Base expansion problems

[Septimus]

Hello everyone
I have a problem and I don't know if my game has a solution. I'm playing with the expansion purchased and without any mod, I haven't left the main planet yet because I would like to unlock everything I can unlock, and I'm at the point of the game with a considerably large base, using trains to bring minerals from distant mines and it is with the latter that I have problems. You can imagine that at this point bitters are already a problem to always keep in mind (I get green bitters from time to time, just so you understand). My way of going to these distant mines is only to clean the areas close to where the train tracks are going to pass and then clean the mine area as well. In the mine itself I make a wall that surrounds the whole mine with its double rows of laser turrets and that's it. The problem is getting to me right now because these mines are getting further and further away, so I can't just clear the areas where the bitters are going to pass through, because when my robots go to build the mine in question, there are so many nests between the space between the mine and my base, that none of the robots can practically reach it, so I come here to ask for help on what are the fastest/efficient ways to clear nests, because although I have recently unlocked the tank cannon shots, I feel that I still spend a lot of time clearing the nests

To give you an idea, here's a picture of my game:

https://ibb.co/Tq4j5CK

I'm considering restarting the game, but it hurts to do it after 75 hours of gameplay :)

[Pay Child Suport]

does a solar powered laser turret produce pollution? I don't think so...

that said, ditch steam power and go solar. nauvis has plenty of space to put that. use the land area. alternatively you can blueprint something like a 1 laser turret for every 30 solar / 26 accumulator and put that 1 tile away from a spawner.

[kremlin]

Originally posted by Pay Child Suport:

does a solar powered laser turret produce pollution? I don't think so...

that said, ditch steam power and go solar. nauvis has plenty of space to put that. use the land area. alternatively you can blueprint something like a 1 laser turret for every 30 solar / 26 accumulator and put that 1 tile away from a spawner.

Solar is easy but it's so space consuming. By the time you want to roll out mass laser turrets it's worth it to build a big nuclear plant for base load. Especially with the new fluid algorithm making larger reactor designs WAY more reliable and easy to feed the water into, and theoretically way more UPS efficient if you're going big.

[Nilfsen]

Nuclear is in my opinion easier than mass solar, but downside is you either need coverex (space platform required to unclock) or you need to store a lot of uranium in chests that you won't have good use for.

While for early defence I would say turrets are better (and you can use some of uranium for ammo) lasers are way for clearing camps. If you don't want to run around and kill bitter camps, do it with bots and laser turrets creep.
Expand network in direction of camp while securing roboports with lasers and it will be enough to clear area around. While it seems slower than going with tank, bots can expand many directions at once which in end should be faster way of doing it.
Buffer chests might be usefull to store repair tools, power poles, roboports and lasers closer to expansion direction.

And lasers as defence are only worse if you are using uranium ammo (assuming you have power to support lasers). Yes even yellow have probably higher DPS, but bitters have also resilance against phisical dmg which nerfs quite a lot yellow ammo. Red in my opinion is not worth making, to expensive for little dmg increase.

[kremlin]

Kovarex enrichment isn't really a requirement at all. The ratio is literally 1 to 1 with centrifuges to reactors to process enough fuel to run continuously. Overbuild slightly, give it some time to warm up, and you'll never run out of fuel.

Oh, don't forget that you need 19 to 1 U-238 to U-235 to make the fuel cells themselves. So you need a lot of that U-238, and can't just process it all into U-235 and be okay.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Pay Child Suport:

does a solar powered laser turret produce pollution? I don't think so...

that said, ditch steam power and go solar. nauvis has plenty of space to put that. use the land area. alternatively you can blueprint something like a 1 laser turret for every 30 solar / 26 accumulator and put that 1 tile away from a spawner.

Producing the materials to make the solar panels and accumulators does. You have to pay the opportunity cost up front and solar takes a lot of space until you can produce enough quality solar panels and accumulators (which has a greater opportunity cost).

