Defense Tower roof

[Francesco]

Do defense towers now have roofs? Specifically the concrete and carbon towers? When I build or move these towers it shows a tilted roof above the platform. once they're built the tilt roof disappears. The wooden tower doesn't ever show a roof. Just curious.

[ahsanford]

Carbon towers do. Not sure it's anything other than decorative -- flyers and ground robots have little trouble hitting my survivors in them.

Beginning to rethink how I defend. Too many injuries in gun battles, even with fully loaded out survivors.

Either I need to rely more on disruptive items like missile battery turrets or I need to man the walls with robots and not survivors,

- A

[Paraleo]

roof should give some cover from above I guess, by the way did u get one of those spec ops in the waves with sniper 2.0 its like the maximum of devs trolling players xD, got one of those in the third wave of the playthrough i think.

[Alaskan Glitch]

My experience has been varied. The fliers seem to attack my towers, and not my survivors. Or they will attack other equipment. They only attacked my survivors when they were attacked.

The Stingers, on the other hand, have a ranged attack and always go for my survivors, even when they are in towers.

My typical defense involves setting traps to hold them in place, while my auto turrets and flamethrowers make short work of them. I also have missile batteries covering the entrance triggered by motion sensors. The traps hold the critters in place long enough for me to dispose of them before they do any damage.

I found that four auto-turrets and two missile turrets, along with several traps, at each entrance was more than sufficient to stop even the biggest bug attacks.

With the new addition of the Flak Cannon, it should make it even easier to dispose of fliers.

Now that I can build multiple levels, I will have to rethink my defense. Normally I just placed a turret on a foundation and surrounded it with either a stone or carbon fence so it could shoot over the fence. It was not capable of shooting over a Fortification Wall before, even with foundation support, but with multiple levels now it can.

[ahsanford]

Originally posted by Alaskan Glitch:

My typical defense involves

I see it a bit differently.

Bug defense is still bug defense. Wall off your compouind, keep survivors in towers, invest in durable carbon towers, use snipers, MG turrets / Missile turrets in combination, and -- if you are fortunate enough to find mech cores -- build mechs. Once you have mechs, you can literally go on the offensive against huge bug swarms as they don't all commit to attack when you go out and face them (if you walk in to combat carefully).

But robot defense is very much the opposite of this:

MG turrets get *shredded* by Laser Pistol 2.0 / laser sword / sniper carrying bots + the laser walker. Almost no point in having them for robot attacks after about the 4th or 5th wave unless you have the power to muster 5-7 of them along any possible axis of attack. (I've tried physically moving turrets to amass them this way and it's a huge PITA. I stopped doing it.)

Towers aren't terrific anymore against dudes with rifles. They give cover, they aren't useless etc. but there is a spec ops bot that ever so slightly out-ranges your sniper rifle, and damned if they don't set up shop 10 feet outside of your planted tower position and wound all your dudes. And you obvi can't get closer because (ahem) you're stuck in a tower. I had 3-4 dudes wounded in one battle -- all in towers -- and the towers didn't take a scratch.

And I only have a 1 core mech this playthrough, but it gets chopped to *pieces* against even a modestly armed 6-8 infantry team with crossbows and 2.0 lasers. Really need to find that second mech core so I can build a heavy.

So, here's my strategy against bots now:

1) Flyers have not been a problem at all. Put in a few flak guns, but honestly, snipers take them down pretty well.

2) Missile batteries are now much more useful to effectively stun/knock down dudes carrying the same weapons your team might be carrying. They are a nice deterrent for spec ops bots and they slow down general infantry. I cluster 4 or so on each edge of my base and hammer them when they entering into (their) sniper range.

3) Laser turrets have new life in this version as they have range and can put a hurting on spec ops dudes.

4) I put my dudes on foot outside the gates off to the side of the enemy advance. Once the bots charge my defenses, I attack en masse with 6 dudes with snipers -- specifically targeting their spec ops and walker bots. Normally a bad idea, they will swarm you, etc. but with missile turret cover it works without injuries.

