Best Turret / Turret Combo

[Crux2]

Played a fair bit of Riftbreaker at this point. What's everyone's favourite turret setup?

I've started mixing things up for variety but used to default to mini-gun/railgun (backed up with artillery obvs).

[crimsonstring]

Depends on the biome. I go plenty of fire and explosive for acidic plains as an example. Cold and artillery for desert and so on.

Very narrow choke point? lasers and railguns. Wide open? Acid spewers, minelayers or/and drones.

There's no one fit all combo, unless you're not worried about efficiency, at which point you can layer lines of turrets over lines of turrets without any thought.

[Stimpacker]

See my Brutal 500% guide. I actually use only 1 turret combo for all bases across all biomes. Here's my endgame turret layout.

Headquarters:
2-3 layers of walls.
1st row of turrets are alternating miniguns and plasma.
2nd row of turrets are alternating rocket and artillery.
Near the very end, after fusion generators are built, I will have shield generators and heavy artillery support.

Outposts that encounter periodic attacks (mining outposts):
2 layers of walls.
1st row of turrets are alternating miniguns, plasma and rocket.
2nd row only artillery with 2 empty spaces between them.

Sentinel? No, too weak.
Flame/Acid? No, too limited range.
Laser/Railgun? No, too high power draw.
Minelayers/Drone? No, too bulky. Drones are slow like crap. Minefield is ridiculous.
Shockwave/Lightning? No, limited range.

[dgresevfan]

Is minefield really that bad? I like to have a line of those in front of my main turret line. Also, the earthquake generator towers.

[Janthis]

The problem with mines in general is they'll take out maybe the first 5% of an incoming swarm, after which they're gone. I stopped bothering with them after the early game.

As for turrets, it's best to have a mix because enemies will be resistant to various things. One of the worst combos I've encountered was waves of the big rock monsters (Krocoons or Gnerots) backed by those artillery snails. I like the portal bomb tower because I think it actually prioritizes artillery units unlike the regular arty tower. Up close I think miniguns have the highest DPS, a mix of them plus rockets/railguns will take care of most things. Include a couple of flamers, lightning or acid for big swarms of small critters. It's all about experimentation. Don't forget a repair tower or two, it can make your life easier.

edit: And of course, build a generous amount of tower ammo factories and storage buildings. You don't want to run out of ammo in the middle of an assault...

[Paladestar]

Each to their own I guess. After a lot of experimenting, here's what I settled on.

I always try to build a square/rectangular base, as best I can between the rocks.

Here's what I do on the four corners:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734399

Sold the buildings and replaced them with coloured tiles to make it easier to see what is going on:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734378

1x1 squares:

blue crystal = Railgun (my favourite tower in the game!)
Purple crystal = Lightning
Yellow crystal = Rocket
Red crystal = Minigun
Green crystal = Acid spitter
Yellow = Laser

2x2 squares:

blue crystal = Gatling laser
Purple crystal = Shield generator
Yellow crystal = Portal bomb
Green crystal = Repair

3x3 squares:

Yellow = Loot collector

On the sides I use a repeating pattern:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734310

Using the tiles to show the pattern again:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734344

I have another set of heavy artillery towers half way along each edge of the base, similar to what is seen in the corner screenshot further above.

I play on brutal 500% and this easily holds off any attack wave. The 500% waves come from the whole length of the area, so all of the towers on that side of the base will be firing at once. 250ish ammo production buildings keep all the tower stocked during any attack have. On brutal normal/100% 50 ammo production buildings gets the job done.

Example of my HQ with the defence perimeter fully established:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734274

I wish we could blow up the smaller rock areas so they don't get in the way, but alas I have to try and find lines for my perimeter that avoid as many rocks as possible.

I build a smaller base in the desert than my HQ for my uranium mining outpost, but it's still fairly big as I want six uranium farms (1 cultivator and 4 harvesters each) and 50+ of each resource synthesiser, making good use of the huge power this base provides. I always have fusion power plants in my outputs, no matter where they are, as they're so good at providing compact power and plasma generation. I of course still also use solar and energy storage in the desert too:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734239
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734204

Exactly the same design used for the defence perimeter as my HQ.