[Nilfsen]

I don't mean you need koverex for power, ~1-5 GW (so should be enough for any early base) you can do without koverex, just need to store way to much of uranium long term.
You can go above that too ofc, just nuclear stops being "compact" as you need to have storage area for uranium :P

While you are right you need 19:1 238:235, production ratio is 330:1, so for ever 10 fuel cells you are storing 311xU-238.
It doesn't seem a lot, and arealy it is not but with scaling power production it will need to be adressed soon.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Nilfsen:

I don't mean you need koverex for power, ~1-5 GW (so should be enough for any early base) you can do without koverex, just need to store way to much of uranium long term.
You can go above that too ofc, just nuclear stops being "compact" as you need to have storage area for uranium :P

While you are right you need 19:1 238:235, production ratio is 330:1, so for ever 10 fuel cells you are storing 311xU-238.
It doesn't seem a lot, and arealy it is not but with scaling power production it will need to be adressed soon.

When you add reactors you can add centrifuges or, since you are producing vast quantities of power with nuclear, you can add a kovarex set up and beacons and modules. In 1.1 I would produce about 22 GW of power to run my 5k SPM base. I had 4 beaconed Kovarex centrifuges and even siphoning off U-235 for atom bombs and nuclear train fuel the set up only had to run about 1/3 of the time.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Nilfsen:

Nuclear is in my opinion easier than mass solar, but downside is you either need coverex (space platform required to unclock) or you need to store a lot of uranium in chests that you won't have good use for.

The biters love that U-238 stuff though - they're literally banging at the gates for it.
So in the spirit of the holiday season: why not wrap a nice incendiary delivery mechanism around it and deliver it to them? Surely; it would take their breath away.

[argrond]

Do not take it to the heart, but this is really cumbersome. XD

Imo, you have 2 solutions.
1. As mentioned above, you remove singular bot network, and divide it into bits. the biggest bit is your main base, little bits are your outposts. It demands a lot of additional support preparations, and personally I do not like this kind of approach due to it's permanent need of attention. I'm not an easy-going railroad world man, so expansion in my maps is full-throttle and green biters/spitters are 3/4 to hatch from nests.
But this is a working scheme, people are doing it effectively, so they can give you better advice of how to organize that.
2. I'm doing it in incinerating way.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3394603092
This is my current (played-off already btw) base on Nauvis. 2.5k spm. No care to pollution, no green modules.
I'm just removing all the nests from areas I use or which are adjacent to polluting clouds. If I start mining a new farther patch - well, I have to make some cleanup there to make sure pollution does not spread too far away to draw too much attention. )
The more you do it and the more you advance in tech tree - the less annoying and time-consuming each cleanup becomes. Last one, when I needed ~60 more cleaned-up non-water chunks, took me less than 3 minutes from first hit on nearest nest cluster to the last wall built in the conclusive perimeter section.
In a word, you have to be proactive to make it work.
It takes some serious time at the beginning, but is extremely rewarding in long run, especially considering that approach you are trying to use.
Oh, and constructing drones will be able to fly safely this way! XD

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by argrond:

Do not take it to the heart, but this is really cumbersome. XD

Imo, you have 2 solutions.
1. As mentioned above, you remove singular bot network, and divide it into bits. the biggest bit is your main base, little bits are your outposts. It demands a lot of additional support preparations, and personally I do not like this kind of approach due to it's permanent need of attention. I'm not an easy-going railroad world man, so expansion in my maps is full-throttle and green biters/spitters are 3/4 to hatch from nests.
But this is a working scheme, people are doing it effectively, so they can give you better advice of how to organize that.
2. I'm doing it in incinerating way.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3394603092
This is my current (played-off already btw) base on Nauvis. 2.5k spm. No care to pollution, no green modules.
I'm just removing all the nests from areas I use or which are adjacent to polluting clouds. If I start mining a new farther patch - well, I have to make some cleanup there to make sure pollution does not spread too far away to draw too much attention. )
The more you do it and the more you advance in tech tree - the less annoying and time-consuming each cleanup becomes. Last one, when I needed ~60 more cleaned-up non-water chunks, took me less than 3 minutes from first hit on nearest nest cluster to the last wall built in the conclusive perimeter section.
In a word, you have to be proactive to make it work.
It takes some serious time at the beginning, but is extremely rewarding in long run, especially considering that approach you are trying to use.
Oh, and constructing drones will be able to fly safely this way! XD

In the past, as likely into the future, option 2 has been my choice. Full colonial mode. The last big game I had more secured zone than I knew what to do with. UPS killed the base before anything else.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2976138923
(about 5600 x 3200 tiles, or 175 x 100 chunks)

That was more an experiment in railway logistics than a serious attempt at megabase anyway. Lessons learned was more important than science produced.

