Help with evolution / dealing with bitters!

[nikimilky]

Hey, I am new player, I went into the game without knowledge and figured stuff as I went.

At the start I didn't mind the bugs, I thought they are just background noise.
At some point they attacked my factory so I had to destroy their nests, thinking nothing of it.. even enjoyed it as it gave me an opportunity to use weapons.

Then at some point I noticed their attacks get harder to defend, and that their nests 'respawn'.
Only then I went to the wiki/forums in order to understand how to deal with them, I came across a youtube video that told me to just destroy their nests as they create them, and this is what I did for a while but their nest spawns became more and more frequent.

I tried to research more and found out that they get stronger based on an 'evolution' factor, which get effected by pollution and how often I destroy their nests.
So how I understand it now - destroying their nests screws me in the long run as it makes their expansion faster and bigger.

I am at a point of running all across my factory putting off fires for half of the time. I destroy one nest and another nests attacks me on the other side of the factory, almost constantly.

Most answers online talk about mitigating pollution and not destroying their nests in the first place, but I dont want to start a new game, especially since Im close to going into space.

evolution factor is 0.67

help please

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[Tertius]

I am at a point of running all across my factory putting off fires for half of the time. I destroy one nest and another nests attacks me on the other side of the factory, almost constantly.

You need to automate biter defense. Factorio is an automation game, so it's no surprise this kind of a new challenge will come up.

There are 2 mechanisms behind the biters you need to know about: expansion (building of new biter nests) and attacks (attack groups forming due to pollution).

About attacks: the attacks originate from biter nests the pollution cloud of your base and your mines will touch. That's the red area on the map. If there are no biter nests inside the pollution cloud, there will be no attacks.

About expansion: once in a while a group of biters decide to run some distance a few chunks away from their nest and form a new nest group.

If the new nests are inside the pollution cloud, they will start to attack. If the new nests are outside, they're just sitting there but are a possible source for future expansion groups.

Biters will not expand into occupied areas. Occupied means other biter nests and player buildings. So they will expand toward to your base if the area is free from nests, but it will stop a short distance from your buildings. However that's usually near enough to be inside the pollution cloud so there will be attacks from it.

This gives a hint how we can deal with the enemies:

- keep the pollution cloud small, so less nests are touched, so less attack groups will start. However since expansion will bring nests near to our base, they will eventually enter any pollution cloud so keeping the pollution cloud small is not the final solution. It just keeps attacks from happening for a short time, but then it will continue. So keeping the pollution cloud small is usually in vain, since you invest more time to save energy than to expand your production.

- destroy nests that pop up inside the pollution cloud, so there are no attacks being started. There is an automated weapon for this, however you probably didn't unlock it yet. It's the final solution for biter defense automation. As long as you don't have that weapon, you need to do this manually.

- build a perimeter defense to stop attack groups from reaching your base. This is the common approach for almost all bases with enabled enemies. Build walls and turrets at choke points where enemy groups will run. Or just build a large wall enclosing your whole base. I do this: I clear the area around the base including the area with the next resource patches I intend to exploit, and build a wall around everything. Including automated ammo supply and automated repair. Automated repair becomes possible with the logistic network (bots), in case you didn't unlock it yet. I make sure inside the wall is not a single nest any more, so there can be no attacks to my base - only from the outside against the wall.

You need such a wall even if you later attack nests with artillery, since surviving biters will go attacking the artillery turret, so it's not just an intermediate solution but instead a vital part of your base defense.

A very good weapon for the perimeter defense wall is the flamethrower turret. It needs an additional turret for finishing off enemies, such as the gun turret or the laser turret. That's my personal approach: wall around the base, armed with a mix of flamethrower turrets and laser turrets.

About evolution: it happens anyway, so the only thing to know is enemies get stronger over time, so you need better ammo and better military research to keep up with biters getting stronger. Don't try to keep evolution low by not killing nests, it's as useless as trying to keep the pollution cloud small.

So what I would do with your base: find choke points and add turrets to intercept and destroy enemy attack groups. Expand these defense points to a perimeter defense wall around your whole base, including automated ammo and repair pack supply. Now you're safe again and are able to expand your base further.

I marked the nests near your pollution cloud. From these nests you will encounter attacks sooner or later. It seems most of the nests are outside of the cloud, however nests inside the cloud consume pollution, so pollution will vanish and it appears as if they're all outside. So you should either destroy these nest groups or you should start your perimeter defense near these locations. Often, a group of 5 gun turrets with manually filled ammo is enough for preliminary defense of some ore mine.

And I added my recommendation where you could build a wall around everything and include lakes to minimize the effort.

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[Kyralessa]

What weapons do you have available in your research so far?

One thing many players don't consider: The bugs are attracted by pollution, so see what you can do to stop the pollution.

If you're in a desperate situation, it might make sense to shut down most of your factory:

• Clear your research queue, except for military research.
• Stop feeding iron/copper/steel to any machines that are making non-military equipment (inserters, mining drills, whatever).
• At those times when you're not putting out fires, focus on hardening one area at a time, so you can gradually increase the area you don't have to constantly defend/fix.

In case it helps, the image below is what I use in most of my games. It's a tileable turret chain that's resilient to attacks. It's available very early since it only uses turrets, long inserters, power poles, and any ammo. (You can use wooden power poles if you need to; in that case, omit the outer set of inserters, because the power won't reach them. The lamp is optional, but helps you see your perimeter if you're driving around in the dark.)

You set it up as a blueprint, absolute positioning, 5x5 size, centered on the power pole. Then you just drag and your construction bots set it up. (You can also do it manually, though it's a bit tedious.)

The inserters should move from inside to outside, so that the back turrets keep feeding ammo even if a front turret gets destroyed. You can tile three or four lines of turrets with this same blueprint if you want. You can also put a double-wall along the outside to make your turrets more resilient.

Good luck!

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[jdrexler75]

I tried to research more and found out that they get stronger based on an 'evolution' factor, which get effected by pollution and how often I destroy their nests.
So how I understand it now - destroying their nests screws me in the long run as it makes their expansion faster and bigger.

Just one note aside, it doesn't screw you in the long run, since evolution is inevitable. You just made it slightly faster than necessary. But over the course of the game it will always reach maximum evolution sooner or later. So yes, like Tertius explained, automate your defences, starting from the critical places. You'll have to keep improving defences too as evolution keeps producing stronger enemies. Eventually you'll have enough defences though!

[quyxkh]

One option is to make an expedition, clear the map out well past your pollution cloud and maybe then some, basically as far as you can. Keeping clean territory clean is a whole lot easier than dealing with biter hordes. .67 is still kinda early and the map you're looking at doesn't look scary, get in your tank or car and wipe every camp you can reach, it's its own groove.

You want as much mil research as you can reasonably get to make camp clearing go quick, people have different favorite tactics, try out allll the toys.

I like to leave a turret with like five magazines in it behind in every camp I wipe, the idea is not to stop expansion back into the territory, turrets are cheap and the combat/death alerts are your sentry reports on the biters' (very slow) progress through the territory you cleared, you develop a feel for when "that's close enough."

[angramania]

Looks like you are playing with default setting and use efficiency modules. In this case thin line of laser turrets usually is enough for a very long time. It is much easier to setup and sustain than gun turrets. You will need to scale power anyway, So just grub uranium patch in the south, setup nuclear plant with 4 reactors and you will forget about power problems until you finish with Vulcanus and Fulgora. In 2.0 nuclear power has quite simple setup.

Alternative is mine fields with roboports. However this better suits guys with skill to build everything with bots. It is not something people use in their first run.