How to approach a hive.

[Ricky]

I'm in a rough spot. I'm on my first world and I'm just not ready to abandon it yet but to progress at all I need oil and the only oil is way north and it's surrounded by biter spawners. Is there any tactics that could make fighting so many at once easier? Also they haven't evolved at all so far my base has not been attacked since I did most of the early mining with no drills and it runs on pure solar during the day.

[Quagmire]

If you don't have a wide rage of weapons at your disposal, you can try a turret-creep. If you have laser turrets; electric pole, surround with turrets, move up and repeat. Awesome tactics for huge clusters of enemies

It can be done with machine gun turrets but you'll have to arrange your ammo, hotkeys well if the base is extensive.

[Fel]

Well, you might want to consider something called "tower creep".

It's a boring but effective way to destroy bases that have up to 5 nests, especially at low evolution factor.

You would probably prefer laser turrets if you have the power to spare (just disconnect the rest of your factory if needed), but gun turrets with armour piercing ammo can also do the trick.

Basically, setup turrets just outside of the aggro range as your "final line of defense", and slowly creep forwards with more turrets, eventually reaching close enough to the nests to fire at them, while the slightly farther away turrets kill the bitters and spitters that those bases spawn to defend themselves.

As I said, it's a boring process, and it kind of burns through either your power or your resources, but it is mostly safe as long as you have enough towers and they can fire at their targets.

It gets significantly less fine when big bitters and spitters start to appear, because you need a massive amount of towers to kill them fast enough, but early-ish it works well.

[MisterSpock]

In med game, powerarmor + personal laserdefense is good. 4 legs make your kiting very strong.

Against nests the flametrower was nerfed very strong. But some ppl told the tank is pretty strong now. I dont know but give it a try.

When i turret creep in med game, i use the personal roboport.

[Fel]

Originally posted by MisterSpock:

In med game, powerarmor + personal laserdefense is good. 4 legs make your kiting very strong.

Against nests the flametrower was nerfed very strong. But some ppl told the tank is pretty strong now. I dont know but give it a try.

When i turret creep in med game, i use the personal roboport.

He specifically stated that he needed oil and that that oil is "protected" by nests, so power armour, flame thrower and roboports are not available to him.

When you do have that, it's definitely nice, it's not applicable to his situation sadly.

[Steelwind]

I tend to use bullet turrets and poison early on. Before poision it is slower but still doable. Drop a couple turrets outside agro range and wrap them in walls. Pull the swarms into the turret then circle around and work down the nest a bit then repeat. Poison is awesome for softening them up (big waves swarming the turrets) and killing the worms.

Oh and grenades. Cheap to make and great for softening up a swarm that you are fleeing. Slow to make but cheap so I try to drop a little crafter to crank them out next to the one that cranks out my ammo.

[loonitun]

if you play in 15 plus. then laser defence on a suit ( 4-5 and 2 battery and a fusion reactor ) then pop in a tank and roll over them biters :D i know mrk 2 suit is a bit far in the game, but should work in a mrk 1 to...

anyhow defence lasers is quite effective

[Citizen Joe]

If you're playing 0.14:

get a bunch of turrets, ideally with a blueprint for a turret emplacement plus 4 personal roboports and 40 construction bots, then start placing down turrets closer and closer to the nests and keep filling them with basc ammo.

If you're playing 0.15:

1. Get a tank and a giant pile of basic ammo like 2k or somethin IDK
2. Ram the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ biter nests while holding down the spacebar and screaming at the top of your lungs
3. Reverse then do it again
4. Don't let the biters chew on your tank too much\
5. Blast them fools

[Name Lips]

It sounds like you're at pre-oil technology, which means your options are limited. If creeping forward with turrets seems too cheaty, you can set up a few defensive "safe spot" turrets and then load up on grenades. Run up to the nests and get the biters following you. Lead them back to the turrets. Then run back to the nests and lob out grenades to whittle them down. Any time things get hairy, run back to the turrets.

[Fel]

So many people answering with "as long as you have tech that you can't have because you don't have oil yet, it's easy".

I will repeat it, but his question includes "but to progress at all I need oil and the only oil is way north and it's surrounded by biter spawners."
This means that even my answer was partially wrong mentionning laser turrets (they need batteries, good luck making them without oil).

Tanks, power armour, flame thrower, all of those are definitely great tools when blasting those nests, but when his tech is pre-oil, he is much more limited in what he can do.

[Steelwind]

grenades, gun turrets, walls, lots of ammo :p

[Name Lips]

Side note: I thought you always started with a nearby oil well or two, or is that only if you're using RSO?

[Coffee Daemon]

Automate ammo, you'll need alot of it ;D

[Coffee Daemon]

Originally posted by Name Lips:

Side note: I thought you always started with a nearby oil well or two, or is that only if you're using RSO?

Yes, only RSO guarantees a spawn of every resource. I have found that out once to my peril!

[Fel]

It's fairly rare, kind of like the 1 tile island start, but you can be without oil in the direct starting zone, there have been a few posts about that every now and then.

For people knowing their ways around the game, it's usually not much of a big deal, because at worse you have a nest or two to blow up and you will have oil, but for people that are not that familiar with it and didn't pay attention to that when generating the map, it can be a pretty nasty surprise, when you suddenly notice a few hours in that getting oil is going to be tricky.

[mtilsted]

It depends on the evolution level. If there are medium bitters, you are in trouble.

But if there are only small bitters and spitters you just need 100-200 rounds of ap munition(The red one). Then you just need to hold down space to kill the bitters and spitters, and then you can take out the buildings.