Though, I did start carving up the bot net anyway. Turns out that once the construction of the factory is done the bots have no reason to be there. With a belt-based system anyway, using logi bots in the factory is a different issue. With the smarter bots in 2.0 it might be better, but with that much territory and supplies scattered around, or worse, concentrated in the center, the con bots were wasting a bunch of time doing the construction of new plants and mines. 40k bots can only travel so far so fast. It gets worse as the range expands. Infinite research into bot speed would have helped, some, but that would also have required even more building and more bots and more space.

[oyssoyss]

I also build big walls to block everything.

laser is not enough. I use lasers and flame turrets.
pipe lines are long but they don't consume much oil.
also have some gun turrets to consume extra u-238s. but they are hard to deploy along super long walls.

[Basho]

i agree with the walling strategies mentioned.
if you can have a refinery setup dedicated to cracking heavy oil into light oil, and exporting the petroleum gas either as-is or after converting it to solid fuel, you will probably have enough light oil to supply various defence walls by train to keep them guarded by flamethrowers.

and while it does not solve your immediate situation, i recommend poking around a bit in the map settings when creating a new world.
i like tweaking the water settings a bit until some large bodies of water is starting to form, and some natural choke points resulting from this.
im just not that revved by a large flat map and i like having terrain to deal with, both as a benefit (choke points) and as a hindrance (large areas of water).
plus it just looks a lot more appealing to me with the water.

that way, after conducting enough military operations of conquest, you can wall of said choke points and focus defence there and give yourself some space to take it a bit easier with the military side of things until a further push for conquest becomes relevant.

you can see what i mean in the screenshots in the posts above.

as for military options, here are various early-game to mid-game observations:
keep in mind that the personal flamethrower leaves burning areas where it hits, so absolutely covering nests in flame will cause good DPS.
poison capsules similarly can also make short work of worms.
with a tank, ramming is also an option, though a risky one.
eventually, if you can get either a modular armor or a power armor and stuff exoskeletons in it, you can do a lot of damage Starship Troopers style (the book) with just the personal flamethrower and a stack of fish though.

[Judge Dread]

Originally posted by Septimus:

Hello everyone
I have a problem and I don't know if my game has a solution. I'm playing with the expansion purchased and without any mod, I haven't left the main planet yet because I would like to unlock everything I can unlock, and I'm at the point of the game with a considerably large base, using trains to bring minerals from distant mines and it is with the latter that I have problems. You can imagine that at this point bitters are already a problem to always keep in mind (I get green bitters from time to time, just so you understand). My way of going to these distant mines is only to clean the areas close to where the train tracks are going to pass and then clean the mine area as well. In the mine itself I make a wall that surrounds the whole mine with its double rows of laser turrets and that's it. The problem is getting to me right now because these mines are getting further and further away, so I can't just clear the areas where the bitters are going to pass through, because when my robots go to build the mine in question, there are so many nests between the space between the mine and my base, that none of the robots can practically reach it, so I come here to ask for help on what are the fastest/efficient ways to clear nests, because although I have recently unlocked the tank cannon shots, I feel that I still spend a lot of time clearing the nests

To give you an idea, here's a picture of my game:

https://ibb.co/Tq4j5CK

I'm considering restarting the game, but it hurts to do it after 75 hours of gameplay :)

As far as base defense is concerned specifically. The usual Factorio solution works( At least on nauvis). Flamethrowers, flamethrowers and more flamethrowers. Make sure bots are able to auto repair and if you have walls automated, then your defenses should just be completely autonomous. As long as walls and repairs are automated, with flamethrowers you just ignore things. Doesn't matter if some walls get broken on occasion. For faraway things, you can just automate the transport of material/fuel/walls etc. Usually biters will leave things alone, but sometimes they don't. All you can really do is load up power armor/tanks with PDLs and run around for a bit. Getting access to artillery makes keeping nearby nests clear, significantly easier and automated.

