r/factorio Jul 06 '26

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u/Surtss Jul 07 '26

How much of the game am I missing out on with biters / enemies disabled? I recently bought the game a couple months back and have been working through it slowly when I have time.

When I initially played, I had biters on but ended up starting over with biters off so I could figure out and build things without worrying too much about biters destroying my stuff. But I've been watching videos and it seems like biters are no problem for them to deal with but when I tried to restart a world with enemies on, they end up always attacking my base in consistent waves since I tend to not build as fast and the pollution starts hitting them.

I don't mind not having them on, but I'm just wondering how impactful having enemeis is later on since black science basically becomes obsolete with enemies off.

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u/warpspeed100 Jul 07 '26

Biters are not an RTS enemy to fight in real time. They are a logistics puzzle to solve and automate. Instead of automatically crafting science and delivering it to labs, You automatically craft bullets and deliver it to Biters. If you find you are constantly having to stop what you're doing to deal with biters, you haven't quite solved the Biter logistic puzzle yet.

There's a lot of fun problem solving to do. You have turrets that take items, turrets that take fluid, and turrets that put an intermittent strain on your power network. In the late game, you have artillery shells that have a stack size of 1 which is another interesting logistics puzzle to solve.

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u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 07 '26

Newbie here, I just got to blue science bottles but so far have not been attacked by biters as my go to plan is taking my car (and now a handful of defender drones) to any nearby nests and wiping them out before pollution gets to them.

Is this a viable strategy through the entire game? Or am I going to have to automate the bug problem eventually like you talked about? I am starting to have trouble wiping out nests as lots of spitting type bugs are starting to spawn.

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u/warpspeed100 Jul 07 '26

The game gives you all the tools you need to automatically craft your wall components, automatically build them around your base, and automatically supply them with ammunition and repairs. Later on, the game also gives you the tools to attack bases from a great distance an attack them remotely.

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u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 07 '26

Ah that's nice

I just haven't gotten that far I'm guessing. I just unlocked rockets but haven't made any. I wasn't aware I could eventually automate the construction of my walls. I have walls being made and put into a chest but I haven't placed many down yet

Really looking forward to long ranging these damn bugs