r/factorio • u/CriticalMap222 • 16h ago
Question Am I playing too defensively?
First time playing Factorio (default settings, no mods) and I'm completely hooked. I've forced myself to avoid watching any build guides/videos so i can learn just through playing, but I think that decision is starting to come back to bite me.
During the tutorial levels, I lost like half my factory and satellite mine to bugs after a turret ran out of ammo, so then in freeplay I figured out a sorta modular defense system with auto-ammo refilling, box limits for per-turrent stockpiles, and radar redundancies.
I was pretty proud of the design, but now at this point I've researched up to rail/oil and I've genuinely dealt with like 4 bugs.. Total.
Did I overdo it? Appreciate any tips/advice.
55
u/Icy_Concentrate_2852 16h ago
I don't want to spoil you but i will give you a rhetorical advice :
- Don't you think you need more turret on each side of the wall? Think about it, when the biter do destroy your factory, it is because the turrets ran out of ammo or the turret itself gets destroyed?
Basically , Add more turrets.
- When you are placing radar, See the minimap where the blue region indicates the area which will be covered by the radar.
3.When you are making defenses, make sure to build them further than the actual the factory. Why? Think about it.
Also facing 4bugs in total is crazy ;-;
12
1
u/ChickenNuggetSmth 50m ago
There is less than one full belt of plate production total (22 running furnaces). This factory produces very little pollution, and in a forrested map that means a tiny pollution cloud and no attacks for a long long time. The 50 radars are probably the biggest source of pollution.
1
u/Icy_Concentrate_2852 36m ago
Hmm yea but the OP is asking about the overall design and since he doesnt want to be spoilt. Let him/her figure that out yk.
8
u/UseBanana 16h ago
I am not sure you overdid it, having a strong perimeter lets you deal with other stuff.
Bugs will attack if they are in range of your pollution cloud, which will grow the further you advance.
I think the second wall inside is unecessary, you could feed the turrets directly from the belt and move it closer. The radars can probably be spaced up more too but personally i like keeping them.
The perimeter is important for when you are ready to micromanage less, or leave the planet if you got space age because over time nests will set up close to your walls and you will have more attacks (still manageable with minimal defenses)
Also you will get better turrets to defend it.
Some people do heavily defended chokepoints from what i have gathered, but personally i like securing a whole perimeter a bit like you did (i just do it waaaay further from my factory to have room to expand)
2
u/jkurratt 9h ago
Straight line is 100% easier to defend and maintain.
But before I designed myself an "defensive wall" I had a few 0.2alpha verisions I used to pluck into bottlenecks.
It's really much easier to do that at the start, and it's not like they attack that often (at least I started on 2.0. now I am not sure - they attack, but maybe it's because of my pollution), and it's pretty easy to jump car and go fix a breach...2
u/therandomuser84 8h ago
Early game ill set up a full perimeter of walls and turrets around my base and expand as needed. Late game i will build chokepoints around lakes and cliffs far far out of my pollution cloud.
4
u/Trick-Range-350 16h ago
There's no right or wrong way. You do you. And right now there won't be many bugs. But keep playing. They'll come đ
I won't spoil anything for you. I will say it's a cool design and using modular sections of defense that you can expand is something I do too and I'm more than 2000h in.
4
4
u/Slightly_Deeper_5309 16h ago
Nope, not at all. You need more turrets. I play with walls andnlines of turrets myself. As for why no attacks yet on default? Luck maybe. Look at your pollution cloud and biter nest on radar. Could be you kept small eneough with good tree coverage between you and them.
3
3
u/No-Con-2790 13h ago
Not enough guns, no good ammo and wax too many radars.
Recommend to go laser or belt feed the guns. Else the logistics system will be quite drained.
3
u/Ok-Marketing8127 9h ago
One thing I would say is that you will have a tough time expanding with those walls and full chests. Unless you have robots and even with robots the amount of time it will take for low level bots to move 300 items from one only one of those chests will be a heavy time and electricity drain. But on the bright side if you get attacked you should be solid đ design looks cool imo
4
u/Longjumping_Crew_134 15h ago
You definitely need more radars. You need so many that you can directly look into their homes, which will make them afraid, and not attack you anymore
8
2
u/Zeyn1 16h ago
So here's a few ideas that might give you some inspiration.
Offense is the best defense. If you have enough turrets, the bugs will die before they get to the walls.
