Power Armor Mk2 Anti-bug setup

[streaks_art]

So, I'm building my Mk2's onboard arsenal. I'm thinking that the Discharge Defense is...useless?
I need a trigger for it. Weird. Haven't used it yet since I haven't built the trigger, nor do I know how to use the trigger. You swap up a gun for it?

In anycase, I've only seen my Personal Laser Defense in action. It's currently underwhelming, given my 2 Mk2 shields. Still, it did manage to save a laser turret or two, so that makes me happy.

I hear that 7 Mk2 shields is basically impenetrable, given that you have 2 Portable Fusion Reactors. 2 PFRs feels just about ok. I'm ready to swap my 5 personal solar panels anyway.

I'd like to go beat up some bugs and worms, so this is going to be a lot of trial and error. Unless you guys again give insight. :)

Ditching my tank for now.

Oh, one more thing - I plan on barbequing a bunch of bugs and worms with the flame thrower. Is that even possible?

[Cyborgt]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Cyborgt:

You could always effectively do the same thing by having all those components on you and switching them out for travel/combat use. It'd save you the materials for a second suit at least.

Wow. All these ideas.

*sigh* Well, until I fix 1.) My solid fuel problem and, 2.) my gears supply problem, I won't be able to try these ideas.

If you have any intention of going for the rocket launch victory condition you'll probably be better served by saving your solid fuel or turning it into rocket fuel now rather than using it for anything. Coal isn't used for much and there's generally plenty of it on the map to fuel your boilers.

The rocket is going to take 1050 rocket fuel (including the satellite) which means you'll need to have a spare 10500 solid fuel before you can launch. If you're having trouble getting that now, it's only going to become more troublesome later since oil production degrades over time forcing you to go further and further out to find wells. In my experience, that happened much faster than the ores.

[streaks_art]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Cyborgt:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Wow. All these ideas.

*sigh* Well, until I fix 1.) My solid fuel problem and, 2.) my gears supply problem, I won't be able to try these ideas.

If you have any intention of going for the rocket launch victory condition you'll probably be better served by saving your solid fuel or turning it into rocket fuel now rather than using it for anything. Coal isn't used for much and there's generally plenty of it on the map to fuel your boilers.

The rocket is going to take 1050 rocket fuel (including the satellite) which means you'll need to have a spare 10500 solid fuel before you can launch. If you're having trouble getting that now, it's only going to become more troublesome later since oil production degrades over time forcing you to go further and further out to find wells. In my experience, that happened much faster than the ores.

Wait...oil wells degrade over time???

Between bugs and running out of key components...I think I'm going to lose.

I think a "personal laser defenses inside a tank" setup sort of works against bugs. But three PLDs running for around a little less than a minute sucks up the juice of 2 Mk2 batteries and a portable fusion reactor. If only tank shells weren't so...weak and yet so costly later on the game.

[Cyborgt]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Wait...oil wells degrade over time???

Yup. It never runs out completely but it can drop down to the point where it's only producing 0.1 oil per second. At that point you'll need dozens of oil fields to produce as much as a single high yield oil field. The ores actually can be COMPLETELY mined out though so you have to keep an eye on that and always have a plan in mind for expansion if needed.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Between bugs and running out of key components...I think I'm going to lose.

I think a "personal laser defenses inside a tank" setup sort of works against bugs. But three PLDs running for around a little less than a minute sucks up the juice of 2 Mk2 batteries and a portable fusion reactor. If only tank shells weren't so...weak and yet so costly later on the game.

Well I only had 2 of them in my setup but I needed 2 fusion reactors to provide enough output to handle the rest of my gear. It's unfortunate but quite a lot of the space in your armor has to be used on power generation. I have no idea how much power the personal laser defense burns but if 3 is enough to completely deplete a fusion reactor then they may be even worse than I thought...

In regard to the tank shells being weak, as I understand it people get use out of tanks in the late game as a platform for launching capsules. I never actually used a tank in my playthrough but it's supposedly pretty strong if you use a personal roboport to keep it repaired with drones.

[streaks_art]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Cyborgt:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Wait...oil wells degrade over time???

