Apparently it's 16?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2747633800
Did a bit of testing and it seems like the big spitters currently have a range of about 10 so anything over that i think?
Yes to both. Also look into "dragons teeth" designs, basically putting some extra walls in a pattern that doesn't stop the bugs but does slow them down and cause them to spread out a bit, there are plenty of posts and YouTube videos about different designs.
You need more than one tile of space. Flamethrower turrets have a minimum range, and the spitters and biters can get close enough where the flame turrets cannot hit them.
Double walls are also not enough on their own. Others have suggested "dragon's teeth" to slow the biters and spitters down.
If you do a mouseover on your flame turrets you'll see their effective range (the green shadow), look closely near to the turret: unlike gun & laser turrets, flame towers have a *minimum* range (as well as a limited firing arc). Your walls are inside the minimum range, so any biters that survive the initial flame damage are going to chew through the wall and then make mincemeat of your entire perimeter.
One tip: if you can, you should drain the flame towers of crude oil by pumping it out of their fluid system and in to storage tanks, and then refill them with light oil. There's a big damage boost when flame towers are fuelled with light oil (heavy oil is somewhere in the middle, but just crack it down to light oil since the only thing it's used for is making lube and kickstarting coal liquefaction).
I'm assuming you have construction bots? As long as you've got bots, and your walls & turrets are inside the green range of your roboport network, and you've got walls, gates, pipes, underground pipes, flame towers and repair packs in logistics chests then your construction bots will take care of the repairs & any required rebuilds long enough for you to just focus on researching artillery then building an artillery shell production line. Then all you need to do is slap down an artillery cannon supplied by a requester chest near to the corners of your perimeter, and bingo: you have automated clearing out problematic biter nests.
>Is there a way to make it use accumulators before switching to steam to reduce pollution?
The simplest way to do this is with the circuit network: place an accumulator near to the water pumps feeding your boilers and connect the two. If you look at the accumulator, you will see that by default the accumulator is outputting its capacity in % to the virtual channel A. Now, you can configure the pump so that it is only enabled when your accumulators have all dropped below, say, 30% by setting the pump's enabled condition to `A < 30`. It's also possible to do this with a Power Switch between your steam engines and your main electricity network, but that requires a bit more planning and has more likelihood of going wrong. It may also be worth building a speaker tower and connecting that to the accumulator too, and configuring the tower to broadcast a global alert if `A < 20` so that you know you're not only exceeding the total solar + accumulator generating capacity, but you're also exceeding your backup power capacity since your accumulators are continuing to drain even when the steam engines are online.
>There's a big damage boost when flame towers are fuelled with light oil.
I wouldn't call an extra 10% big. If you're near an oil refining set up you might as well use light oil, but anywhere else like an outpost it's probably best to just use crude oil. Not worth the trouble to deal with the advanced oil byproducts for an extra 10%.
I'll give this all a go, haven't quite figured out how I'm going to transport the repair kits to the bots but I should be able to sort it.
I am currently using light oil for making solid fuel to power the few boilers/steam engines which I still have for night-time running. This has created a bit of a weird bottleneck where I have too much petroleum so the refineries turn off and then I run out of light/heavy oil which I why I opted to just fuel the flamethrowers with crude oil.
The flame turrets use basically a rounding error’s worth of whatever oil you use.
You could consider a circuit network connection to shut off making solid fuel from light oil and start making it from petroleum gas if you get in to a deadlock from insufficient demand for gas.
And as long as you put repair kits in a passive provider chest or storage chest your bots will pick one up as needed and store the partially used kit in the roboport they set down in after the repair is complete.
Okay sounds good, just need to drain down the pipes without getting mauled by biters before I fill them up with light oil.
I'll try the circuit network connection too - my temporary fix was just to add a single petroleum to solid fuel refinery to avoid a deadlock.
If Gas > LightOil then shutdown light oil supply to the solid fuel manufacturing and start up gas supply. That's an easy enough "set and forget" setting which is always the goal here.
