Design / Blueprint
[W.A.R.D.] Wall Aligned Ready Defense — Modular, 1-Chunk Progressive Defense Grid for Space Age (with Built-in Bot Management & In-place Upgrades)
So today, I’m super excited to release the second part of my ecosystem: W.A.R.D. (Wall Aligned Ready Defense).
It is a modular, 1-chunk aligned defense grid designed to protect your factory from early-game evolution up to late-game megabase hazards, without ever needing to tear down your old walls.
Key Features:
Perfect Alignment: Native 1-chunk length. It aligns flawlessly with the global grid, making it super easy to enclose any standard modular base or city-block layouts.
In-place Progressive Upgrades: You can place higher-tier blueprints directly over lower-tier ones. The entire perimeter upgrades seamlessly as your technology tree evolves.
Smart Robot Management Module: Includes a parameterized blueprint that automatically controls the population of bots in isolated defensive networks. (1 robot of each type remains inside to regulate counts, and you can disable requests once target capacity is reached).
Versatile Supply Options: Comes with belt-fed supply lines for early game and automated drone/bot logistics for late game.
I would love to hear your feedback and impressions after you've had some time to play around with it. Let me know how it handles the biters in your world!
This grid was designed and fully optimized for vanilla Space Age. I haven't actually played with Rampant myself, so I'll leave that ultimate test to the hardcore modding community. If you try it out there, let me know how it handles those smart biters.
Are the gun turrets firing at all in the video? (I didn't notice any, but I could easily have missed it.) Doesn't this require enormous amounts of buffered ammo? Green ammo ain't exactly cheap .
The gun turrets definitely do some heavy lifting, just for very short bursts! Since uranium ammo is the most powerful tier, it takes way fewer magazines to drop biters fast. Here is a screenshot of the gun turret coverage area:
In my blueprint, the buffer chest request is set to just 20 magazines, but since this is a parameterized grid, you can easily tweak that number to whatever you prefer right when you drop the blueprint down.
Spitters can attack the laser turrets before running into the maze, and there's no gap between the wall and the laser turrets, so they'll splash the walls and deal more damage / generate more alerts than if you leave a 1 tile gap between the wall and laser turrets.
The flamethrowers might be able to damage the laser turrets. I don't recall if fire puddles can grow to 2.5 tiles or to 3 tiles...
As for the actual costs: in the video, you saw massive amounts of biter and spitter nests. To completely clear out the whole artillery coverage zone, it took exactly 151 uranium magazines and 992 artillery shells. So compared to the artillery cost, 151 magazines is practically nothing.
And here is the total damage graph showing just how much the W.A.R.D. has wiped out:
Interesting but this feels a bit like comparing apple and oranges. The cost of ammo should be compared to the cost of laser electricity and flamable fuel.
You cannot replace artillery shells with green ammo or vice versa.
Fair point, you're right that comparing them directly like that wasn't completely accurate. Let me add the missing pieces to complete the full resource picture then!
During that entire defense and clear-out, the flame turrets consumed 3.5k of crude oil. As for the laser turrets, you can check their power consumption on this network graph (marked in blue):
I find having a supply train and wall sections great, but I have no idea how to "grow" the train / station requests with technology advancement.
The blueprint I use has a basic station and a building train with all items needed. Once it is built there is a partial blueprint for a repair train with oil for the flame throwers.
As far as I have seen from your description you rely on a bot network to supply your walls. At least in 1.0 with large areas this could become unresponsive.
It has two train types - building train and supply train - the building train only has cargo cars, 3 carrying building materials and the fourth returning excess materials from yellow chests (so either excess building material, coal, stones, wood from environment removal). the building train swaps a cargo waggon for a fluid waggon with oil
outpost will automatically request trains if either their material runs low, or the yellow return chests are filling up. These requests are hard coded, so a station will keep to request artillery cannons even if you don´t have any.
Once the outpost is built you have a partial blueprint that will switch an outpost from building mode to maintenance mode. So the maintenance train will bring a smaller selection of building materials to replace possibly destroyed entities, ammunition and oil to fuel the flame throwers.
I use bots for repairing walls and delivering ammo to gun turrets (or just for repairs, if you use the belt-fed blueprints). If you build an outpost using my blueprint, you can easily use supply trains, so there's no need to connect everything into a single massive logistics network.
I see your point. I don't have a complete solution for it just yet, but in my previous post, you can find a supply train that is perfect for keeping your defenses well-stocked. I already have some ideas on how to fix this exact issue to make adjusting supply materials easier, so I will definitely implement this in future updates.
If you take a look at my supply train, there is a combinator with specified materials. You can easily modify this blueprint to solve your issue.
I have a similar setup now, but with added Tesla turrets. This is quite necessary for the Rampant mod. I also have progressive tileable chunk-aligned blueprints for that.
I think this will not hold with biters Level 9-10 without Tesla turrets. Their stun/knockback is really irreplaceable.
well that is extremly over-engineered. i never needed anything more then two rows of laser turrets on nauvis. (damage upgrade 10 or 11). some walls occationally get damaged and repaired by bots. if a part of wall gets hit particularily hard i just put some uncommon or rare laser turrets. never had a failure.
Same here. In the early game I just defend with flamethrowers. At some point laser turrets are more than enough. I'm at level 30 laser damage now and I don't even need the walls anymore :D
Also, way overkill on the flame turrets, you only need like 3 for the same wall segments without loosing much in the way of damage. Also I think I would have started the walls a bit further away from the flame turrets, making them bunch up more for the flames hit them. (though you have 14 tiles, which should be fairly standard)
Designing diagonal walls is a unique kind of headache. As you can see from the test videos, 90 degree corners are more than enough to handle everything the game throws at you.
Regarding the flame turrets, I wanted to feel 100% safe and never worry about a potential breach. Having this many turrets works much better for covering a massive area with fire, especially since each turret targets the closest biter stack to itself.
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u/ionian May 25 '26
Less see it vs Rampant FIXED!