progress on the current unit) to pump out some polys before going back to its normally intended T3 or greater units.

When I lost Nuclear Complex, I think I was back to pumping out Eclipses and Octs by wave #50. I set up my core to pump polys, let the polys deal with overall base reconstruction while I got enough defences back up to handle early waves, cleaned up some crap around my destroyed base before polys attempt to rebuild it and got a head-start on reconstructing the most critical spots ahead of the poly fleet pitching in.

How did you get enough resources for both Octs and Eclipses?

[InvalidError]

Originally posted by Shrekker:

How did you get enough resources for both Octs and Eclipses?

Simple: use the same factory for both by switching the base unit every now and then. Another option is to use payload routers to automatically switch T1s or T2s around.

[InvalidError]

BTW, I lost Impact too while doing Terminal despite having a couple of Eclipses there and I'm pretty sure that Impact run hadn't even reached wave 100. By wave #5 of my re-capture, my T5 manufacturing was already back up.

A bunch of my conquered maps mysteriously reset a week ago and the spawn point got in the bad spot (middle of the map instead of corner) on both Impact and Nuclear this time, which means one more side for bosses to leak through from. I may end up abandoning both sectors if I end up losing them prematurely again until I get the corner spawn.

[smaraGdine]

Anyone got some pics on how they set-up their base? I'd like to steal some of your ideas for more efficiency.

[InvalidError]

Not much special about what I'm doing: surge wall, wall of Meltdowns with shield generators, repair blocks to keep the walls up, cryo supply for the whole thing, a few batteries to keep things up if some in-between power nodes go down, some Foreshadows on the back row and some Spectres too. Once all of that is set up, I start making Eclipses and Octs to stack on top of my Meltdown wall. Adding overdrives also helps if you can spare the power.

Foreshadows are usually the last thing I put down since I rarely have surge-alloy to spare, especially once I'm doing T5s under an overdrive dome.

As for what that looks like:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2877174037

Pretty much everything is hidden by Eclipses and Octs surrounding the enemy spawn point. All you can see is the Meltdowns melting down the mob pack. I only got water going to meltdowns on this run due to running out of space around the only nearby titanium source and cannot be bothered to fix it up now that I cannot see a damned thing :)

[lonesh33p]

Originally posted by Shrekker:

Anyone got some pics on how they set-up their base? I'd like to steal some of your ideas for more efficiency.

Some bad_example / how_not_to_do-it screenshots. I didn't take any shots during build / attack. Here some conveyor / power lines have been cut / rerouted for farming**. You can sort of guess how it was before. Per usual I embraced bojianh's quad rush approach. (Although with 3 enemy bases, rush might not be the correct term.

Sector 24 base: Note the inelegant dual overdrive domes - one for RTGs and a second for factories.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2877585768
Sector 24 defense: Brute force with tons of turrets. Note the overdrive dome.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2877583520

**even though I apparently had launch pads unlocked and presumably was getting most resources that way.

[Cylix]

The harder attack maps had me stymied for a while but I hadn't realized you can launch a 15x15 pre-built base from sectors with the highest level core. The guide Mindustry Achievement Guide [6.0] has a couple base schematics and one has up to a T4 factory with an accelerator already built. You'll need to get cryofluid producers and probably a few more reactors to power everything and enough defense to fend stuff off the earlier waves, but it can build quads quick and once you have a couple if you're against ground units only you can fend them off long enough to get a full quad group to suicide bomb a core. Hopefully you'll have a few survivors to take back home, repairs and get read for the next bombing run.

To keep up enough resources you'll need to have other sectors feeding them. You can also launch from a core with 8x vaults around it so even with the resources taken up by the base schematic you'll have a good starting stock. I'm not 100% sure how resources transfer works; it seems like every sector that isn't active has calculations done in a large batch so you can switch sectors to set up resources shipments and switch back with no time having passed, or if you switch away at the wrong time even if you're only gone a few seconds an entire set of waves will be calculated and you'll lose a bunch of buildings if not the entire sector.

Even with this, the 4x core sectors will still pretty tough and I did a lot of save/loading when bombing runs went wrong. I've also tried to build T5 units but I'm not sure how much better they did vs. a 9x group of T4, though because of the shield I think I'd have more survivors even though I went in with fewer units. I've also heard stuff about a blast compound bombing strategy that was also nerfed at some point? Maybe loading up quads with it could be viable as I already lose quite a few and maybe it'd guarantee the base goes down, but I haven't tried so I don't know how it works.

A few people have mentioned if you're still early in the tech trees capturing Nuclear Facility and then letting it get taken just to progress the tech trees isn't a bad idea. You'll need to retake it later and after I had everything unlocked I was finally able to retake that large cluster of attack sectors so that entire region is now safe.

[InvalidError]

Originally posted by Cylix:

I'm not 100% sure how resources transfer works; it seems like every sector that isn't active has calculations done in a large batch so you can switch sectors to set up resources shipments and switch back with no time having passed

From the look of it, the game calculates a production vs export rate while the map is active and periodically applies that. Though there seems to be some wonkiness going on with the production rates since I often see the "stats" saying I'm not producing certain resources despite having a production zone or two dedicated to sending said resources to the core and the conveyors not being clogged up so the production should have been 200+/min.

Maybe the calculation is getting screwed up by my mlog unloader managing what gets dumped into launchers from the core to keep my cores at 90% of max capacity.

BTW, if you leave a sector early to update launchers on other maps, make sure to set up some basic defences first since there is a chance the "away simulation" may decide that the AI drone got your core. Happened to me two or three times before I realized what was going on. The last time, I still had over 3min to go before wave 1 and got the message about losing the map less than 1min after going to other maps where I was pausing the game as soon as I zoned in so there shouldn't have been more than a few seconds of game time going by. Seems like AI drones are 1000X more effective than player drones at destroying cores.

[Vigilante]

when defending a teritory the game allocates a decent amount of def worth to the units you have built so make sure your chucking out the hiest tier u can in nuke to keep it back longer