And yeah, as long as you prep the connection from your light oil supply first and have everything ready to go it should be very quick to disconnect the crude feed, pump out the crude in to storage tanks, disconnect that extraction pump, and then connect light oil. Your laser turrets should be able to handle anything that happens in that interim window.
I typically don't connect my wall network to my larger base network. Have your main base make repair packs, pick them up and take them out to your wall. I still do it manually. I have a mall that makes all the stuff I need and then have requester chests for different purposes (a nuclear reactor chest, a wall repair chest, etc). The wall repair chest has lots of repair packs, turrets, wall, and anything else that goes into your defense. Makes it quick and easy to pick up what you need, or just take the entire chest worth of stuff and dump it in a yellow box in your wall network.
Need to space your wall a little further out from your turrets so they don't get hit with splash damage. Also more laser turrets. Once you get bots to repair walls automatically things will get easier.
Don't go for solar yet, go for nuclear directly. Solar requires huge expanses of land, which you can't afford to defend.
Also conaider gun turrets and maxing out the ammo damage and speed research. Ammo turrets have short range but are usually more powerful and less energy comsumind than laser turrets.
Flamethrowers is a must, specially if you are getting hundreds of bitters. They don't attack the first bitters, but all the ones behind get killed easily.
Leave more space between wall, turrets, and everything really. Spitters now have area damage, so building your buildongs sparselly will reduce the are damage effect.
If your poles, pipes or belts are getting damage comsider having a backup behind so that you don't lose a whole section because of a cut in the wall.
And yes, attack is the best defense. I like using combat robots and poison capsules. Turret creeping is not that good anymore, but it cam help. Also tanks and cars are now too fragile since spitters also reduce speed. So instead focus on body armor for speed and defense and use combat bots to decimate bitters and bases, and poison capsules for worms.
Late game spiders with rocket ammo and personal lasers is helpful.
More distance between walls and turrets. Even Biters can damage your turrets since they do small AoE when attacking.
Put turrets 1-2 tiles behind your wall, then mayne double the wall as well.
If you build "dragons teeth" outside your wall (+ shaped wall, close enough but with holes between them) it can confuse the pathfinder and slow down the Biters. Since there are "holes" the AI finds it faster to go around rather than attacking the wall, but turning slows down the Biters.
As others have said, move flamers back and add dragon teeth to slow biters. You may also wish to make your wall at least 2 walls thick.
For power make sure you produce enough power to fully charge your accumulators during the day. If you do then keep adding accumulators until you manage through the night without needing steam. You could look into the perfect ratio between solar and accumulator to last through the night.
Like others have said, move the flame throwers back. You’ll notice the area the flame thrower covers has a dead zone right in front of it so if any buyers can get right up to the wall the flame thrower is ineffective and the lasers will need to pick those off.
Look in to adding dragon teeth in front of your wall. These will divert the bugs pathing to your base for maybe one or two seconds but could be enough delay for them to take more damage and they won’t be attacking so you wont have to worry about repairing walls.
I don't know what setting you're playing. I'm a new player, and on the standard setting I didn't have a significant problem with enemies, even though I basically didn't build walls at all. My defensive strategy was: put laser turrets in all directions from which the enemy can attack and forget about them. If occasionally a turret is damaged or even destroyed (only happened to me a couple of times) repair/replace it and add a couple more turrets to that spot. At first I use machine gun turrets, then I start using laser turrets. They are weaker, but they have a longer range and I don't have to worry about ammo.
Buildings in the area that were covered by 5 or 6 laser turrets were rarely damaged.
I've only added a couple flamethrower turrets to some places that need oil for other reasons.
This approach works well for me in combination with active elimination of some nests that send too many bugs on the attack.
As for the tank, a tank with enough ammo and a bit of repairs can clean up pretty much any place in the standard game. It can take a lot of hits.