Yup. It never runs out completely but it can drop down to the point where it's only producing 0.1 oil per second. At that point you'll need dozens of oil fields to produce as much as a single high yield oil field. The ores actually can be COMPLETELY mined out though so you have to keep an eye on that and always have a plan in mind for expansion if needed.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Between bugs and running out of key components...I think I'm going to lose.

I think a "personal laser defenses inside a tank" setup sort of works against bugs. But three PLDs running for around a little less than a minute sucks up the juice of 2 Mk2 batteries and a portable fusion reactor. If only tank shells weren't so...weak and yet so costly later on the game.

Well I only had 2 of them in my setup but I needed 2 fusion reactors to provide enough output to handle the rest of my gear. It's unfortunate but quite a lot of the space in your armor has to be used on power generation. I have no idea how much power the personal laser defense burns but if 3 is enough to completely deplete a fusion reactor then they may be even worse than I thought...

In regard to the tank shells being weak, as I understand it people get use out of tanks in the late game as a platform for launching capsules. I never actually used a tank in my playthrough but it's supposedly pretty strong if you use a personal roboport to keep it repaired with drones.

The 2 main things keeping me from all these great ideas are 1.) the bugs are swarming me, and 2.) I'm always low on iron, despite the fact that I'm drowning in copper, and both my iron and copper mining and furnacing facilities are more or less the same.

Which means I need more iron, probably about double of what my copper production is at. Which means I should expand. But I can't because bugs. And even if I can make a quick iron-rich land grab, I won't be able to defend it because I have more than enough lasers to give my power generation a heart attack or several massive strokes in succession.

With the info you guys gave about oil wells running low...good grief, I'm doomed.

[Cyborgt]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Cyborgt:

Yup. It never runs out completely but it can drop down to the point where it's only producing 0.1 oil per second. At that point you'll need dozens of oil fields to produce as much as a single high yield oil field. The ores actually can be COMPLETELY mined out though so you have to keep an eye on that and always have a plan in mind for expansion if needed.



Well I only had 2 of them in my setup but I needed 2 fusion reactors to provide enough output to handle the rest of my gear. It's unfortunate but quite a lot of the space in your armor has to be used on power generation. I have no idea how much power the personal laser defense burns but if 3 is enough to completely deplete a fusion reactor then they may be even worse than I thought...

In regard to the tank shells being weak, as I understand it people get use out of tanks in the late game as a platform for launching capsules. I never actually used a tank in my playthrough but it's supposedly pretty strong if you use a personal roboport to keep it repaired with drones.

The 2 main things keeping me from all these great ideas are 1.) the bugs are swarming me, and 2.) I'm always low on iron, despite the fact that I'm drowning in copper, and both my iron and copper mining and furnacing facilities are more or less the same.

Which means I need more iron, probably about double of what my copper production is at. Which means I should expand. But I can't because bugs. And even if I can make a quick iron-rich land grab, I won't be able to defend it because I have more than enough lasers to give my power generation a heart attack or several massive strokes in succession.

With the info you guys gave about oil wells running low...good grief, I'm doomed.

Yeah, this stuff takes a bit of planning to do well. You could probably solve your power problems easily enough with another bank of steam engines/boilers until you can get a solar panel/accumulator assembly line going and start filling up empty space with those for "free power." A conveyor belt leading coal to a set of burner inserters works well for keeping the boilers fueled.

In case you don't already know, the optimal ratio seems to be 1 offshore pump with 14 boilers and 10 steam engines. Supposedly 13 boilers is enough most of the time but the system occassionally needs the 14th boiler to keep the water at max temp. I haven't tested this but since it's just 1 boiler being wasted if it's never used, I didn't see it as being worth the trouble.

Once your power issues are solved, you should be able to pretty easily tower creep your way to more iron. It's certainly a potentially significant problem to be short on iron ore. Iron is used in pretty much everything so you need a ton of it. As long as you're still getting in SOME you should be fine though. Just repurpose whatever iron you're bringing in toward whatever your most critical needs are right now (which it sounds like power/turrets are for now) and work on expanding your walls out to the closest iron patch.

It'll help you a lot if you can manage to take out the nests within your pollution radius that seem to be the source of your largest attacks since that will prevent further attacks. It'll be even better if it's the ones on the side you need to expand out to reach iron so you won't have to worry about getting turrets up quickly.

