Factorio Forums

IMHO, main problem now is machine guns, not strength of biters.
Gun turrets (and hand machine gun) is completely useless against medium biters (armor 4) with standard ammo. Barely useful against medium biters and completely useless against big biters (armor 8) with armor piercing ammo.
It have be ok if biters attacks in groups of 100 small, 10 medium and 1 big biter. But now big biters come more frequently, so player need not to use gun turrets, he may use laser turrets only.
I think need to decrease somehow number of big biters and increase number of small. For example make it more difficult to grow small biter into medium and even more difficult to grow medium into large. And increase number of spawn small biters.

Yeah, and you registered just to post this ?
The devs already said numerous times that they will add techs to improve the gun turrets.
And you can already improve your own guns with techs.

Upgraded guns also barely can pierce armor of big biters (5+4 vs 8). And very much of resources need to make all upgrades.
With current rarity of different sizes of biters gun turrets is useless. They require lots of resources for ammo and logistic system. For what player need to build it if laser turrets is enough?
I did not met large packs of small biters that laser turrets will kill long enough to make me think about bullet guns.

For the 0.7.1 we have added some bullet upgrades and increased a little bit the speed of rotation and shooting distance for gun turrets. Also we did some balancing regarding the enemy units so there should be less big biters indeed.

Thanks for answer. Sorry.

Also I wanted to make clear, that making the pistol/submachne gun not effective against the strongest enemies was the goal.
So upgraded gun turrets will still work, but with the evolution slowed down, the player needs to use different weapons against the strongest enemies.

Kovarex, will guns still be a reliable method ?
For example, a row of gun turrets with small groups of laser turrets here and there and maybe one or two rocket launchers to take out the big guys ?
Also, there should only be like 1 or 2 bigs per group of enemies, like spaceships, you often see 1 big with several middle and a lot of small ones.

The distribution of big/medium/small ones depends on the enemy evolution (concept that we should describe on the wiki better).
The evolution starts at 0, and maximum value is 1.
So basically in the start, you encounter only small biters all the time, and when evolution gets near to 1, there are mostly big (blue) biters.

kovarex wrote:The distribution of big/medium/small ones depends on the enemy evolution (concept that we should describe on the wiki better).
The evolution starts at 0, and maximum value is 1.
So basically in the start, you encounter only small biters all the time, and when evolution gets near to 1, there are mostly big (blue) biters.

The thing is, if you kill big biters, the spawner will spawn big biters ?
Or only small ones that needs to grow again ?

If big biters come back, ouch, else that seems fine to me.
The thing is, if at some point you only have big biters, and you need to use only the most powerful turrets to protect your base, then you'll have some useless tech, and that's meh.
But let's say, if you go somewhere else, and there are only small biters (they have not evolved yet .. maybe pollution is what makes them evolve ?) then you can use your small protections.

I fear that if I want to create an extension to my base somewhere, say, another, smaller base, just to regroup some of my resources before bringing them by train, I've never got there before but yet there are already big biters waiting to eat the crap out of me. That seems unfair.

true enough, before the latest update i liked to use a defense system with names for each stage, a pod is 8 laser turrets in a circle with a empty space in the center, and a star is 4 pods around a medium power pole all surrounded by a wall. i liked theses systems because it had a distinct image on the map and let me quickly see how well my base was defended by simply looking for the unique pattern. it was over kill and i knew it but i liked the pattern. with the new version that system is effectively obsolete, i design and place factories so that enemies are funneled into specific places, and because of that a single star is over run with ridiculous ease by even a small biter rush, so i need to use two stars with double walling on each assault vector of the biters, and the only areas where im even considering using gun turrets are spots where the biters are blocked off by water.

also i'm never too fond of shotguns so on principle in not happy about having to use them as the most reasonable personal defence, i've noted railguns in the source marerial and i really like the idea of them, i'd like railgun towers too, both with greater range, maybe just bigger thatn enemy turret range but not more than their charge range is what i'd like.