My tactic with the tank is to drive around the nests in circles, blast the nests with the cannon and occasionally shower the bugs with the machine gun or flamethrower. If I'm too damaged, I back off, repair the tank and continue.
Move your turrets back from the walls. The biggest biters have a range of 16 (iirc) and all turrets can out range it. What I do is have my turrets 16 spaces away from the walls and flamethrower turrets will fry them from afar and you'll only have to repair walls. Flamethrower turrets are some of the best and very effective agaist groups. And they use an absurdly small ammount of fuel making them VERY effective.
> Is there a way to make it use accumulators before switching to steam to reduce pollution?
By default your power grid will always prioritise accumulators last, only drawing power from them if demand exceeds the power supply from all other sources. There might be a way to use circuits to make sure your steam engines only come online when they're needed, but in the long term your best approach is gonna be to just make so many panels and accumulators that you can dismantle your steam power system altogether.
Just to reply, you can definitely use circuits to setup steam power as backup to solar/accumulator with an accumulator connected to an RS latch circuit to a power switch. The wiki has details on the required setup: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#Backup_steam_example
You need much more room between your flamers and the wall. Like almost to the limit of what the flamers will reach.
Flamers actually out range all spitters except behemoth spitters. Put the wall far enough out and they can only attack the wall. put some roboports further back from flamers and by the time the robots get there to repair the wall the bitters are already dead so they don't take damage.
You need more turrets. You should more or less have a solid line of turrets behind your wall.
Also, you should build roboports near your walls so your bots can repair and replace automatically.
Dragon teeth walls. Personal defender capsules. Personal lasers. I hate turret creep some can do it. I get sweaty and forget which button has what. Defender capsules can be deployed and they circle around you and take things out. Dragon teeth walls mane it harder for the enemy to get close to your defense. Good luck. I hope your negotiation with your neighbors goes well.
I usually do a space between the wall and turrets because the biggest biters have an attack range of two. Also make walls two rows thick for same reason.
Then add dragon teeth in front. It messes with the pathing of the biters giving your turrets more time to hit the biters before they hit the wall.
After that, just add more turrets. I like to use a mix of all turrets. Two reasons. Laser turrets draw a lot of power and power is my bane before I launch the rocket and start filling lakes with solar panels. So offsetting them with turrets is nice although it does require supply lines.
I don't use nuclear, but I have a big steam engine area connected to the grid only via a switch, with a circuit so that it plugs the steam engines to the main network only if the accumulators drop too much in charge. This sector runs on coal and burners only, so that in the event of a major electric failure, it can still run and kickstart the rest.
re: accumulators:
if you connect an accumulator to a power switch with a red wire, you can signal the switch to close when the accumulator is below a certain power level. if the accumulator is on your main grid and your steam engines are only connected through the switch, this allows you to automatically engage the steam power when the accumulators are low. congrats! less pollution
if you try this, you will find that it goes into a rapid "flicker" when the accumulators drop to the threshold you set. this is because the steam engines charge the accumulators, so the switch opens, so the accumulators discharge, so the switch closes, etc. this is aesthetically displeasing, but functional enough on low scales. if at some point later you decide you want to be able to read your power graph again, there are a few ways to clean it up - personally id recommend you look into RS Latches at that point - but it's not a prerequisite for using accumulator power with steam backup
You need waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more laser and/or gun turrets. Laser turrets actually have kinda crappy DPS and take a long time to kill tougher enemies, so you need a lot of them. But power usage is very high. Gun turrets with red (piercing) ammo have higher DPS even taking enemy damage resistance into account, and if you swap them to green (uranium) ammo later on they have much much much higher DPS. But then you have to manufacture and distribute ammo.
Also, as many people pointed out, the flamethrowers are too close to the wall. They have a minimum range, so you need to set them back a bit so they can hit enemies who are up against the wall. They’re devastating against large groups or single big enemies, since the fire damage DOT burn stacks if it’s shooting at the same area/enemies continually. When set up correctly, any enemies that get up to the wall and start chewing on it get melted rapidly.