For all other mining outposts, they only need to be a foothold in the area, so they don't need as much space, so I just make a little square, using the same defence perimeter again:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3106734419

That's my latest metal zone outpost.

There's plenty of ways to make a good defence perimeter, this is what I like. I guess the most fun is in the trial and error of coming up with your own approach.

Mine is a mix of different ranges and types of turret, in terms of both single target or AOE and the type of damage being done.

Heavy artillery are good for thinning out the waves on approach. I wish they'd give us a way to make them stagger their firing, so all don't fire on the same target at once as soon as the first wave appears, but they soon spread their fire automatically as a larger amount of enemy units get closer.

The portal bombs are the next range of defence, they do a good amount of AOE physical damage. Normal artillery towers aren't as good, they tend to miss more due to the range the shell have to travel and they can't be used at all on the underground levels, but portal bombs can.

The next range of towers is the railguns, rockets and miniguns and gatling lasers. Railguns absolutely shred enemies as they have huge energy damage and pierce through 32 other units after hitting the primary target. Rockets give nice AOE damage of the area type. Minguns are great single target physical damage. Gatling lasers are awesome single target energy damage.

The the final defence line is lightning towers and the acid spewers, with each acid spewer also having a laser behind them. If anything makes it to this final layer (most of the time nothing gets in range of these!), it's usually lot of the little enemies or a bunch of tough gnerots. The lightning turrets do a lot more damage than it looks like they will on paper. The acid spewers don't actually hurt enemies as they hit them, they just leave a pool of acid on the ground. So it's pointless to have lots of acid towers as the pools will just stack on top of each other and the damage from them won't stack on the enemies. The laser tower does more damage the longer is focuses on the same enemy, so they're good for finishing off gnerots that get too close. Gnerots are immune to physical damage, so the portal bomb towers can't harm them, nor can the miniguns. The railguns are good at killing them combined with the rockets as the gnerots take double damage from the rockets and they's slow as hell, so the acid pools on the ground are good for killing them too.

It's good to stagger the range of your towers so that when enemies get through one range the next range is waiting to open fire and isn't already committed to existing targets as they were out of range before. A lot of people don't like to use towers that have less than 30 range, but I do have a few still for just that reason.

Edit: fixed some typos.

[Janthis]

Damn, how many hours did it take to build all that and how many times did the game crash? lol, pretty impressive though.

[Tashrinbackup]

As a basic defence, I found once I've unlocked mini gun turrets and lazors, those are sufficient for most threats. Provided there are not too many. Lazors deal with the big boys while the mini guns handle most spam. Of course having other turrets like artillery and gattling plasma help deal with other threats.

Plus its just fun. All in all, mix and match damage types and watch the fire works lol. I find one layer of turrets and double layered walls with repair turrets is sufficient for most waves.

[dgresevfan]

Anyone actually bothering to put upgrade mods on your towers? I tried with a couple but didn't really notice an effect.

[Tashrinbackup]

Maybe for kicks but otherwise no. Too much micromanagement to be worth it. If it was per type of turret then I'd make much more use of them.

[dgresevfan]

Originally posted by Tashrinbackup:

Maybe for kicks but otherwise no. Too much micromanagement to be worth it. If it was per type of turret then I'd make much more use of them.

I did it on heavy artillery so there were only a few to modify. Put increased explosion radius on them. But since they're generally shooting things off screen I can't see the results.

[arcadia171e]

Railguns with portal bombs will handle nearly everything.

[Crux2]

Originally posted by dgresevfan:

I did it on heavy artillery so there were only a few to modify. Put increased explosion radius on them. But since they're generally shooting things off screen I can't see the results.

I group batteries of heavy artillery together and use different combo's of rate of fire mods to stagger the shellfire. Partly for aesthetic reasons but also it scatters the impacts over a wider array of incoming mobs rather than hitting all at once and in the same place.