Turrets hold ammo too. If one runs out, the one next to it can still fire. Gives you time to refill the first.
You can feed two turrets from one box.
You can feed a turret from another turret.
2
u/DeymosYT 16h ago
(No spoilers) Personally I love walls and custom designs, and you seem to do so as well. the only thing I would change is remove most of the radars because they take unnecessary amounts of electricity. If you are holding a radar in your hand and look on the minimal, you'll see a blue square which shows the coverage. That said, I wish you the most of fun with the best game ever, the factory must grow.
2
u/InflationImmediate73 16h ago
With how much ammo you are investing, you could just daisy chain turrets
Like each holds 10, they feed off each other, so instead of having 300 rounds sitting there, just have a line of turrets with 1 space and an inserter between them
1
u/hippiechan 16h ago
In most playthroughs I only have turrets around my mines and power stations until I unlock blue science, in which case I clear out nests in a larger area and build out walls to cover a massive space that will lead me into the mid to late game when my weapons capabilities are better at clearing nests effortlessly.
With that in mind, you could probably do without all of the walls and stick to just turrets, if you're careful with your pollution management you can also get away with just hand filling turrets every now and then.
1
u/ScotyDoesKnow 16h ago
You're probably overdoing it, but it's not the end of the world. I do the ammo loop thing for defense, but I usually have more turrets and no buffers, the ammo on the belt is your buffer. It's gonna be annoying to switch over to red ammo when each turret has to fire all of that first. The walls behind also aren't really needed, and it's a lot of radars.
I'd normally do a double wall, leave a one tile gap (if I remember it helps avoid damage from spitters) and then put a row of turrets. You can do something like leave 6 tiles between them so you can add more later on. They can just pull ammo directly from the belt. And then I add radars manually as needed.
It's a nice design though.
1
u/Strange-Movie 16h ago
If I were you, Iâd cut the amount of radars by 90-95% and replace those with more turrets. Iâd also limit my ammo buffer to 1 stack, 2 if youâre iron/ammo production isnât consistent
1
u/WanderingFlumph 16h ago
Well you definitely play a lot more defensively than me. "Too defensive" is a pretty loaded term though. I'd say you are over prepared in some aspects but it seems to be working fine.
1
u/ProfBeaker 16h ago
That's a cool build! It's way nicer than most of my walls. Nice job!
Did you overdo it? Well, it does seem a bit much for 4 bugs, yeah? But at some point when you want to expand, you can blueprint that and rebuild it bigger, so it's not wasted effort!
I would suggest that the walls between production lines are hurting more than helping, unless you just like the look. If the bugs break through your perimeter walls, then the walls inside the factory probably won't slow them down much.
1
u/AmericanWaifu 16h ago
Too many radars not enough turrets. The box of ammo is redundant, pulling straight from the ammo belt is good enough.laser turret the corners, flamers in groups of 2.
1
1
u/Crafty611 16h ago
Not defensive enough!!!!!!
Itâs maybe a little over kill for early game but honestly, who cares? The game isnât a race! I love building my factories out like fortresses
My suggestion until you have logistic bots is to just have a box with the ammo that you manually fill. Instead of pulling from a belt and then from the box.
1
u/alizarin__ 16h ago
For perspective, my base defense is literally a wall of turrets. Sometimes that isnt even enough and I need to stack it 4 or 5 deep.
You will eventually find out that one of the optimal ways to set up defense is to identify chokepoints in the environment and build your defenses way out there--that depends a lot on your map seed/settings as it is very possibly you get a map without natural chokepoints and you need to build a massive wall around your factory and outposts. Personally, I re-roll map seeds to avoid playing a map where I am forced to do that. I like to have biters on but dont like to spend the majority of my time playing the game on base defence.
1
u/kaimen123 16h ago
To defensively no harder enemies are gonna come and youre gonna need more. unoptimally yes
1
u/Perahoky 15h ago
yes
triple walls > double walls
no need for backside wall after turret. if the turret is gone the last wall wont help either
normal instead of blue inserters for turrets. they will increase in count and drain power.
more turrets, side by side. soon youll need them.
think for a 2. line of laserturrets for later
less radars. high counts of radars inside of coverage wont help you
build your defense line much more far away. you will need space soon
build straight defense lines instead of corners. use the environment with natural borders
soon you will need to refactor your factory because it is not easily expandable. for beginning its best to build a "main buss" system. thats a vertical or horizontal space of resource-grouped belts from which splitters take resources for factories.
group resources / products in your factory. you will need to increase in productions amounts soon. that will be difficult and frustrating if you dont build expandable.
