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Re: Tank Chat I don't know what the hell I did to my world settings that caused all biter bases to be huge, dense bricks of dozens of spawners and worms, but the tank was absolutely the only way I could take out bases short of extremely extensive turret creep (which feels rather like cheating to me, so I avoid doing it). You mentioned you don't know how it compares to the Power Armor in terms of damage resistance, so I'll throw the numbers out there. Unlike the car, which has no resistances whatsoever and is easily bogged down and exploded by swarms of biters, the Tank is incredibly durable. Power Armor (100HP base plus shields) Acid: 7/30% Explosion: 15/30% Physical: 8/30% vs Tank: (2000 HP) Acid: 15/50% Explosion: 15/70% Fire: 15/60% Impact: 50/80% Physical: 15/60% As always, flat damage is applied first, and then the percentage reduction from resistances is applied. The difference in damage mitigation between Power Armor vs the Tank is very substantial in practice, as the smaller biters and spitters only deal a fraction of a single HP in damage to a tank and even the largest worms and spitters require over a hundred attacks to destroy a tank from full HP. While inside the tank, you can still use combat robots, Personal Laser Defense modules, and Personal Roboports without issue and your construction robots will bravely fly out to repair the tank in the middle of combat. However, the tank does not benefit from your Energy Shields.
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Dec 13, 2017 22:55
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:02 |
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There's a dramatic difference in how much ammunition/HP you expend in the first video versus the second one. A couple suggestions - the tank's flamethrower is _really good_ at clearing out the huge packs of biters that trail along after you because it does much higher damage while also hitting multiple biters close together. I know you mentioned you weren't aware of this before, but if you're using Combat Robots and/or Personal Laser Defense, your robots/personal lasers can also thin out large chunks of the herd, and they'll also murder buildings /worms you get close to. The less time you spend in proximity of the base with spawners alive, the fewer biters that spawn and the less ammo you have to spend. You mentioned that you're not using Combat Robots anymore, but they're still very much worth it even once you're rolling around in a tank - if nothing else, it reduces the time and ammo you spend clearing biter bases. The more overwhelming your firepower going in to clear a base, the more efficiently that firepower gets spent (versus having to spend ammo/HP on the biter swarms). Olesh fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Dec 17, 2017 |
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Dec 17, 2017 22:35
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Thotimx posted:I don't like the really short range on it. But I will give another try. There certainly is something of a fiddly opportunity cost to using the flamethrower - swapping weapons while driving, turning, and aiming while also driving slow enough that biters actually catch up to the tank can be annoying. I wouldn't blame anyone for just not using it, but it does have a niche. Unfortunately, once you get Uranium ammo regular bullets pack enough punch that the extra damage from the flamethrower simply isn't worth it anymore. As far as combat robots go, I've touched on this before but the real value of combat robots is just the economic equivalent of throwing money at the biters to clear bases faster. I never stopped producing them, but I also never bothered upgrading past Defenders either. I wasn't aware at the time that Distractor capsules were armed and spawned three robots per capsule, or that Destroyer capsules spawned five robots per capsule. My experience with modular armor and the first level of power armor are that you basically can't afford to power anything other than night vision all the time, though with batteries you can use a shield for a while. If you really want to be powering any other kind of module, you need to stock up with a bunch of batteries and solar panels, and temporarily swap in items to run directly off of battery power. A single personal laser defense consumes 600 kW, while personal solar panels only generate 10 kW. A fully charged battery MK1 gives you ~33 shots; five charged batteries will let you run a couple personal laser defenses for long enough to clear a biter base or two, but it's almost certainly not worth the hassle. Much easier to just throw combat robots at the problem, even if Defenders are largely ineffective against big biters and big worms. Sadly, exoskeletons are largely unusable until you get that better power source - you can just barely power a single exoskeleton once you get access to Power Armor, but you're only one or two research projects away from better power sources at that point so there's not much point. Exoskeletons have a constant 200 kW power draw, so in order to be able to use them constantly you'd need 20 solar cells just to power them during the day, plus enough battery capacity to last all night, plus additional solar cells to charge the batteries during the day. I don't think it's even possible without Power Armor Mk2, at which point you have better options. Olesh fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 13:13
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ousire posted:Apparently roundabouts tend to jam easier than other types of intersections that don't allow trains to 180. Or so I've been told; personally, I've never experienced a problem with them but that's what I've heard from the Factorio subreddit, which tends to discourage the use of them for that reason. I usually build them liberally since it makes it easy to expand rails in the future, but it's just something to keep in mind. Traffic jams arise from a bad signal setup that allows trains to stop in such a way that cross traffic is blocked. If you treat your roundabouts like intersections and set your signals up so that no stopped train can interfere with traffic coming from another direction (and only stop traffic behind them), then your only worry is overall traffic density - which is a problem that can only be solved by expanding capacity and throughput (aka more lanes). That's a can that you will be theoretically kicking down the road forever, but at least it's one that doesn't become a frequent problem.
