Gleba defence

[Yader]

Gleba's harsh. 5 hours in and i've barely set up some iron and copper plate automation. I need to start defending my base, but i just checked that most turrets are either useless, cannot be used or are just way too expensive. Lasers are useless against pentapods, no oil so no flamethrowers, tesla requires way too much energy considering you can only reliably use steam engines on gleba and the rocket turret seems way too expensive too (though i haven't even researched it yet). Gun turret seems okay, though the stompers have great physical damage resistance... Any advice? Don't want to mess this up, knowing how unforgiving Gleba is.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Defektiv:

The biggest problem with the stompers is that they walk straight over the walls and instantly delete power poles and substations, making the tesla turrets that would normally slow them down useless. I had my first big one just show up at 60% evolution and it disabled all my defenses in seconds. I'm at the point now where I just want to research what I need, pack up some seeds and leave for good. The idea that I'm going to be able to spend any time on Aquilo while babysitting Gleba after spending 2 straight days building a base that can sustain operation does not sound fun in any way.

One plan is redundancy. Add more substations and be sure to link them to an internal grid and not along the wall.

But yeah I'm just shipping in artillery ammo and keeping the map clear.

[MangoMan]

random advice includes:
- you only need to "defend" your farms if you keep your main base far enough away from them and don't put anything valuable at your farms
- many Gleba techs are about Gleba defense so go for tech soon as you can
- yellow bullets can suffice if you have *enough* gun turrets (but "enough" can be a lot, like groups of 15-20+)
- for me, since defense was at first borderline impossible, I instead cleared out the area and used radar to keep constant vision over my spore cloud, ensuring it was always clear; zero attacks this way

[Defektiv]

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

Originally posted by Defektiv:

The biggest problem with the stompers is that they walk straight over the walls and instantly delete power poles and substations, making the tesla turrets that would normally slow them down useless. I had my first big one just show up at 60% evolution and it disabled all my defenses in seconds. I'm at the point now where I just want to research what I need, pack up some seeds and leave for good. The idea that I'm going to be able to spend any time on Aquilo while babysitting Gleba after spending 2 straight days building a base that can sustain operation does not sound fun in any way.

Well you can always take spidertron on a stroll and kill every spawner in sight. With some rocket research, the spawners only take a couple of rockets to die. Since pentapods spread pretty slowly, it will take them hours to reach your pollution cloud again (and if they ever do, you will just do it again). And since you already have big enemies showing up, it's not like killing spawners would make things any worse evolution-wise.
Edit: And you can do all this remotely from Aquilo.

Spidertrons do not last long around the big stompers, and even I can't get close to them with epic shields and several research levels into player health. The spawners are no problem for my rare+ pdts but they seem to expand far faster on gleba than on nauvis. Clearing all nests up to the unexplored area far outside my spore clouds only bought me 2-3 hours before I started getting engagement alerts, and the second attack with the big stomper destroyed about 20% of my factory that had teslas and turrets lined around with tesla priorities set to big guys. I immediately hopped on a ship to head over and by the time I was landing another attack was incoming.

[Defektiv]

Originally posted by Yader:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Does it? I suppose if you haven't figured out how to make small factories then big factories would make your problems worse.

But if you've figured out how to deal with spoilage... you're shipping around products with spoil times measured in hour(s). How would size make things particularly difficult in ways small factories wouldn't?


I think you're underestimating agriculture. You can make 15 iron or copper ore for around 3 yumako fruit and 1 jellynut (on average), and that's without considering productivity modules. The oil products have agricultural versions. Stone is harder to come by, but I'm not entirely sure if its better or worse than on Nauvis.

Gleba's just hard as hell okay? You're right and I do have quite a stockpile of jellynut and yumako not being used and slowly rotting away so expanding shouldn't be too hard. But it's just really complicated to build here. Makes my brain boil every time i try building a few more biochambers since there's so much stuff to think about and spaghetti you need to do while building here. Maybe i should just try using robots and not belts (haven't used robots at all on Gleba yet).

There is a blueprint on the factorio blueprint site called Gleba all production. It takes quite a few imports to build and a ton of landfill because it is rather large, but it is very well designed. After a manual startup of the 3 lines it runs very well and so far for me, forever. And it will produce more science than you can use at 100 spm, plus has really good recycle and dump loops for spoilage. It's just too bad stompers are so overpowered because keeping it running has nothing to do with its design but the fact those enemies can simply walk through all of your defenses and destroy everything with a huge aoe and massive health pool.

