help & advice wanted: my late game pain points

[xattus]

So I have a long game going now with a heavy focus on trains and separated bases that do mainly one job or role. I have a couple of issues with the biters that are maintance chores at this point and before digging into scripting or mods to specifically adress them, I thought I'll drop them here first. So without a particular order, this is what drives me nuts:

0. (This probably causes the next one or two) Biters expand too close to my tracks that are going through red territory. Obviously they'll aggro on the train I'm travelling in.
1. I have a mining base VERY VERY FAR from my main area. While travelling by train sometimes the biters destory the tracks a short while after I pass by.
Takes 2-3 mins to get back there and fix.
2. Groups of biters that attack my main base perimeter get hit on the main line that connects other areas. The trains sometimes get partially destroyed, this then causes a huge grid lock and I have to go there just to rebuild the train parts and get everything going again.
3. Spitters destroy a huge amount of bots with repair packs that are continously spawing to repair an entity they are damaging.

I don't want to set up defenses along the entire rail road network, its way too huge for that.
I don't want to defend only with arty outposts as I also have very cool turret walls of doom that have a fully automated maintenance network.
I want the biters to continue being a threat but without causing the current annoying chores.

Any advice is appreciated

[mmmPI]

I think one need to have its railroad line protected. The best area to perimeter shape would be a circle, but in factorio that's going to be more often a square as it's easier to build .
A large square that encompasses your production area AND your ressources extraction area i think is the most generic layout that "solve" the problem of train getting destroyed. Because the robots could solve anything else pretty much. That should represent less total perimeter than protecting lines individually.

From your description it is not so easy to have an idea on ressource spread/ scale of the base and amount of water/cliffs, the previously described strategy would be unecessary in railworld as biters don't expand, otherwise given very scatered ressources, it feels like a lot of combat/expansion for few ressources but water or cliff can help you create large protected region by controlling only few chokepoints which can help.

Given your description, the "FAR AWAY" mining area, is what make me think of railworld where those problems don't exist, you have placed yourself in a difficult situation by doing a such base in a non-railworld game, solutions i can think of would contradict some things you want, it would be to build a wall protecting this long corridor with intermediate stations where a train can unload defense supply, like wall turrets power poles repair kit so that it constitute several logistic network self-repairing, to protect at least "Main line" to begin with.

[NineNine]

I agree. Just build a border around everything, including all of your mining. With bots and blueprints, it's not difficult.

[BicycleEater]

I would go with regular artillery posts along the train line, using a resupply train and an artillery train (and some circuit network stuff). You don't need many to clear the whole line, and while it would get attacked, it could just be heavily defended.
That or some mod/settings changes.

[Qon]

I don't want to defend only with arty outposts as I also have very cool turret walls of doom that have a fully automated maintenance network.
I want the biters to continue being a threat but without causing the current annoying chores.

The biters will attack your walls when the expansion parties new base is blown to mush. Having artillery doesn't mean you don't need other defenses. But you don't need walls around all your tracks, just around the artillery. If there's no pollution on rails then just artillery coverage can be enough since they will never walk close to rails without making a base in artillery range first. More artillery range means that you can have more sparse artillery outposts and still cover all your rails.

[Tertius]

Don't forget biter expansion. If a migrating biter group stops at a rail track by chance, the spawning nests and worms will destroy the tracks at that place. No attacks, no aggro required. They don't attack the tracks at that place, the tracks are simply replaced by the nests and worms at spawning.

Expansion also makes nests and worms come nearer and nearer to your base, up to the point where nests and worms are directly next to your defensive wall but just outside the reach of your turrets. The worms as well as the permanently spawning spitters will wear down your wall in the end. Since only artillery is able to automatically attack and destroy worms and nests, you need artillery to prevent this nest creep.

[xattus]

Thanks for replies

Let me clarify a few more things:

The game was stared with custom settings a long while ago, it's not a rail world and I left the expansion setting active on purpose.

I went "VERY FAR" away mainly because I wanted to, not for the sake of efficency. I wanted to have a mega train transporting huge amount of ore from far away, so that's what I built. But even without that very long track that heads 18 km away from my starting area, I still have other bases and mining outposts that have tracks running to them across biter territory.

So walling in absolutely everything - including ALL tracks - would require insane amount of time and effort. Same applies for covering everything with arty.

I don't want to defend only with arty outposts as I also have very cool turret walls of doom that have a fully automated maintenance network.
I want the biters to continue being a threat but without causing the current annoying chores.

The biters will attack your walls when the expansion parties new base is blown to mush. Having artillery doesn't mean you don't need other defenses. But you don't need walls around all your tracks, just around the artillery. If there's no pollution on rails then just artillery coverage can be enough since they will never walk close to rails without making a base in artillery range first. More artillery range means that you can have more sparse artillery outposts and still cover all your rails.

Yep, this system is already in place in some areas and it's very convinient. However like I mentioned, I still want my wall of doom (that I build even before arty was a thing) to be useful, so I'm not putting arty behind that one.

Don't forget biter expansion. If a migrating biter group stops at a rail track by chance, the spawning nests and worms will destroy the tracks at that place. No attacks, no aggro required. They don't attack the tracks at that place, the tracks are simply replaced by the nests and worms at spawning.

Expansion also makes nests and worms come nearer and nearer to your base, up to the point where nests and worms are directly next to your defensive wall but just outside the reach of your turrets. The worms as well as the permanently spawning spitters will wear down your wall in the end. Since only artillery is able to automatically attack and destroy worms and nests, you need artillery to prevent this nest creep.

This is not how the expansion mechanic works, unless you or some mods altered some values. By default biters don't make bases on top of rails and won't make bases too close to walls or turrets, there are no issues with range. The turret wall is capable of holding the expansion as well as the pollution related attacks.


One solution would be to modify the expansion setting that determines how close the biter bases can be to player entities. This would mean that collisions on tracks could be avoided on sections that run through hostile territory but are not in the path of attacking groups.

[stagdancer]

My solution is: rail-based artillery outposts.

When I run extremely long rail routes, I hang a heavily defended autonomous artillery-train base on to the rails, with some timer logic to enable the train-stop every X minutes (like, every 20 mins). It has radar, some robots, and usually some logic to summon a resupply train to keep ammo/flamethrower-fuel/walls/etc fully available. Place them as far apart as you choose, but ideally ensure the whole line has at least manual artillery coverage.

I usually use the 8t nuclear artillery from True Nukes, but basic artillery rounds are fine.

You have to clear away the existing nests by manual control initially, but after that the thing looks after itself.