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Dec 31, 2017 17:32
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You can set up perfect ratios for oil production/cracking to convert everything to petroleum gas, but it's more hassle than it's worth. You WILL want lubricant and solid fuel, at the least, and flamethrower ammo is nice to have. Oil annoys a lot of people to start with, because really most of what people actually want is petroleum gas, and so they either continually expand storage of heavy and light oil, or set up cracking lines and solid fuel and flamethrower production without really understanding the production bottleneck. Once flamethrower ammo/solid fuel storage back up, though, the problem persists. The basic, low-effort solution is to set up cracking lines (heavy oil to light, and light oil to petroleum), put a pump feeding each line, and connect the pump to a single tank of the initial product - connect your heavy oil cracking line to a heavy oil tank, your light oil cracking line to a light oil tank. Set the pump to turn on when when the tank gets too high (>20k is usually a safe margin). This ensures that your cracking lines will shut off to maintain a reserve of heavy/light oil for producing other products (like lubricant, solid fuel, and flamethrower ammo) and gives you a flexible margin for production without having to worry that you haven't gotten the ratios perfect. The goal is to always maintain enough cracking that heavy oil/light oil never fill up beyond 20k - this means that as you expand your refineries, you need to also expand cracking, but since cracking shuts off at a 20k reserve and below, you can't run out because of too much cracking and managing your chemical plants is easy. Light oil filling up in the tank? Add more light oil cracking until it drops to 20k and stays there. Heavy oil filling up? Same thing. Not producing enough petroleum? Add more refineries and cracking until the petroleum tank starts filling again.
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Dec 31, 2017 19:48
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Veloxyll posted:Those mixed outputs though *twitch* One cargo per train car only please good sir! A reminder that blueprints are a thing that exist to save you time on repetitive tasks, and that once you have a set of basic train blueprints, you can ride a train, laying blueprints down ahead of you - your bots will do the work and you can benefit from your train cars' inventory to carry all of things you actually need to set up a station once you get to your destination.
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Jan 3, 2018 19:23
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Sage Grimm posted:Piercing Shotgun ammo combined with the eventual auto-shotgun results in a blender that'll ruin any biter group below behemoth. And it will render biter bases and worms to shreds in seconds. It's not disappointing in the slightest. My problem with shotguns is that they just don't fill a need. The regular submachinegun with piercing rounds covers non-resistant targets in pretty decently sized groups. The flamethrower covers resistant targets and also handles large groups well, and then you have the rocket launcher for more safely approaching clusters of Big Worms. Shotguns aren't really good at handling groups until they get Piercing Ammo, at which point there's no need for a shotgun anymore. Once you get Uranium Ammo, you don't even really need the flamethrower anymore.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:00
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Thotimx posted:** Lifetime: 45 seconds for Defenders/Distractors, 120 for Destroyers. To the extent they are able to survive, this is a huge upgrade. You're not wrong. On the face of it. Destroyers look incredibly expensive for what seems like a modest duration increase on the face of it. Here's the thing... each Defender capsule spawns one robot. Each distractor capsule spawns three robots, and each Destroyer capsule spawns five robots. Distractor capsules are supposed to draw biter aggression, but don't seem to do a great job of it once the biters are already chasing you. Additionally, Distractor capsules are completely stationary - they don't move at all, but stick around where they're placed and shoot any enemies in their range. This isn't entirely a drawback - since Distractors are stationary, they don't contribute to your follower robot count - your only limit is however many you want to place. Destroyer capsules, on the other hand, are an expensive optional military upgrade. The robots individually do less DPS than Defenders (because all robots benefit from Combat Robot Damage, while Defenders also benefit from bullet shooting speed and bullet damage upgrades), but you get five per capsule - deploying a swarm of robots is significantly faster (10 Destroyer robots/sec vs 4 Defender robots/sec). They consume a ton more raw materials than Defender robots. Since they individually do less damage, they look like a bit of a bum deal considering you're