[Septimus]

Originally posted by Judge Dread:

Originally posted by Septimus:

Hello everyone
I have a problem and I don't know if my game has a solution. I'm playing with the expansion purchased and without any mod, I haven't left the main planet yet because I would like to unlock everything I can unlock, and I'm at the point of the game with a considerably large base, using trains to bring minerals from distant mines and it is with the latter that I have problems. You can imagine that at this point bitters are already a problem to always keep in mind (I get green bitters from time to time, just so you understand). My way of going to these distant mines is only to clean the areas close to where the train tracks are going to pass and then clean the mine area as well. In the mine itself I make a wall that surrounds the whole mine with its double rows of laser turrets and that's it. The problem is getting to me right now because these mines are getting further and further away, so I can't just clear the areas where the bitters are going to pass through, because when my robots go to build the mine in question, there are so many nests between the space between the mine and my base, that none of the robots can practically reach it, so I come here to ask for help on what are the fastest/efficient ways to clear nests, because although I have recently unlocked the tank cannon shots, I feel that I still spend a lot of time clearing the nests

To give you an idea, here's a picture of my game:

https://ibb.co/Tq4j5CK

I'm considering restarting the game, but it hurts to do it after 75 hours of gameplay :)

As far as base defense is concerned specifically. The usual Factorio solution works( At least on nauvis). Flamethrowers, flamethrowers and more flamethrowers. Make sure bots are able to auto repair and if you have walls automated, then your defenses should just be completely autonomous. As long as walls and repairs are automated, with flamethrowers you just ignore things. Doesn't matter if some walls get broken on occasion. For faraway things, you can just automate the transport of material/fuel/walls etc. Usually biters will leave things alone, but sometimes they don't. All you can really do is load up power armor/tanks with PDLs and run around for a bit. Getting access to artillery makes keeping nearby nests clear, significantly easier and automated.

my problem is not the fact of how to make the defences, but to establish the distant mining bases in an ‘efficient’ way, that is to say, my problem is when I need to create another distant mining base (that is to say, that requires a train), the process of going there, establishing the plans and such, that is fine, no problem, the problem is that, when setting up the plans, the robots have to go there, and between the new distant mining base and my base, there is usually a huge amount of nests of bitters, which make them not reach the destination, so I have to go to these nests and destroy them, a task that is becoming boring and tedious for me honestly.

[Jagdtiger]

Originally posted by Septimus:

my problem is not the fact of how to make the defences, but to establish the distant mining bases in an ‘efficient’ way, that is to say, my problem is when I need to create another distant mining base (that is to say, that requires a train), the process of going there, establishing the plans and such, that is fine, no problem, the problem is that, when setting up the plans, the robots have to go there, and between the new distant mining base and my base, there is usually a huge amount of nests of bitters, which make them not reach the destination, so I have to go to these nests and destroy them, a task that is becoming boring and tedious for me honestly.

My solution for expanding into biter territory without clearing them all is to use what i call "Engineering Trains". Load up a train with all the materials you'll need to build your outpost (walls, guns, rails, mines, roboports, construction robots, etc), and manually lay the track to your outpost site. If you steer clear of nests you'll avoid their aggression and they wont target your rails or power poles. Once you're at your destination, first place a blueprint that contains an unloading station which unloads the contents of the train into provider chests, places some storage chests, as well as lots of roboports and inserts robots into them. Then, place a blueprint of your entire outpost's defensive perimeter. If you brought 500+ bots. they will very quickly assemble the wall of your outpost, at which point you can safely place down the mines and permanent stations, or reinforce your defenses with whatever else you want in relative safety. This only requires manual intervention in placing the rails by hand, and cuts down on how many bases you need to clear compared to complete expansion