INSANE survival difficulty or doing something wrong?

[Kdt]

Hi,

after finishing campaign i've tried survival.

Biggest map, 250% resource size, unlimited time, 30-40 min to first attack.
Trying normal enemy power with 2x wave size, normal and 1x wave size, easy with 1 wave size.

Have a lot of resources, well defended base but after survivng few waves all my main walls and turrets gone :D All the time the same trying settings as above.

Do you have aby ideas what im doing wrong?

[Protek]

Watch Kensei on youtube do the brutal survival. To me it seems like you tech too slow. You should cancel the second wave with a strong wave and go for super fast tech.

[Bobucles]

For the most part, survival mode is incredibly hard and has very fast pacing. More monsters are unlocked, so the extra large waves are even deadlier.

Rapid early expansion is your friend. It's important to get carbon and iron income up as quick as possible to start building defenses. Riggs is the primary defender for most waves, power him up with the grenade launcher and more weapons. Artillery and flame turrets are very useful and easy unlocks, and railguns give a big punch.

[[Peppe]]

A 45 minute warm up - how does that work with the hq upgrade?

I imagine if I had 45 minutes warmup I would have at a minimum have full blue weapons in several different ammo types and the bulk of my defense would be plasma or railgun turrets. With artillery support. The other ammo turrets are ok, but almost not worth the time to research as other turrets consume ammo so fast you only want 1-2 of them at any defense point. Sentinels are ok early, but railgun or plasma is usually 4-5 times stronger and your bottleneck at a lot of points is just raw resources.

Normal brutal build path for me at least is armory built for the warm up wave that comes at 5 minutes. Then the 90 minute clock starts and I get the HQ upgrade for first attack wave. Sometimes even triggering it to bring the first attack faster.

Now if you have collected a lot of eggs you can equip each tier of gravity mine if armory is built and HQ upgrade is started. This and dual swords is a lot of fire power.

After the first hq upgrade build communications hub asap.

My general research flow is white weapons, mech consumables, blue weapons, storage and mine production level 2, defense / plasma tower tech, alien techs, purple weapons / consumables, titanium machinery.

On Brutal 5 min warm up 90 minute timer the Final day is like 12:30 pm day 8. I would be looking for ideally purple titanium machinery that day then level 2 or 3 on plasma and artillery tower. Flamer tower maybe worth upgrading as well, but lower priority.

If base / map space is an issue you can divert a little time to upgrade energy production and energy storage. If space is not an issue just spam level 1 wind/solar.

Tech path still a work in progress, but my latest thought is:
HQ 3 (Tech Only -- you don't need to upgrade HQ in survival after the first upgrade)
Grenade
Radar -- the building one
HQ 4
Armory 2
Ammo Handling
HQ 5
HQ 6
Explosive Weapons

Warm up wave is just dual swords and starting consumables. You are holding the first real wave with basically that and grenades.

With each HQ tech add a communications hub and upgrade any you can to lvl 2. Level 2 comm hubs ideal, if resources level 3 is ok, but don't go past that.

The mech radar cooldown is way to long to help you locate resources. The building is much better at both scouting resources, prevents spawns once you clear out the area, and helps you judge where to help during attacks.

I used to have spears up there with grenade to hold early waves with spears -- and may be required on some maps, but trying to trim everything I can out of the tech path. As just need enough to hold until ranged weapons come online.

Anyway from explosive weapons pickup other weapons you like and cheap useful techs -- like geothermal, artillery turrets, uranium handling (for nuke mine), most mech consumables.
My ideal mech hotbar is repair, small mine, gravity mine red, nuke mine, grenade, gravity grenade, cryo mine, open slot (turret/self explosion/gravity mine purple). I set everything other than heal to the same button and just spam mines and grenades -- you can maybe make 2 buttons one to plant mines and another grenades. Saw someone playing with W mapped to their mines and they just planted a mine every time they walked north.

Another thing I like lately is to get alien research on the first tab fairly early. It is cheap and unlocks a few techs itself when you research it. Main useful one is cobalt handling for geoscanner which can be useful at some points. Then mid game when building two alien labs lvl 2 is doable i'll drop them in and research rail gun towers, cryo mine to lvl 2, and gravity grenade to level 2. Then usually increase storage and sell the labs. Takes less then a day to do the critical research and now have an alternate to plasma tower if palladium is scarce and have two more good consumables on my mech.

[Kdt]

Thx guys very much. Of course you have right, my tech was tooo slow. When i was playing campaign i didnt care too much about mech and alien techs. It's must have on survival.

After playing few games have anothe question. How to get tanzanite, ferdonite etc? Is there any other way than killing monsters? What about flora cultivator? Why i can't set which plants i want to cultivate?

[[Peppe]]

There is a mod to let cultivator select from plants you have seen on the current map. Does not tie into the scanning system.
https://www.nexusmods.com/theriftbreaker/mods/96

After playing some more myself it ends up a non issue for 90 minute brutal games. Not much spare time or resources to go into alien tech on brutal. Lean heavy on plasma and scouting the whole map for palladium.

Custom game I would run the cultivator mod though as I think each biome has a plant for 3 of the 4 rare gem types on it. The waves usually drop the other in small quantities.

Imagine survival will see some love eventually to either remove the things that have no use or give them a use in survival.