Flying hordes - how to deal with them?

[Swato85]

What are your strategies to defeating flying hordes? E. G.: 400+ on insane. There is no dedicated anti-air defense for masses like the flamer is for ground bugs (no Flak turrets) . I allways end up with severley burnt droids and some dead animals. Are the gun turrets the only effective option or is there also anykind of inteligent longterm solution to those masses? Or is the primitive approach of gun count the only way? Thank you.

[Actual Malice]

We feel your pain. Every turret, trap and turbine was destroyed when 215 hummingflies descended on my camp midway through year three on Insane/chaos. Game over. I had to put the game aside for a week, before I could bear to boot it up again, as I thought things had been going well up to that point.

AA for hummingflies, I like it.

Barring that, though, it appears to be a turrets arms race. My six turrets (excluding flamethrowers) were clearly insufficient, so I am assuming, as tommy_b_schmidt has suggested, that closer to 20 are necessary. But I, too, would be interested in others' solutions to the hummingfly hordes, if there are any.

[Swato85]

Originally posted by Actual Malice:

We feel your pain. Every turret, trap and turbine was destroyed when 215 hummingflies descended on my camp midway through year three on Insane/chaos. Game over. I had to put the game aside for a week, before I could bear to boot it up again, as I thought things had been going well up to that point.

AA for hummingflies, I like it.

Barring that, though, it appears to be a turrets arms race. My six turrets (excluding flamethrowers) were clearly insufficient, so I am assuming, as tommy_b_schmidt has suggested, that closer to 20 are necessary. But I, too, would be interested in others' solutions to the hummingfly hordes, if there are any.

The only effective method that I can share for the moment is to build an enclosed balcony. With one entry point and get a stunn pulse rifle. Most of the flies will descend to the height of the opening and group there to shoot into the corridor, where your people with some with pulse rifles canhave them all grouped together, so every shot effectively stuns 15-30 flies. This helped me a lot. So for the moment, pulse rifles for their stun and a balcony with one entry to group at least most of the flies together for the mass stun effect. It is not perfect, you will get hurt and a lot, but you will survive and with far less burns than when facing them in the open area.

[Swato85]

Survived two 400+ fly attacks with this, but it hurts for healing balm still, fly mass attacks are game enders if not forplanned.

[Swato85]

Just found my new defense concept for fighting hummingfly hordes. Survived a 470 attack with 11 burns in total, great, this won me at least two more years of defense capability. The trick was to build a guard tower in my kill path for all survivors. Not the prebuild tower, but an elevated foundation with fully enclosed and roofed house with wooden windows! Windows are only from the killzone side so whoever wants to attack the crew must either climb to the bunker door or attack from the killzone area.

The most important thing: by having all survivors inside this guardtower before the attack begins - HUMMINGFLIES DO NOT ENTER THEIR BEELINE FLY ATTACK FROM ABOVE (do not fly over even low level walls) , but instead remain at 1m altitude and take the path through the killzone maze = I killed most of them with flamethrowers! Some of them started to fly high once the killzone masacre begun but the quantity was manageable.

This is absolute a key finding for me and for anyone who needs to manage flying hordes!

I just hope developers will not ruin this behaviour (hopefully this is intended behaviour) as we have absolutely no other way to manage flying hordes of hundreds.

[injto4ka]

Hmmmmm

[Swato85]

Originally posted by injto4ka:

Hmmmmm

Please do not change this! At least untill we get flak turrets or anything to counter fliers.

[Actual Malice]

So in an effort to deal with this vexing problem, you built a room with a couple of windows on top of an elevated foundation "in your killpath" (picture? killpaths come in all shapes and sizes, so not exactly sure what in a killpath means). Not an iota of extra offense, just build a room to hide the survivors in hopes that the hummingflies would run through the flamethrowers like proper insects? That's either brilliant or crazy, maybe both. :) Either way, I'm resurrecting my massacre save ....

Thank you for sharing.

[Swato85]

Originally posted by Actual Malice:

So in an effort to deal with this vexing problem, you built a room with a couple of windows on top of an elevated foundation "in your killpath" (picture? killpaths come in all shapes and sizes, so not exactly sure what in a killpath means). Not an iota of extra offense, just build a room to hide the survivors in hopes that the hummingflies would run through the flamethrowers like proper insects? That's either brilliant or crazy, maybe both. :) Either way, I'm resurrecting my massacre save ....

Thank you for sharing.

Yeah, thats why I wrote simply killpath, players have lots of their own designs for this. Simply the trapped labyrinth. Will try to post a screen once I am at the coresponding station. I now have hopes that I can actualy survive long enough to win this insane/chaos trading mission ✊. Eitherways I blocked updates for now, just in case someone decides that players got too creative and dont suffer enough 😆, so will patch a new attack behaviour for those flies to ruin the day properly... 😓

[Swato85]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2967479967

[Swato85]

I aint good with posting screenshots. Hopefully you can see the maze structure. I will add next max humms attack when it occures.

[Swato85]

OK, had an attack. a Small one to my surprise, wonder if its something linked to the v01.00 release. Still, the point is visible. Fliers are using pathing of ground units. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2967612080

[Unholy]

I usually just set up a few machine gun units in my base. I'm not sure if Missles or Lasers are any better for dealing with them. The new mechs also can attack the flying hordes if someone is mounted inside them. The downside to mechs being that it takes a while to unlock them and then building them can hurt if you aren't prepared properly. I'm not sure if the item required to make mechs is researchable in the crash landing or trade scenario though, I've only found one so far from scavenging in a crash landing scenario and I've never had anything come up giving me the chance to learn how to make it.

[Paraleo]

Originally posted by Swato85:

Originally posted by injto4ka:

Hmmmmm

Please do not change this! At least untill we get flak turrets or anything to counter fliers.

i didn't use to work like that, probably a bug

[Swato85]

Who knows, but eitherways, direct attack by hundreds of flies at once can almost insta kill anyone over whom they stop. Guns are slow to kill them, one by one, when there are hundreds of them so at least there is somekind of a method how to have a chance.

[Martin]

It is true that even on lower difficulties, hummingflies make the game impossible to play eventually. Even if you're in the best armour.

There are not enough resources in the game map, via discovery or supply, to ultimately defend the base. Unless you're playing peaceful. But esp if you're on insane difficulty, the game should still be difficult to complete, but actually completable.

After 2-3 years, I just restart the game, because it get's to the point it isn't worth my time and effort fighting against impossible odds.. the game is broken in endgame and I'm not really interested in rushing a game to finish it.