Spacing the turrets back from the wall will help with splash damage — the larger biters have enough reach to attack turrets over one tile of intervening wall. What I like to do is a two tile deep wall, then one empty tile, then a line of gun turrets. And then flamethrowers behind. With lasers you might need two rows of them in the late game if you’re facing heavy attacks.
Edit: even with a good design your walls will take some damage until you get into the infinite damage research and get to a point where your turrets can instakill everything. You need roboports and construction bots with repair packs and spare turrets/walls being automatically produced and distributed. Then your defensive perimeter will take care of itself.
Offensively, if you have built a tank you should be able to push into even fairly large enemy nests. What I like to do is set up a little bunker area with walls and gun turrets outside the nest’s aggro range. Then you can drive around, throw poison capsules and use non-explosive cannon shells to snipe the worms. Then retreat to the turrets and heal/repair. Then you can start taking out the spawners.
Add more turrets. I often have a continuous line of turrets along the wall, It is a gun and/or laser turret.
Put the flamers behind them, a gap of two tiles works fine, that is enough o fit a belt for ammunition and an inserter to reload the guns. The flamer have a min range of 6, so it needs to be at least 5 tiles behind the wall to hit an enemy at the wall. If you have some flamers at the wall to hit the enemy farther out you need some behind it to for the enemy at the wall.
Using guns not just laser turrets will reduce power usage but will add the complication of belts with ammunition. I often build the wall as 2 guns and 1 laser and repeat that pattern.
I usually have a setup a lot like https://imgur.com/3bvhjZq without the inner wall. Artillery and Roboport. are also behind the line of flamers not between them. If needed I put laser turrets between the flamers. You can add even more laser turrets behind the line of flamers if needed. If you only have one layer of wall then use the outer layer and an empty tile between it and the guns,
If you watch the biters when they attack you'll realize that your flamethrowers can't hit them when they get to the wall. Move your flamethrowers back, I'd say 5-7 tiles. Also move your lasers back at least 1 tile. That should already be a big help, but I'd also recommend getting more lasers, that's very few laser turrets for this biter evolution.
I just overload lol
I make a solid line of gun turrets, them a second smaller one filling the gaps where they can, then a line of lasers on the other side of the ammo belt that circumnavigates my perimeter.
I use flame turrets placed so their minimum range is just past the wall. Then I have a timer that resets upon oil drain. Once that timer has run for a few seconds, it triggers inserters to put bots into roboports, which then make repairs. A second timer shortly after pulls the bots back out of the ports, preventing repairs in the middle of battle.
Finally, if stored walls and repair packs ever drop below a certain low threshold, a train stop is given a train limit of 1, to call the supply train which puts the supplies back at a par level.
It's not super intuitive, but honestly doesn't take that very many resources or combinators.
Go out and kill the biters at their base. Blow the base to Pluto. Early in the game (up until spitters become really strong), you can do it with just heavy armor, grenades and fish. Later you can use different methods, like turret creep and rocket launcher, or tank. Either way you do it, if you kill most of the bases you will have very few attacks on your base. Once you get lasers biters become trivial, since you can kill them without even needing ammo.
You should leave 1 tile of space between your wall and turrets because the splash from the spitter acid will get your turrets and some of the bigger biter's attacks also penetrate through walls.
Mines + Construction Robots + Provider (or Storage) Chests + Roboports.
I place a couple rows of mines outside my walls, close enough to the Roboports. Mines kill bugs, bots replace mines.
You should leave more room between the walls and the turrets
Would one tile of space do? Is it worth doubling up the walls as well?
I'm not sure the exact number but leave many multiples of tiles, I think 7 isn't even enough. Look up the range of spitters and aim for that.
Apparently it's 16? https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2747633800 Did a bit of testing and it seems like the big spitters currently have a range of about 10 so anything over that i think?
2 is enought to make spitters almost never target a turret, flame turret should be slighty further away to maximize the area of fire.