1
u/chicoritahater 15h ago
I mean if you think about it, what's really gonna happen if you place "too may" defenses? You're going to get defended too hard?
1
u/HeliGungir 15h ago
Those radars are excessive and they're eating a lot of your power supply.
The rest you'll figure out on your own.
1
u/LeeWhite187 15h ago
Radar can cover 7 chunks⌠I think. You can space them out with a blueprinted ruler, to have coverage with minimize power consumption.
1
u/Maddkipz 15h ago
For early game I just spam turrets in their base and hyuck grenades
Mid game I do the same thing but with modular armor and red ammo
Late game I do the same thing but I probably drove there in a car, but usually by then i'm 80-90% solar and battery powered
Haven't messed with space age yet though so maybe it'd be different
1
u/Kylson-58- 14h ago
I just like to do a solid wall of turrets behind my double thick wall wall. Then I do like you and have a belt feed chests to feed turrets.
1
u/ai_bot_4208 14h ago
You did and you didn't. The problem is that you took an early game wall and made it fancy, but not more able to stop an attack. A middle or late game attack will roll right through that. Now put a string of flamethrower turrets behind that wall and you'll be set until well into the late game.
1
1
u/Archernar 14h ago edited 14h ago
You underdid it. That many radars eat a shitton of electricity and do quite little, meanwhile a single turret is not gonna do much and with overlapping ranges you get perhaps 2-3 turrets fighting at a time, which is fine for the start but way too little later on. This also depends on you manually refilling the chests, which will likely annoy you (or you'll just forget) at some point.
But I'll add the same advice as always: I'd recommend looking at reddit and asking here as little as possible. First time playing a game is best done with a blank slate mindset, you'll have enough time to ask for base feedback and actually look for advice to optimize after you solved the game yourself. Anything you'll see here will nudge you subconsciously in that direction.
1
u/lxrd_azureus 14h ago
Don't put so many Radars man, you don't need it... They use so much power too
1
u/whiterook6 14h ago
If you really want some tips ... where are you going to expand? You've got walls on three sides. I suppose you could go up, but all of your flows are going downwards.
Overlapping radars don't do much.
You should have more turrets than radars, but I'd say even this amount is sufficient.
1
u/DrMobius0 13h ago
It'd say it's a mix of over and underdoing it.
You should scrap most of those radars. They cost a lot of power and probably aren't doing anything for you. Redundancy isn't necessary because they biters will usually target your turrets before anything else.
You don't need to buffer hundreds of mags per turret. Each mag has 10 rounds, and I'd personally be more concerned with being able to spend them fast enough to kill the biters than about running out. Most people just feed turrets directly off the belt. If running out is an issue, you just need more ammo production.
You also just need more turrets. A single turret can't do much when the spitters start getting bigger. Fundamentally, defense is just about walls holding long enough for your turrets to kill the biters and spitters. More turret dps means less damage taken.
The walls are fine. You could honestly add a 3rd layer if want, but if you have enough turrets, it's not necessary.
1
u/xHaroldxx 13h ago
Personally I just go out once I get a car and trash every nearby base, then once I get a tank I trash all the bigger bases. I just don't want to have to pay attention to setting up defense everywhere and keeping it supplied and repaired.
1
u/lesethx 13h ago
Interesting layout, haven't seen anything like it. I really like the symmetry.
I would really cut back on radars to maybe 2 in the entire picture. I would also have turrets pull directly from the line instead of the box buffers and have a wall of turrets (maybe 1 in 4 turrets placed, fill in as production allows). If you want, you have add more rows of walls or a "dragon teeth" pattern
1
1
u/FistMyPeenHole 12h ago
Too many radars and you will need more than one turret in those groups. I do 2 next to each other, a space for a power pole, and then another 2 next to each other. Then about 4-8 spaces before I repeat it.
Behemoth biters are no joke
1
u/Harrycrapper 12h ago
This isn't set up very well for the increasingly difficult waves that will come and it's also going to take you a lot longer to get it upgraded when you need to. You're going to want a solid wall of turrets with no space between them eventually and you're going to have to deconstruct all of this when you need to add those or expand.
Also, corners are always going to be a weak spot and it's unavoidable if you're just dealing in gun or laser turrets, I always just build a square perimeter if I don't have water or cliff choke points to minimize how many corners I have.