[Ryac]

Fusion reactors, 1 exo skel, as many shields as possible. Use destroyer robots and a combat shotgun with piercing amo. Nothing even remotely compares to the killing capacity of that setup. The tank is pathetic. The other modules for armor aren't worth the slot loss.

[streaks_art]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Cyborgt:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

The 2 main things keeping me from all these great ideas are 1.) the bugs are swarming me, and 2.) I'm always low on iron, despite the fact that I'm drowning in copper, and both my iron and copper mining and furnacing facilities are more or less the same.

Which means I need more iron, probably about double of what my copper production is at. Which means I should expand. But I can't because bugs. And even if I can make a quick iron-rich land grab, I won't be able to defend it because I have more than enough lasers to give my power generation a heart attack or several massive strokes in succession.

With the info you guys gave about oil wells running low...good grief, I'm doomed.

Yeah, this stuff takes a bit of planning to do well. You could probably solve your power problems easily enough with another bank of steam engines/boilers until you can get a solar panel/accumulator assembly line going and start filling up empty space with those for "free power." A conveyor belt leading coal to a set of burner inserters works well for keeping the boilers fueled.

In case you don't already know, the optimal ratio seems to be 1 offshore pump with 14 boilers and 10 steam engines. Supposedly 13 boilers is enough most of the time but the system occassionally needs the 14th boiler to keep the water at max temp. I haven't tested this but since it's just 1 boiler being wasted if it's never used, I didn't see it as being worth the trouble.

Once your power issues are solved, you should be able to pretty easily tower creep your way to more iron. It's certainly a potentially significant problem to be short on iron ore. Iron is used in pretty much everything so you need a ton of it. As long as you're still getting in SOME you should be fine though. Just repurpose whatever iron you're bringing in toward whatever your most critical needs are right now (which it sounds like power/turrets are for now) and work on expanding your walls out to the closest iron patch.

It'll help you a lot if you can manage to take out the nests within your pollution radius that seem to be the source of your largest attacks since that will prevent further attacks. It'll be even better if it's the ones on the side you need to expand out to reach iron so you won't have to worry about getting turrets up quickly.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย 9 Ryac:

Fusion reactors, 1 exo skel, as many shields as possible. Use destroyer robots and a combat shotgun with piercing amo. Nothing even remotely compares to the killing capacity of that setup. The tank is pathetic. The other modules for armor aren't worth the slot loss.

Thanks for the intel.

I'll give it a whirl.

[mike17032]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย streaks_art:

Whu...how...?

Blueprints are easy once you have them unlocked. You make a blank one, click it and drag over what you want to "copy", then pick a few icons for it to show and confirm it. The next time you use it you will see an outline of what you are placing on the ground, and just click. Your construction robots (either from your personal port or your larger network) will then use the items to built it for you.

The personal ones from your roboport will use items from your inventory. So I just made a blueprint of 5 lasers around a large power pole, and drop them everywhere near large hives. The robots build them and my lasers wipe out the bugs.

I switched to all solar at this point, so I don't even need coal anymore. This is my first playthrough outside of the tutortial campain, and I used default settings. At this point I have pushed the bugs so far back and walled off a large enough area that I don't even get attacked anymore because my outer wall is no where even close to my polution.

I had power problems for a while, and was constantly being attacked too before I had the walls. I found that just taking some time to go clear out the few closest hives made a huge difference in getting me some breathing room.

[bonesbro]

I've had good success with the tank. The laser defenses on your suit shoot while you're in the tank so you can set up with 6-7 of them, 2 reactors, and a few batteries. Then attack the big base by driving in big circles using the long range tank gun (it outranges spitters and worms) to take out spawners and worms. It takes a little practice but you can do laps around the base firing almost continuously and taking almost zero damage.

Your lasers will kill all the biters that get near you and they cut down small/medium spitters quickly too. Eventually your tank will get damaged enough to need repairs... kite the blob back to some laser turrets or kill them with the tank. Personal roboport + construction bots is not an efficient way to keep the tank repairs because the bots are slower than the tank and the crowd of spitters chasing you will kill them.

Lobbing 2-3 blobs of destroyers behind you is also a good way to keep the horde thinned out and keep your tank from taking damage.

[streaks_art]

Thanks for all the intel guys. Much appreciated.