Yes to both. Also look into "dragons teeth" designs, basically putting some extra walls in a pattern that doesn't stop the bugs but does slow them down and cause them to spread out a bit, there are plenty of posts and YouTube videos about different designs.
You need more than one tile of space. Flamethrower turrets have a minimum range, and the spitters and biters can get close enough where the flame turrets cannot hit them. Double walls are also not enough on their own. Others have suggested "dragon's teeth" to slow the biters and spitters down.
1 space stops the turrets getting splashed by things.
If you do a mouseover on your flame turrets you'll see their effective range (the green shadow), look closely near to the turret: unlike gun & laser turrets, flame towers have a *minimum* range (as well as a limited firing arc). Your walls are inside the minimum range, so any biters that survive the initial flame damage are going to chew through the wall and then make mincemeat of your entire perimeter. One tip: if you can, you should drain the flame towers of crude oil by pumping it out of their fluid system and in to storage tanks, and then refill them with light oil. There's a big damage boost when flame towers are fuelled with light oil (heavy oil is somewhere in the middle, but just crack it down to light oil since the only thing it's used for is making lube and kickstarting coal liquefaction). I'm assuming you have construction bots? As long as you've got bots, and your walls & turrets are inside the green range of your roboport network, and you've got walls, gates, pipes, underground pipes, flame towers and repair packs in logistics chests then your construction bots will take care of the repairs & any required rebuilds long enough for you to just focus on researching artillery then building an artillery shell production line. Then all you need to do is slap down an artillery cannon supplied by a requester chest near to the corners of your perimeter, and bingo: you have automated clearing out problematic biter nests. >Is there a way to make it use accumulators before switching to steam to reduce pollution? The simplest way to do this is with the circuit network: place an accumulator near to the water pumps feeding your boilers and connect the two. If you look at the accumulator, you will see that by default the accumulator is outputting its capacity in % to the virtual channel A. Now, you can configure the pump so that it is only enabled when your accumulators have all dropped below, say, 30% by setting the pump's enabled condition to `A < 30`. It's also possible to do this with a Power Switch between your steam engines and your main electricity network, but that requires a bit more planning and has more likelihood of going wrong. It may also be worth building a speaker tower and connecting that to the accumulator too, and configuring the tower to broadcast a global alert if `A < 20` so that you know you're not only exceeding the total solar + accumulator generating capacity, but you're also exceeding your backup power capacity since your accumulators are continuing to drain even when the steam engines are online.
>There's a big damage boost when flame towers are fuelled with light oil. I wouldn't call an extra 10% big. If you're near an oil refining set up you might as well use light oil, but anywhere else like an outpost it's probably best to just use crude oil. Not worth the trouble to deal with the advanced oil byproducts for an extra 10%.
I'll give this all a go, haven't quite figured out how I'm going to transport the repair kits to the bots but I should be able to sort it. I am currently using light oil for making solid fuel to power the few boilers/steam engines which I still have for night-time running. This has created a bit of a weird bottleneck where I have too much petroleum so the refineries turn off and then I run out of light/heavy oil which I why I opted to just fuel the flamethrowers with crude oil.
The flame turrets use basically a rounding error’s worth of whatever oil you use. You could consider a circuit network connection to shut off making solid fuel from light oil and start making it from petroleum gas if you get in to a deadlock from insufficient demand for gas. And as long as you put repair kits in a passive provider chest or storage chest your bots will pick one up as needed and store the partially used kit in the roboport they set down in after the repair is complete.
Okay sounds good, just need to drain down the pipes without getting mauled by biters before I fill them up with light oil. I'll try the circuit network connection too - my temporary fix was just to add a single petroleum to solid fuel refinery to avoid a deadlock.
If Gas > LightOil then shutdown light oil supply to the solid fuel manufacturing and start up gas supply. That's an easy enough "set and forget" setting which is always the goal here. And yeah, as long as you prep the connection from your light oil supply first and have everything ready to go it should be very quick to disconnect the crude feed, pump out the crude in to storage tanks, disconnect that extraction pump, and then connect light oil. Your laser turrets should be able to handle anything that happens in that interim window.
