Problems with demolishers

[Effluvial Kraken]

1. Their trails and gas clouds can make passable terrain and impassable terrain visually similar
2. Every method for killing demolishers feels like it's not what you're meant to do. You can either chase them with tanks loaded with uranium rounds (which aren't necessary for anything else up to that point), plop down a massive amount of turrets, or one-shot the thing with a rail gun. The progression is busted.
3. Territory mechanics aren't explained, even though they're pretty game-y. One worm for one zone, kill the worm and the zone is yours forever. Since that doesn't really make sense, why not just tell the player outright?
4. No special techs for worms. No Dune-styled thumping machines, anti-worm electrical fields, etc.. The engineer arrives on the planet, works in a small zone while thinking about how to beat the worms, then goes "uhhhh lots of guns I guess" and that's it.

Suggestion: Add worm-warding buildings so that you can keep one barely at bay with high energy expenditure. This frees you up to mine some tungsten, build artillery, blast it from a distance, and THEN consider stupider methods like charging at them with a tank.

[Khaylain]

That suggestion sounds cool. Unfortunately the developers don't look here, they look for suggestions on their forum at forums.factorio.com (this is the Steam Forums for Factorio, it belongs to Steam)

[JustSmile]

What makes you say "shoot it a lot" is a stupid or unintended way to kill one? This is Factorio, you can outproduce 9 out of 10 problems. Pumping the oversized earthworm with enough lead to double its BMI sounds plenty reasonable to me.

There's a variety of different ways to kill demolishers(at least small ones), some requiring off-world imports, some you can put together in half an hour from stuff you find on Vulcanus itself.

A stack of poison capsules will do it with some kiting.
A stack of red ammo turrets plopped down will get one down with minimal losses.
Non-explosive rounds from a tank with a bit of skill are good.
Uranium rounds from a tank will one/two shot them.
Spamming some artillery is good enough.
Put down and fire up a 2x2 nuclear reactor in the worm's territory for the luls.
Or just launch a nuke or two outright.

All of this is just stuff you get without visiting a single other planet, and I'm sure I am missing some methods. If anything, it's good there's numerous, wildly different, ways to get past the worms even before you get to ♥♥♥♥ like railguns and outgun them..

[knighttemplar1960]

If you build in a demolisher's territory it will become annoyed and investigate. Once annoyed it will leave its own territory by up to one chunk to destroy what ever it can see. If you want to waste your time and be active you can thrown poison capsules from your tank while you fire cannon shells. Which works fine for little ones. If you want to set it and forget it set a radar and some solar panels in its territory as bait. A dozen turrets with red ammo and damage research level 9-10 will kill a small one with no losses except the panels and radar bait.

For mediums you can do the same thing. Poison capsules and a tank with uranium shells or you can set and forget radar bait and 24 turrets with uranium rounds and damage research 10-12. You'll lose 6 or so turrets if they are clumped tightly and zero if they are spread out a bit.

By the time you need to kill a big one you'll have weapons that make the task trivial.

[Ghulmeister]

tesla towers work extremely well against them, and for least amount of casualties just quickly stamp down multiple sets of them at the tail end.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by JustSmile:

Uranium rounds from a tank will one/two shot them.

You mean the uranium cannon shell, right?

I don't see any reason why you would decide to use a tank to fire uranium rounds at a demolisher.

(I highlight this since it sounds like the OP used uranium rounds...)

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by JustSmile:

What makes you say "shoot it a lot" is a stupid or unintended way to kill one? This is Factorio, you can outproduce 9 out of 10 problems. Pumping the oversized earthworm with enough lead to double its BMI sounds plenty reasonable to me.

One of the title screen scenarios even shows the engineer leading a Demolisher into a kill zone and pumping a number of different kinds of weaponry into it, including a big pile of land mines (that the scenario cuts out before it reaches)

[Aestrea]

I just literally use 20 normal gas grenades to kill one. You walk up to it and make it turn as much as possible in the cloud and you stack it. It just dies really really fast, the small ones. If you have trouble surviving, equip a bunch of rare shields and get like ~400 extra health with at least 2 exoskeletons to out run it.

[Ozone]

Originally posted by Ghulmeister:

tesla towers work extremely well against them, and for least amount of casualties just quickly stamp down multiple sets of them at the tail end.

Or just a hand Railgun, it one shots them with one bullet.

[Esxhaton]

Originally posted by Ozone:

Originally posted by Ghulmeister:

tesla towers work extremely well against them, and for least amount of casualties just quickly stamp down multiple sets of them at the tail end.

Or just a hand Railgun, it one shots them with one bullet.

I seriously doubt that someone having trouble killing small demolishers have access to that kind of tech

[Batt0ls]

At the beginning they are unpleasant to kill, you can kill them but you have to be prepared, when you unlock the final techs you will kill them with one shot there will no longer be any type of challenge, sad.