Factorio Forums

I'm playing with Bob's Mods and RSO along with a few other mods so after going through all of the close ore deposits that you can just belt I'm in a bit of a debate with myself. Do I kill all the biters in an area and wall it off to mine to my hearts content? Or do I build small/large mining outposts and simply wall those off? I'm also trying to create a rail system that isn't all spaghetti and looks semi organized. I was also thinking of building separate distribution centers instead of one large one. The issue I tend to have is building things to be expandable. I've seen tutorials and other megabases, but one thing I've noticed when they explain things is not how to deal with the biters (or there simply aren't any in their maps?). Any advice on this would be great.

If you make an outpost, you need to wall off your rail network. If you have a lot of outpost, your border perimeter is actually much bigger than if you just protect a wide area. On the other hand outpost is much faster to clear and you can delay the protection of your rail system for a while even though eventually you need to wall it off. So, unless you are in a hurry, just clear out large area and wall it off. It is easy to clear biters if you already have flamethrower.

I don't use any game changing mods (not even RSO) so it might be different but... couldn't you protect your rail network with turrets as well? I personally find outposts "nicer" as in they are fun, look cool, give a sense of realism while long walls feel kind of "gamey" (though walls instead of outposts has been done in reality many times... looking at you china and USA).

However, my choice when it comes to effectiveness is definitely walling off.

Walling off is much more effective though you will have to kill biter nests inside of your walled region after. The deal is, while wall length grows linearly, walled off area grows quadratically.

quinor wrote:Walling off is much more effective though you will have to kill biter nests inside of your walled region after. The deal is, while wall length grows linearly, walled off area grows quadratically.

Plus one usually chooses narrow gaps between water to build walls, at least I do and I never put water on very low or starting area only settings because of it. Smart placement of wall segments probably cuts the amount of wall you have to build by half.

Here is a screenshot from my single player game and red lines where I will probably wall off eventually (it's a huge area):

Ah, thanks for the tips guys. I spawned in an area with not too many large bodies of water so I was needing tons of stone to wall off areas and I felt like there had to be a better way to do this but I guess not. Time to wall off and concrete the world! MUHAHAHA.

I never found the need to protect the railways .. biters do not attack rails .. sometimes a electric pole near one of the outposts is missing but that's it.

I regularly kill nearby nests to keep the attacks on the outposts low though.

If not defending the rails, the aliens either destroy it or the train. And if traversing between outposts, you always have to carry your defensive setup.

Honestly, I've never seen a biter attack a rail. Heck, I've never seen them attack a pole either. The area I have to cover is pretty massive to so it has been a bit frustrating trying to build the wall and keep the resources coming in while fending off the biters and repairing the damage they do. For the meantime I've created a little "defense factory" in my factory that produces tons of Mark II Gun Turrets and depleted uranium ammo so I can quickly setup a wall to stem the flow then follow up with laser turrets for a more permanent wall. I also found out the hard way that you should have a sort of redundant electrical pole system for really distant parts of the wall. I didn't pay attention to the warning at first because I thought the laser turrets would deal with it but apparently they took out the ONE electrical pole powering the whole wall and I lost 27 laser turrets before I got it under control. >_<

I had bitters destroy my long distance power pole that was my power link in the middle of turret creeping a giant base. Sacrificed something like 60 turrets to the Irony gods. Turns out they had built a base right were the power pole was and thus had to destroy it to set up their spawners.

If you ask me bitters need to target power poles especially if your main defense is lasers. They are already smart enough to avoid turrets power poles just makes sense. You can even call it a stealth machine gun turret buff

Perhaps have it so that they're attracted to whatever is generating the electricity (power poles, generators) and so destroy anything in there way to get to it. Seems to make sense to me. So if your gun turrets are in the way, they destroy them, and if your main defense is laser turrets, then your defenses could be crippled if you don't properly build a wall to make sure they can't just destroy the power poles and render you defenseless.

And if a worm happens to spawn near the rail, it will attack your trains, and it is a guaranteed hit. Only 3 worms are enough to destroy a train i think. Byebye cargo.

Biter nests are covering like 20% of the landscape in endgame, so you cannot go to any of your outpost without clearing nests. To me this is a mayor annoyance, but some people enjoy killing the same aliens over and over. But who cares.

It really depends on how spread out your outposts are, and if you play with water or not.

If you think the amount of time and resources it takes to expand you wall will net you many pockets of resources I say go for it.

I've done both methods, and I've found if you plan on making bigger bases to just do one giant wall around everything and expand that wall when you need more resources. This way, when you need to setup more Solar pannels, or a new Factory producing a massive amount of green circuits or whatever, you'll have plenty of space to work with.