Oh yes, the game where I say “This time I will build tall and focus on diplomacy and alliance building”, before it inevitably devolves into science rush into a military buildup to carry out a century-long xenophopic extermination campaign to rid the galaxy of the alien race who wronged me.

Currently playing the Star Trek total conversion mod (which is excellent btw). Last night, as the Romulans, I took about half of the Federation’s territory in a war including Earth and genocided about 50 billion people. Everyone except for my cousin species the Vulcans. They get to be slaves.

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Yeah, the giant cloud of pollution choking your people is entirely a coincidence what the fuck guys

that’s not true at all. you’d just get more science for the factory to grow.

They attack first because you are polluting their home though.

That’s pretty much how the game is designed.

With that said, I always thought it would be a bit interesting in Factorio if the bugs were at first neutral towards the player and only got hostile after the player started polluting too much or chopped down too many trees.

Not played Space Age and ground up their eggs into prod modules then I take it?

Definitely thinking of Satisfactory. The monsters in that don’t really attack you unless you go to them and fhe weapons you get really kinda suck. In Factorio, they are triggered to come harass your constructions because of the pollution you cause. They’re also very StarCraft Zerg like with how they create nests and spam you with overwhelming forces. But you have typical shooter weapons from pistols to rocket launchers as well as tanks and turrets.

I wish Satisfsctory was essentially just 1st person Factorio but the need for combat is so lacking in it that it gets super boring once you have a decently automated factory going.

As your factory grows, it produces pollution, which makes the aliens stronger. They become pretty dangerous, while you develop better ways to fight them, like the buggy, artillery, or spider mech.

Using efficiency modules cuts down pollution by -30%. It makes a massive difference.

Unless you’re playing in some hardcore difficulty settings, you have two main choices. Either you destroy every nest before they reach the pollution cloud (which requires artillery and an easy to expand robot or train network). Or you build walls with turrets. I usually go for full solar panel energy and laser turrets as I’m scared to death to “waste” resources. But to be honest, any type of turret can do for most of the game, you just have to decide what resources you want to spend on combat.

Automate wall, ammo, and turret production early. Rush to lasers, nucelar power, and bots once you build up a little bit. Use double layers or thicker, and belts to feed ammo. Covers early but scales poorly.

Late game, once you scaled up, make copy pastable wall segments with flame, laser turrets, pipeing, and a robot port. Paste your walls and let the robots build them.

Once you have enough bots and materials you base can rebuild itself and repair the defences.

What works for me:

1. Have radar coverage to keep an eye on biter expansion

2. Keep an eye on your pollution cloud, and reduce production (at least initially) if it’s expanding too fast.

3. Build up military tech alongside your other tech

4. Pending 3, take out biter nests that expand too close to the edge of your pollution cloud.

If you can do 1-4, biters should never actually get to your base.

Then by the time you’re ready to go off world, make sure you have a perimeter lined with turrets (and some walls to help protect the turrets), repair bots and repair kits, automated ammo production, and supply lines (belts or trains) to automatically get that ammo to your perimeter turrets.

Flame turrets are stupidly strong behind walls. You can spread them out along the wall with no overlap needed.

There’s a complicated solution and there’s an easy solution.

The easy solution is fire.

At some point, biters almost always overwhelm my defenses

you need to have a wall of gun turrets fed by a ammo belt, all around the base. They will shred through all biters.

1.automate Gun Turrets, bullets, and walls for early game defense

2. You should have Researched cars and grenades by the time the bugs start getting annoying. Do some drive-bys on the smallest nest around you throw a bunch of grenades while in the car. Savescum often.

3. Research and mass produce green modules and stuff them into everything. They cut pollution down to nothing. Biggest pollutors are mining outpost, oil pumps, oil refineries.

4. While in fullscreen map hit alt to see red pollution cloud and preemptively target nest that are gonna be a problem

5. Also begin looking for local geographic choke points see if you can wall two cliffs together for example. Put sattalites everywhere.

6. By the time nest get big enough hit and run grenade tactics no longer work you should have tanks and advanced red bullet ammo. Starting out you’ll want explosive tank shells because you don’t have any aiming skills. When you get comfy switch to precision rounds. Target worms then nest.

7. By this point you should have enough resources and means to chart your continent and find cliffs and water body boundaries. Look for choke points and lay down walls + gun turrets across the continent. Robots are helpful.

When that happened to me I just shut down my factory except the part making ammo for my tank and then went around and cleared out the nests that were giving me problems and reinforced my defenses.

I would have guessed this is the book of “there were trees so obviously I cut them down and started minin’ but there were a bunch of ugly locals that tried to stop me it was kind of a mess - long story short I shot them then I went to their homes and shot their families”

Was this just not a misunderstanding from the internet? I remember reading something about that. No, I can not back it up with a source. Sorry.

Yikes.

Don’t think the aliens would bother with that distinction.

Um…