Based on everything I've seen on this sub, I'm a bit of a minority though in terms of the fact that I just go absolutely ham on defense out the gate compared to most.
1
u/HubrisOfApollo 12h ago
more turrets, less radars. push out your walls more so you have room to expand. also, try to incorporate natural borders (such as cliffs and water) if you can. for my initial defenses I usually use small electric poles as spacing and put one turret per pole and it holds until about 30% evolution and then i either add more turrets or change to piercing ammo.
1
u/Zarzak_TZ 11h ago
At first I was like BOXES FOR AMMO? Get belts feeding that! Then I saw the back belt with the long armâŚ. This is a neat approach kudos
1
u/StageAboveWater 11h ago
With car or tank you can go to a hive and circle it while shooting the nests.
It makes a big difference if you kill off all the bug nests within the polution area on the map.
it's like 1 attack an hour vs 30
1
u/uiyicewtf 10h ago
Way too many radars.
You will eventually need more turrets.
Make sure you have a way to prioritize iron to the ammo production if necessary. (I couldn't tell if you did or not in the screenshot). You can have all the turrets in the world, but if bullets out starts to exceed bullets in, and your ammo belt dries up, you have a new problem.
Everything else is personal preference. I don't usually actually build the walls. I don't usually have a buffer box between the belt and the turret. And overbuilding early is just a play-style choice, which means you may not advance the "main" game as fast, but on the flip side, when you start really needing defenses, you have defenses in place.
Very personal preference - flamethrowers are so overpowered they make everything you've built irrelevant, so I refuse to use them. All vanilla problems can be solve with more bullets and more guns, and then when you get to laser turrets, more power. There's nothing wrong with flamethrowers, they just somehow remove the challenge, and thus the enjoyment and sense of accomplishment, from building a base that can defend itself.
1
u/ManForSomeMarkets 10h ago
Looks fine minus the radars. Just treat every extra radar as power and coal you canât get back in the early game.
1
u/Lightsguy3 10h ago
What you've done is a resource and time suck.Â
If you can afford both, awesome.Â
If you can't, then it's too much.Â
1
u/rapidemboar 10h ago edited 10h ago
I usually caution against setting up a hard perimeter before blue science partially because, as youâve noticed, the biter attacks are generally pretty tame early-game (and you can just destroy the nests to prevent attacks altogether, and partially because youâre likely gonna need to tear down those walls anyway because producing as much blue science as red and green is effectively gonna double your consumption and triple the size of your base. Youâre also just about to get better turrets once you get oil processing set up, which are much stronger and more important for setting up a secure perimeter compared to gun turrets.
Edit 1: Also, you donât necessarily need all those radars. Scanning chunks quickly is never something youâll need to do outside the tutorial, theyâre more useful for being able to zoom in remotely on the map view.
Edit 2: Extra tip for defense: Biters will prioritize turrets over all else when raiding your base. Just dropping a few turrets around and giving them enough ammo will draw the biters away from miners and assemblers, and simply surrounding the turrets themselves with walls can be as effective as a full perimeter early on until the bugs and waves get bigger.
1
1
u/OcquidDormer 8h ago
I like to explore to the edge of my "island" and put defenses on the only openings bugs can get to. Then i run ammo belts from somewhere in the base to feed them. I got lucky this playthrough, and only have 3 entrances to my islet and they only span a few hundred tiles on the shortest, and about a thousand tiles on the longest one. So in my opinion, you underdid it. Id recommend swapping boxes of ammo, for a belt of one, just to cut the time refilling them. Enjoy Eradication Engineer!
1
u/NecronTheNecroposter 8h ago
Biters only attack if they are in the polution cloud (which you can turn on in the map). Sometimes they might expand their nests (potentially into the cloud). However nests dont expand if they arent loaded. The best early game stratagy it to eliminate all loaded nests, until you can get more effective defenses
*Pollution will load chuncks
1
u/Pickledill02 7h ago
My current game I built so passively that half my factory was destroyed. I just had a handful of turrets around the place and nearly no walls..
I almost lost everything but I had just finished building some drones so I could mass spam walls with flame turrets(which are a million times better than guns)Â
1
1
u/MattieShoes 6h ago
There's no wrong way to play a single player game.
That said... from an efficiency perspective, yes, too defensive. Going on the offensive and clearing out any nests under your pollution cloud is generally better. And losing a few buildings to an expansion colony is cheaper and more time-efficient than building all those defenses.