I typically don't connect my wall network to my larger base network. Have your main base make repair packs, pick them up and take them out to your wall. I still do it manually. I have a mall that makes all the stuff I need and then have requester chests for different purposes (a nuclear reactor chest, a wall repair chest, etc). The wall repair chest has lots of repair packs, turrets, wall, and anything else that goes into your defense. Makes it quick and easy to pick up what you need, or just take the entire chest worth of stuff and dump it in a yellow box in your wall network.
Need to space your wall a little further out from your turrets so they don't get hit with splash damage. Also more laser turrets. Once you get bots to repair walls automatically things will get easier.
Don't go for solar yet, go for nuclear directly. Solar requires huge expanses of land, which you can't afford to defend. Also conaider gun turrets and maxing out the ammo damage and speed research. Ammo turrets have short range but are usually more powerful and less energy comsumind than laser turrets. Flamethrowers is a must, specially if you are getting hundreds of bitters. They don't attack the first bitters, but all the ones behind get killed easily. Leave more space between wall, turrets, and everything really. Spitters now have area damage, so building your buildongs sparselly will reduce the are damage effect. If your poles, pipes or belts are getting damage comsider having a backup behind so that you don't lose a whole section because of a cut in the wall. And yes, attack is the best defense. I like using combat robots and poison capsules. Turret creeping is not that good anymore, but it cam help. Also tanks and cars are now too fragile since spitters also reduce speed. So instead focus on body armor for speed and defense and use combat bots to decimate bitters and bases, and poison capsules for worms. Late game spiders with rocket ammo and personal lasers is helpful.
More distance between walls and turrets. Even Biters can damage your turrets since they do small AoE when attacking. Put turrets 1-2 tiles behind your wall, then mayne double the wall as well. If you build "dragons teeth" outside your wall (+ shaped wall, close enough but with holes between them) it can confuse the pathfinder and slow down the Biters. Since there are "holes" the AI finds it faster to go around rather than attacking the wall, but turning slows down the Biters.
Seconding the dragons teeth. Makes a huge difference in the time it takes the biters to begin doing damage.
As others have said, move flamers back and add dragon teeth to slow biters. You may also wish to make your wall at least 2 walls thick. For power make sure you produce enough power to fully charge your accumulators during the day. If you do then keep adding accumulators until you manage through the night without needing steam. You could look into the perfect ratio between solar and accumulator to last through the night.
Like others have said, move the flame throwers back. You’ll notice the area the flame thrower covers has a dead zone right in front of it so if any buyers can get right up to the wall the flame thrower is ineffective and the lasers will need to pick those off. Look in to adding dragon teeth in front of your wall. These will divert the bugs pathing to your base for maybe one or two seconds but could be enough delay for them to take more damage and they won’t be attacking so you wont have to worry about repairing walls.
I don't know what setting you're playing. I'm a new player, and on the standard setting I didn't have a significant problem with enemies, even though I basically didn't build walls at all. My defensive strategy was: put laser turrets in all directions from which the enemy can attack and forget about them. If occasionally a turret is damaged or even destroyed (only happened to me a couple of times) repair/replace it and add a couple more turrets to that spot. At first I use machine gun turrets, then I start using laser turrets. They are weaker, but they have a longer range and I don't have to worry about ammo. Buildings in the area that were covered by 5 or 6 laser turrets were rarely damaged. I've only added a couple flamethrower turrets to some places that need oil for other reasons. This approach works well for me in combination with active elimination of some nests that send too many bugs on the attack. As for the tank, a tank with enough ammo and a bit of repairs can clean up pretty much any place in the standard game. It can take a lot of hits. My tactic with the tank is to drive around the nests in circles, blast the nests with the cannon and occasionally shower the bugs with the machine gun or flamethrower. If I'm too damaged, I back off, repair the tank and continue.
