Prevent Enemy Expansion

[Alaskan Bull Walrus]

Does placing say a stone wall prevent enemy expansion to it's vicinity? Like I wipe a nest out, and put a stone wall there will said wall prevent another nest from materializing in that position?

[KatherineOfSky]

Nope. You'd have to place a very large number of structures to prevent a base cropping up.

[Silberfuchs]

Expansion doesn't happen by magic respawn, biters have to physically travel to places they want to expand too.

Hence it's usually a good idea to place turrets in their path, or walls to funnel them to other locations that have turrets.

One way or another. the expansion party has to die before it stops. Granted, a map filled with biters can't get colonized even more. But in that case you got already smoked.

[KatherineOfSky]

Walls don't funnel the biters, they usually chew right through them.

[Silberfuchs]

Originally posted by KatherineOfSky:

Walls don't funnel the biters, they usually chew right through them.

True, but leaving a space for them without walls usually ends up with them using this pre-made breach. they go for the place they percieve as the weakest.

Sure, i build lots of turrets everywhere, but when biter amounts go crazy i reinforce the firepower of one place accordingly and just get rid of walls there => perfect death trap.

[KatherineOfSky]

It definitely depends on the terrain. I recently tried to use a (very) small maze wall, testing out tower defense tactics, but the biters just want to come right through it instead of going around the walls.(Tower defense with mazes used to work in the past, but biter AI has changed significantly since then).

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Here's some experimental walls defense I've been putting that have worked wonders lately.
https://imgur.com/a/3HWY6pC

Mind that I know the gun turrets do not have any automatic way to get ammo, they fire so little that I just leave ammo in a box nearby and when I go by periodically to go through, I drop some ammo in them.

Here's how the idea works and what you can do with it.

I learned this trick by watching how biters navigate, or actually fail to navigate trees in a swarm. You see, in a swarm sometimes a biter will get trapped by his buddies behind a tree, and he has no way out except through his buddies or the tree. He will try to chomp the tree. This starts him biting. If he completes the animation he will damage the tree, but if his buddies move in time, he will interrupt the animation to move again. This slows him down.

Furthermore, biters can't just run in a straight line, they have to move about 50% farther to make it through, and since they all try to move towards one point, they get into each other's way as they do so, clogging the holes as they do so. Clogging the holes in the walls does not trap them though, so they won't bite the walls. They only bite at a wall if they are completely trapped against it with no other path.

Finally, spitters. Spitters can't bite walls. They can't spit at walls. They are completely crippled by this technique. Unless you have an absolutely massive wave, they won't get anywhere close enough to spit at your turrets. If they start becoming a problem, add flamethrower turrets and bots with landmines to place behind each wall.

I barely have to maintain this at all. One segment of wall gets bitten every few hours for a handful of hp. Large biters rarely even get close enough to the gun turrets to cause them to fire. Their AI becomes their own undoing as they don't want to bite each other.

Edit: Oh right, forgot what you can do with this.

You may notice it is difficult to drive through, and you can't put a train through this. This is easily solved. Take an upgrade planner. Set it to upgrade walls to gates. Turn your Dragons Teeth Walls into Dragons Teeth Gates. Now it opens for you and doesn't impede your vehicles at all, still blocks biters, and you can build railroad tracks underneath it.

BAM!

[MleQus]

Yeah