paying 20-25x the price in resources per capsule. Even with 5 robots per capsule, you're still paying 4-5x the cost per robot. There's one important difference, though. Defender robots shoot bullets and do physical damage. Medium Biters and up have physical damage resistance. Big biters and Big Worms have enough physical damage resistance to render Defender robots more or less completely impotent. Once biter evolution has progressed to the point where Big Biters become increasingly more common, regular Defender robots simply don't cut it anymore, as while they're perfectly fine against spitters and smaller biters, they will frequently get distracted trying to shoot enemies they can't reasonably damage and stop actually contributing. Distractor and Destroyer capsules, on the other hand, do laser/electric damage, which biters don't resist whatsoever, and can be quickly deployed in large groups, enabling you to tackle large swarms and clear out multiple bases very quickly and with minimal effort.
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Jan 12, 2018 08:37
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The main advantage is additional inventory space and room to run a second Portable Fusion Reactor, which then allows you to fill up the rest of your space with shields, lasers, roboports, and/or legs without having to worry about running out of power. You mention that you don't really feel the need to upgrade, but I find that Power Armor Mk2 is a fairly substantial QoL upgrade and frequently don't even bother making Mk1s. Having more roboports, more lasers (which, as a reminder, still work from inside vehicles), or simply more walking speed is enough to make it worth it for me.
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Jan 12, 2018 23:36
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SSNeoman posted:I don't suppose you can send out your robots to deal with the biters for you? Combat robots either follow you (for Defenders/Destroyers) or are launched at a specific point (for Distracters). Either way, the range is limited to the area around you personally. 0.16 included a pair of longer-range options for dealing with biters, but those are frankly post-game options as by the time you can build them, you're in a position to simply win the game if you choose.
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Jan 18, 2018 07:51
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wiegieman posted:I get the sense that a giant multi belt bus might be inferior to smaller systems connected by a rail network. The giant multi belt bus is fine, but a mixed system works best. If you've got the production to actually saturate the belts, you can reliably pull materials off it in fixed quantities. Problems creep up when you've, say, pulled a whole belt's worth of materials off, used a belt balancer, and then need a whole belt's worth of material somewhere down the line - instead of 4 lanes of 40 items/sec, instead you have 4 lanes of 30 items/sec and you need to split two lanes and recombine them to get a saturated belt and it's a spaghetti mess. One solution is to pay attention to what your demands are, and shrink your lanes down. Once you're using a whole belt's worth of materials, you stop balancing to 4 belts and condense it down to 3. Once you're using another belt of materials, you go from 3 to 2. Then, later on down the bus, you can inject fresh belts of materials by simply running new lanes in to where the previous belts were. If you do all your manufacturing on one side of the bus, you can use the other side of the bus for resupply depots. Rather than running 8 belts of iron plates, you run 4 belts of iron plates and periodically ship in a new belt or two further down the line, or even cut the line entirely and route in a fresh set of 4 belts. Tap a whole belt of iron plates? Shift the other lanes up afterward and leave the empty space. Somewhere down the line, you've got a train station that delivers more iron plates, which you route back on to the bus.
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Jan 23, 2018 10:18
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:02 |
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Bots aren't required, sure. Your basic logistics robots in vanilla only require red and green science to research, but you can't properly convert your factory from belts to bots until you've researched Logistic System, which gives you the rest of the logistic chests that make bots work industrially. It also requires purple and yellow science, meaning if you can research it you could also be researching (and building) the Rocket Silo to win the game. On the other hand, bots make handling logistics so much simpler and easier that there's very little practical reason to expand the belt system ever again once Logistic System is unlocked, which is a shame because optimizing and spaghettifying belts is a huge part of what gives the game its appeal.
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Oct 10, 2018 02:42
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