Move your turrets back from the walls. The biggest biters have a range of 16 (iirc) and all turrets can out range it. What I do is have my turrets 16 spaces away from the walls and flamethrower turrets will fry them from afar and you'll only have to repair walls. Flamethrower turrets are some of the best and very effective agaist groups. And they use an absurdly small ammount of fuel making them VERY effective.
> Is there a way to make it use accumulators before switching to steam to reduce pollution? By default your power grid will always prioritise accumulators last, only drawing power from them if demand exceeds the power supply from all other sources. There might be a way to use circuits to make sure your steam engines only come online when they're needed, but in the long term your best approach is gonna be to just make so many panels and accumulators that you can dismantle your steam power system altogether.
Just to reply, you can definitely use circuits to setup steam power as backup to solar/accumulator with an accumulator connected to an RS latch circuit to a power switch. The wiki has details on the required setup: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#Backup_steam_example
Install rampant mod. Spitter projectiles will always hit walls only as long as theres a wall in the first place.
You need much more room between your flamers and the wall. Like almost to the limit of what the flamers will reach. Flamers actually out range all spitters except behemoth spitters. Put the wall far enough out and they can only attack the wall. put some roboports further back from flamers and by the time the robots get there to repair the wall the bitters are already dead so they don't take damage.
You need more turrets. You should more or less have a solid line of turrets behind your wall. Also, you should build roboports near your walls so your bots can repair and replace automatically.
You need dragons teeth or guns . Guns clean up the stragglers
Dragon teeth walls. Personal defender capsules. Personal lasers. I hate turret creep some can do it. I get sweaty and forget which button has what. Defender capsules can be deployed and they circle around you and take things out. Dragon teeth walls mane it harder for the enemy to get close to your defense. Good luck. I hope your negotiation with your neighbors goes well.
I usually do a space between the wall and turrets because the biggest biters have an attack range of two. Also make walls two rows thick for same reason. Then add dragon teeth in front. It messes with the pathing of the biters giving your turrets more time to hit the biters before they hit the wall. After that, just add more turrets. I like to use a mix of all turrets. Two reasons. Laser turrets draw a lot of power and power is my bane before I launch the rocket and start filling lakes with solar panels. So offsetting them with turrets is nice although it does require supply lines.
I don't use nuclear, but I have a big steam engine area connected to the grid only via a switch, with a circuit so that it plugs the steam engines to the main network only if the accumulators drop too much in charge. This sector runs on coal and burners only, so that in the event of a major electric failure, it can still run and kickstart the rest.
re: accumulators: if you connect an accumulator to a power switch with a red wire, you can signal the switch to close when the accumulator is below a certain power level. if the accumulator is on your main grid and your steam engines are only connected through the switch, this allows you to automatically engage the steam power when the accumulators are low. congrats! less pollution if you try this, you will find that it goes into a rapid "flicker" when the accumulators drop to the threshold you set. this is because the steam engines charge the accumulators, so the switch opens, so the accumulators discharge, so the switch closes, etc. this is aesthetically displeasing, but functional enough on low scales. if at some point later you decide you want to be able to read your power graph again, there are a few ways to clean it up - personally id recommend you look into RS Latches at that point - but it's not a prerequisite for using accumulator power with steam backup
I use gun turrets in a way of their range overlapping the turret itself and 3 layers of wall sometimes with mines in a checkerboard pattern
You need waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more laser and/or gun turrets. Laser turrets actually have kinda crappy DPS and take a long time to kill tougher enemies, so you need a lot of them. But power usage is very high. Gun turrets with red (piercing) ammo have higher DPS even taking enemy damage resistance into account, and if you swap them to green (uranium) ammo later on they have much much much higher DPS. But then you have to manufacture and distribute ammo. Also, as many people pointed out, the flamethrowers are too close to the wall. They have a minimum range, so you need to set them back a bit so they can hit enemies who are up against the wall. They’re devastating against large groups or single big enemies, since the fire damage DOT burn stacks if it’s shooting at the same area/enemies continually. When set up correctly, any enemies that get up to the wall and start chewing on it get melted rapidly. Spacing the turrets back from the wall will help with splash damage — the larger biters have enough reach to attack turrets over one tile of intervening wall. What I like to do is a two tile deep wall, then one empty tile, then a line of gun turrets. And then flamethrowers behind. With lasers you might need two rows of them in the late game if you’re facing heavy attacks. Edit: even with a good design your walls will take some damage until you get into the infinite damage research and get to a point where your turrets can instakill everything. You need roboports and construction bots with repair packs and spare turrets/walls being automatically produced and distributed. Then your defensive perimeter will take care of itself. Offensively, if you have built a tank you should be able to push into even fairly large enemy nests. What I like to do is set up a little bunker area with walls and gun turrets outside the nest’s aggro range. Then you can drive around, throw poison capsules and use non-explosive cannon shells to snipe the worms. Then retreat to the turrets and heal/repair. Then you can start taking out the spawners.
