Something's off about the gun turrets and their target priority.

[Sly-Scale]

Returning player from a year-long hiatus.
Seems like my turrets are getting taken down by small spitters, now -- pretty much as soon as they evolve to have small spitters. Are the turrets now targeting the nearest bugs instead of prioritizing spitters?

I remember my gun turrets holding up into the Large Biter stage, and not just losing one after the others have spent ~13 magazines each.

[malogoss]

I don't remember gun/laser turrets working another way.

They pick the closest target, lock on, fire until that target is destroyed, then switch to what is the closest target, lock on, etc.

Small biters/spitters should not be a problem for groups of 3-4 turrets, overlapping each other and protected by walls. At least not on default settings.

[Sly-Scale]

Okay yeah, you're right. I had to throw more turrets at it -- five or so, in lines -- and that gave them the firepower to chew through the biters and get to the spitters.

[Sly-Scale]

Oh! Okay! That's what they do now! Sometimes the aliens will throw teams of just Spitters at our bases! And I don't think the devs bumped up the aliens' pollution cost of creating Spitters to compensate. The game could technically just spam Spitters and there's no silver lining to it.

That's such a ♥♥♥♥ move. I was getting paranoid that I wasn't keeping up for early-game military, when the truth is that they added RNG to the combat. I mean, more RNG than Behemoth spawns at high evolution.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Sly-Scale:

Oh! Okay! That's what they do now! Sometimes the aliens will throw teams of just Spitters at our bases! And I don't think the devs bumped up the aliens' pollution cost of creating Spitters to compensate. The game could technically just spam Spitters and there's no silver lining to it.

That's such a ♥♥♥♥ move. I was getting paranoid that I wasn't keeping up for early-game military, when the truth is that they added RNG to the combat. I mean, more RNG than Behemoth spawns at high evolution.

The spawn density of types among attack waves is largely dependent upon the nest makeup of the hives building out the attack waves.. And RNG is gonna RNG. A hive made up of mostly spitter nests will send, of course, mostly spitters. And it's been that way since like, Factorio 0.11 at least.

[Fel]

Just add some flamethrower turrets into the mix, they will light the floor on fire behind the first few bitters, roasting bitters and spitters that come behind, killing them pretty quickly.

That way, your gun/laser turrets will handle the closest enemies while the fire takes care of those behind.

Your memories might also have included damage and firing speed technologies, those drastically improve the damage done by gun turrets (damage technology applies to both the turret and the ammo, increasing the damage significantly as a result).

[knighttemplar1960]

Gun turrets out range all spitters by 1 tile. If you use 2 rows of walls you can place an exterior wall 1 tile inside the gun turret's range and the spitters won't be able reach your gun turrets.

[luziferius]

Did you return from pre-1.0? There was a change in biter behavior prior to release. The developers removed biter to biter collision when they break from formations they are in during travel.
This causes them to no longer do a weird pathing glitches that resulted in a biter trickle that was easily defeated. In my old 0.16 map, a single gun turret was sufficient to tank an entire late-game horde with behemoth enemies mixed in.
After the change, the rush is now much, much faster and requires a good amount of turrets to fend off.

[Gorem]

just go out there and take out any nests in your pollution cloud and you can never even get attacked.

Honestly vanilla biters are so easy to beat in freeplay and so easy to avoid them launching waves I've kinda numbed myself with the mods that increase difficulty. Playing without rampant at least feels like you don't even need to build a single wall to defend. Then adding stuff like armoured biters, and natural evolution enemies in my latest run really shows how crazy they can get.

Even Vanilla deathworld is beaten the moment you get flamethrower turrets and then its just a slow slog through nests if you actually want to keep playing that map.

but anyway, do not rely solely on gun turrets, the ammo is expensive to produce and they are the games earliest and weakest turret requiring tech upgrades to keep up. Flames, repairing bots and walls means vanilla biters are already 100% beaten if you don't just go out there in a tank and take out every nest.