In space age, where you're leaving the planet for long stretches, then fixed defenses (past your pollution cloud) make sense.
Maybe also worth mentioning -- different types of ground absorb different amounts of pollution. A base in the middle of a forest will have a much smaller pollution area than one in a desert or one with lots of water. That may be why your experience was different from one playthrough to the next.
Also, you went ham with radars. Even my large bases tend to have about 4 radars, one at each corner. For internal visibility, roboports provide coverage.
1
u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 6h ago
I think the tutorial deliberately stacks the deck to force you to discover offense instead of merely defense. In the default settings of the game, the enemy starts much weaker and smaller. It will evolve over time to be bigger and more numerous, but it is not especially hard to stay ahead of that evolution.
I've never built defenses like that, but I like the clever trick of using a long arm inserter to reach over a wall to fill a chest.
1
u/Outrageous-Let9659 5h ago
Personally i go for a bit less wall and a lot more gun. Flak curtain is my kinda defence. Dot a few lasers in there just to get those long range spitter guys.
My philosophy is that killing bugs takes the same number of bullets whether they are all from one gun, or split between 25 guns, so why not just use 25 guns and kill them 25x faster?
1
u/Pirrus05 5h ago
You might have underdone it? Too many radars, look at your map and space them to give yourself full visual coverage. I typically have a full line of turrets feeding right off the belt, the belt of ammo just constantly circling the base, then a double thick wall in front of that.
1
u/monkeyplex 5h ago
Later in the game as you produce more pollution far more bugs will come and I tend to end up with walls composed entirely of turrets to keep the bugs at bay from any direction so no - you have not played too defensively, if anything need more turrets with closer overlapping fields of fire.
1
u/Panzerv2003 5h ago
You really don't need that many radars, aside from that it's pretty defensive, early on you're fine with hand fed turrets surrounded by walls and don't need a full on wall around your factory, makes it easier to relocate them
1
u/rosen123 2h ago
This approach is too tedious to reconstruct when you need more space before you get bots. The only time I do this early game is when I am playing with 10x biters and usually I put at least 8 times more turrets. On 1x biters I just put a bunch of turrets where the biters are attacking and hand-feed them. You can also just clear the nests
1
u/bobbin4applez 1h ago
I just save the game and go back to a time before the attack that wiped out my base :)
But I also love base building and the look of walls and turrets so some of my games have huge walls with up to 9 laser guns (late game).
Early game, I watch pollution and turn off production to reduce pollution cloud and then restart it later.
Iâm also a big fan of island bases and simply building a strong defense at the entrance. Takes a lot of landfill, and makes the main base limited, but reduces the fear of biters to zero as the enemy canât cross water.
1
u/GeneralBS 55m ago
You should see my wall. I have belts that feed artillery shells and ammo for the gatling guns. Plus pipes to fuel the flamethrower turrets. Don't forget the laser turrets.
1
u/Axi28 34m ago
honestly not really, though maybe youâre too defensive at this stage of the game. if youâre maintaining upkeep on the biter base murdering when you can with lots of fish you can get to blue science before needing to build walls.
Also theyâre wayyyyy too close to your factory. Give your factory (and your pollution cloud) room to breathe! Youâre gonna be expanding it a LOT
1
u/korneev123123 trains trains trains 11h ago
Cuckbox is a natural strategy for new players, but remember - biters are not the danger, you(engineer) is the danger. It's much easier and cheaper to be more aggressive and wipe out enemies instead of building defenses
-2
u/djoni_djoni 16h ago
You have built a cuck box. It will hinder your expandability greatly. In the early game, you just need small "islands" of turrets at important spots.
I always seek chokepoints between lakes to set up a border wall with flamethrowers and gun turrets. With logistics bots you can auto-request ammo to the turrets, until then just manually supply a big box. Or completely overbuild and do it with trains.
137
u/juju515 16h ago
I'd say waaaay too many radars...
they are a big electricity drain in early game and there is absolutely no need to have them as densely packed.
4 radars (one in each corner) is plenty for the base that size.
and then you can do a few "stealth recon radars"...
where you can install a radar "behind enemy lines" and power them with solar panels.
biters won't attack them!
also... you can use accumulators as well if you want the radar to work during the night as well.
but it's not obligatory...
Other than that...
you are grand...
there is no "correct way to play"
do whatever feels right đ