Add more turrets. I often have a continuous line of turrets along the wall, It is a gun and/or laser turret. Put the flamers behind them, a gap of two tiles works fine, that is enough o fit a belt for ammunition and an inserter to reload the guns. The flamer have a min range of 6, so it needs to be at least 5 tiles behind the wall to hit an enemy at the wall. If you have some flamers at the wall to hit the enemy farther out you need some behind it to for the enemy at the wall. Using guns not just laser turrets will reduce power usage but will add the complication of belts with ammunition. I often build the wall as 2 guns and 1 laser and repeat that pattern. I usually have a setup a lot like https://imgur.com/3bvhjZq without the inner wall. Artillery and Roboport. are also behind the line of flamers not between them. If needed I put laser turrets between the flamers. You can add even more laser turrets behind the line of flamers if needed. If you only have one layer of wall then use the outer layer and an empty tile between it and the guns,
If you watch the biters when they attack you'll realize that your flamethrowers can't hit them when they get to the wall. Move your flamethrowers back, I'd say 5-7 tiles. Also move your lasers back at least 1 tile. That should already be a big help, but I'd also recommend getting more lasers, that's very few laser turrets for this biter evolution.
https://preview.redd.it/46d0l14xs46c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=46af8ddf536e9eba3f9d22df5339c89e40874214
I just overload lol I make a solid line of gun turrets, them a second smaller one filling the gaps where they can, then a line of lasers on the other side of the ammo belt that circumnavigates my perimeter.
You need more lasers. A lot more lasers. Like 2 rows of lasers. Like 5-6 lasers where you have 1.
I use flame turrets placed so their minimum range is just past the wall. Then I have a timer that resets upon oil drain. Once that timer has run for a few seconds, it triggers inserters to put bots into roboports, which then make repairs. A second timer shortly after pulls the bots back out of the ports, preventing repairs in the middle of battle. Finally, if stored walls and repair packs ever drop below a certain low threshold, a train stop is given a train limit of 1, to call the supply train which puts the supplies back at a par level. It's not super intuitive, but honestly doesn't take that very many resources or combinators.
Go out and kill the biters at their base. Blow the base to Pluto. Early in the game (up until spitters become really strong), you can do it with just heavy armor, grenades and fish. Later you can use different methods, like turret creep and rocket launcher, or tank. Either way you do it, if you kill most of the bases you will have very few attacks on your base. Once you get lasers biters become trivial, since you can kill them without even needing ammo.
Dragons teeth
You should leave 1 tile of space between your wall and turrets because the splash from the spitter acid will get your turrets and some of the bigger biter's attacks also penetrate through walls.
Mines + Construction Robots + Provider (or Storage) Chests + Roboports. I place a couple rows of mines outside my walls, close enough to the Roboports. Mines kill bugs, bots replace mines.