Later strategy simply has to employ combat bots (with sniper rifles) and building *laser* walkers of my own. Both seem to be musts for scale and reach.

- A

[ahsanford]

And one more thing, you simply can't engage infantry in close quarters without major injuries. Laser Pistol 2.0 is ridiculous up close and sword wielders will cut up anyone. I think you need to keep them at a distance and duke it out with them while they attack something that needs a wrench to repair and not a scalpel.

Haven't tried EMP grenades, but it seems like you need to walk into murder range to use those. Terrified to try that. I've seen them completely take out 250 health turrets in 2-3 seconds.

- A

[Francesco]

Originally posted by ahsanford:

Originally posted by Alaskan Glitch:

My typical defense involves

I see it a bit differently.

Bug defense is still bug defense. Wall off your compouind, keep survivors in towers, invest in durable carbon towers, use snipers, MG turrets / Missile turrets in combination, and -- if you are fortunate enough to find mech cores -- build mechs. Once you have mechs, you can literally go on the offensive against huge bug swarms as they don't all commit to attack when you go out and face them (if you walk in to combat carefully).

But robot defense is very much the opposite of this:

MG turrets get *shredded* by Laser Pistol 2.0 / laser sword / sniper carrying bots + the laser walker. Almost no point in having them for robot attacks after about the 4th or 5th wave unless you have the power to muster 5-7 of them along any possible axis of attack. (I've tried physically moving turrets to amass them this way and it's a huge PITA. I stopped doing it.)

Towers aren't terrific anymore against dudes with rifles. They give cover, they aren't useless etc. but there is a spec ops bot that ever so slightly out-ranges your sniper rifle, and damned if they don't set up shop 10 feet outside of your planted tower position and wound all your dudes. And you obvi can't get closer because (ahem) you're stuck in a tower. I had 3-4 dudes wounded in one battle -- all in towers -- and the towers didn't take a scratch.

And I only have a 1 core mech this playthrough, but it gets chopped to *pieces* against even a modestly armed 6-8 infantry team with crossbows and 2.0 lasers. Really need to find that second mech core so I can build a heavy.

So, here's my strategy against bots now:

1) Flyers have not been a problem at all. Put in a few flak guns, but honestly, snipers take them down pretty well.

2) Missile batteries are now much more useful to effectively stun/knock down dudes carrying the same weapons your team might be carrying. They are a nice deterrent for spec ops bots and they slow down general infantry. I cluster 4 or so on each edge of my base and hammer them when they entering into (their) sniper range.

3) Laser turrets have new life in this version as they have range and can put a hurting on spec ops dudes.

4) I put my dudes on foot outside the gates off to the side of the enemy advance. Once the bots charge my defenses, I attack en masse with 6 dudes with snipers -- specifically targeting their spec ops and walker bots. Normally a bad idea, they will swarm you, etc. but with missile turret cover it works without injuries.

Later strategy simply has to employ combat bots (with sniper rifles) and building *laser* walkers of my own. Both seem to be musts for scale and reach.

- A

I completely agree with everything here. With this Hope scenario electronic components become super abundant after a while with my bottleneck becoming metal alloys. Even so I've tried using the mobile turrets. I was lucky enough to get 2 mech cores early on so i got my combat mech (its a difference maker). The robot baddies love to focus on that thing probably because i begin every encounter with a missile salvo but when the robo baddies get to my walls they stop and focus on the mech, I have a missile turret to knock em down when they're that close but then I have 2-4 mobile machine gun turrets that exit my "sally port" and gun them down as they're becoming unstunned. I can cover 100% of my perimeter using this method and the only downfall is the metal alloys required to repair the mech sometimes up to 90-100 per assault so...meh. my combat survivors are typically armed with as many sniper rifles as I can find or create and help in the fight but the mech seems to always be the target. i have a smattering of MG and laser turrets at key spots but those MG turrets DO get knocked down quickly if they draw the focus. Im pretty happy with this scenario, i think i got a luck seed with a nice huge canyon on one side which my base is butted up against cutting off about 35% of the perimeter I had to worry about.