[kremlin]

Originally posted by Yader:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Does it? I suppose if you haven't figured out how to make small factories then big factories would make your problems worse.

But if you've figured out how to deal with spoilage... you're shipping around products with spoil times measured in hour(s). How would size make things particularly difficult in ways small factories wouldn't?


I think you're underestimating agriculture. You can make 15 iron or copper ore for around 3 yumako fruit and 1 jellynut (on average), and that's without considering productivity modules. The oil products have agricultural versions. Stone is harder to come by, but I'm not entirely sure if its better or worse than on Nauvis.

Gleba's just hard as hell okay? You're right and I do have quite a stockpile of jellynut and yumako not being used and slowly rotting away so expanding shouldn't be too hard. But it's just really complicated to build here. Makes my brain boil every time i try building a few more biochambers since there's so much stuff to think about and spaghetti you need to do while building here. Maybe i should just try using robots and not belts (haven't used robots at all on Gleba yet).

It's not quite as bad it looks.
Prioritize turning the yumako and jellynut into bioflux about as fast as you can, then make the cheap nutrients with the bioflux recipe, then to get your iron and copper running you start feeding the iron and copper bacteria the bioflux to make a breeder reactor that will give you resources as fast as you need them.
Make it so you're always turning the yumako and jellynut into bioflux even if you don't need the bioflux so you get the seeds from the processing. You'll basically always be seed-positive if you're processing the fruits and nuts quickly enough.
You want an inserter on every machine that is dedicated to removing the spoilage which you can send directly to the heating tower to burn it right off, or process into carbon fuel for a better energy return. Don't throw it all away though because nutrients-from-spoilage can be useful if things grind to a halt and you need to reboot it.
Make it so the belt lines themselves have a spoilage inserter at the very end of them. You can assume that the oldest product you've put on the belt is at the end of the belt, so putting a spoilage removing inserter at the end of each belt with spoilables will keep them from clogging.

The hard part in my opinion comes with dealing with the pentapod eggs. But they can burn, too! Make a looped pentapod egg breeder biochamber that just throws away the eggs before they can hatch. Toss them right into the spoilage burn line.

EDIT: OH, use a biochamber to make more biochambers! That 50% productivity helps a lot!

[Quillithe]

First just start with fruit processing -> bioflux -> nutrients.

Get that going and your factory will run forever and flood everything with bioflux and nutrients.

Personally SECOND it can be nice to add science since that only uses bioflux and nutrients and can help keep them from overflowing.

And you probably want it next in line anyway.

[Yader]

I figured it all out. For anyone struggling like i did - just use bots lmao. Your base will be much more compact, stable and easy to build and fix if something goes wrong. Honest to god, the difference between using bots and belts is just insane on Gleba.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Yader:

I figured it all out. For anyone struggling like i did - just use bots lmao. Your base will be much more compact, stable and easy to build and fix if something goes wrong. Honest to god, the difference between using bots and belts is just insane on Gleba.

I dunno, I can believe botting spoilage or bacteria reboots (I do both) but using bots to distribute everything else kinda seems like a pain since there are very few resources to start with (4 total really), you specifically want some production to get the freshest resources (science), and a lot of buildings want to be chained so they pick up their own output and pass it to the next to make sure the system runs smoothly (eggs, nutrients, and bacteria all want to do this).

And botting nutrients sounds...bad.

But whatever works for you, that's the fun of the game.

[Yader]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Originally posted by Yader:

I figured it all out. For anyone struggling like i did - just use bots lmao. Your base will be much more compact, stable and easy to build and fix if something goes wrong. Honest to god, the difference between using bots and belts is just insane on Gleba.

I dunno, I can believe botting spoilage or bacteria reboots (I do both) but using bots to distribute everything else kinda seems like a pain since there are very few resources to start with (4 total really), you specifically want some production to get the freshest resources (science), and a lot of buildings want to be chained so they pick up their own output and pass it to the next to make sure the system runs smoothly (eggs, nutrients, and bacteria all want to do this).

And botting nutrients sounds...bad.

But whatever works for you, that's the fun of the game.

I had my doubts too but it does indeed work smoothly. I thought i wouldn't have enough bots for nutrients and spoilage and similar stuff too. Or that it would work badly and the eggs or whatever would spoil but it really only took like 300 logibots to set up a 4 science per second base. Probably gonna need no more than 1000 when i get to the carbon fiber and rocket turret manufacturing. Easy money.