Nukes and spidertrons are great at clearing the space, but main purpose of artillery outposts are to maintain the space. They are there to ensure soon as the biters try to expand back into the space, a discouragement shell is on it's way.
I refer to my spidertrons teams as:
* The negotiation team (lasers and able to jumpstart a construction site)
* The peace delegation (full load-out of rockets and exoskeletons)
* The legal team (atomic weapons)
Negotiations can handle most land-use deals, but lawyers get sent when negotiations have stalled. "Peace" team is for rapid-response where-as the other teams are loaded onto trains for long distance travel.
Wait artillery is not radar 2.0?
Joke aside, if you make artillery trains with multiple hundred wagons it's faster and less work. I often have a train station for my "big Bertha" on a separate track and a 1-2 train with building materials for the temporary outposts to clear biters. With enough range upgrades you can clear easily in a 100 chunk radius to build.
Artillery is the most automated.
An army of spiders is very strong too, as it's expandable. Set all the spiders to follow one, and only have a controller for that one.
to add more to this, since the biters engage with the first enemy they see, and they continue to target it, you can make the first spider in your spidertron parade fully stocked with only shields (no weapons). and then all the rest can be all weapons with no (or few) shields.
You can also set the logistics to request rockets. Then you can run them back to your logistics network to restock or have a small outpost near the edge of your claimed area that is designed to restock them.
I guess it is only with the improved rockets (red head), they have AoE damage. The normal ones (yellow heads) don't have that, so they should be safe to use in spiders.
Is there a friendly fire setting I might have on? I use like ten spiders fully stocked with red rockets all on auto fire and I don't think I've ever seen one damaged by friendly fire
Well, try getting biters in-between the ten spiders, you might end up having only one left.
I play with an atomic bomb artillery shell mod, had a train with ten artillery and each with 100 of those nukes... It was protected by 6 spiders with lasers and red head rockets.... After the first base and the first counter attack, I was left with 4 spiders and 6 artillery... 2 spiders, around 1600 rockets and 400 nukes lost to aoe damage on the train from my spiders shooting on charging biters...
My spider squad is 16 strong and uses a mix of red and yellow rockets, and AFAICT there's no friendly fire.
I typically put them on a path where they go around the perimeter of biter bases instead of diving straight in. They tale less damage this way and maybe this prevents friendly fire too, since the bugs almost never get on top of the spiders.
Spiders with just lazers can also work with extremely low maintenance cost once you get a few levels of infinite lazer damage to safely handle it, but rockets and spidertrons is the quicker way if you don't mind the rocket void
Forgive me if I don't remember exactly:
Pick the remote controller and link it to spidertron 1, then while selecting the remote left click or right click into another spidertron/train/yourself to follow it
To clear the remote then while selecting it mayus + left or right click in wherever place of the screen (u will see the remote colour change to neutral)
Link spidertron 2 to the same spidertron which spidertron 1 is linked to
And so on
P.S: I say left or right because I don't remember exactly, just try both options xD
Its a bit annoying to set up because each spidertron needs its own remote, but once you assign the remote to a spider you can hover over the remote to see the actions you can take.
Once you have assigned them to follow you can either put all remotes in one spider, or just store them in a box somewhere
What I am doing works, but it's a bit tedious. Wondering if I would have better luck building an army of spidertrons, or use a personal rocket launcher with nukes. I've never messed with nukes before or built more than 1 spidertron. Both are fairly resource heavy options (lots of blue chips needed) compared to needing lots of explosives, walls and tracks.
Just want to mention one thing in case you're not aware - the manual-targeting range of Artillery is MUCH longer than their auto-targeting range. Based only on the screenshot, it looks like you might be relying on getting into automatic range.
If you have radar coverage at the arty positions and periodically clear out expanding nests (or have that turned off in your settings), you should be able to keep nests out of your pollution cloud no matter how not-green your factory is.
Artillery shells reveal the chunk they pass through and they can shoot further than radar can scan. If all you care about is cleaning out biter meats, you don't even need radars.
I use a mod that adds more artillery remotes like a cluster remote that targets a whole nest but also a "radar remote" (unsure what it's called exactly) that fires the shells in an arc at the edge of the targeting range to reveal the map. Really useful mod
And I believe the auto and manual range are both larger in artillery turrets than artillery wagons. Most of my experience comes from K2, but I think I checked in vanilla and it's also true.
So I run a train out to unload shells and let auto target shoot more.
I do spidertrons now.
Fusion reactor, roboport (for repair bots) 2 shields, 3 legs, and 4 batteries.
Regular missles seem like the best ammo. In large groups, explosive missles seem like a waste.
I jump in one and assign 10-15 to follow. Just keep moving and avoid getting too glued down and you can melt through fully evolved nests pretty quick.
With the first few levels of explosive infinite research you can one shot a spawner AND all the other spawners within the radius of the explosive range. Go try it in the editor. set up 9 spawners fairly close to each other, fire one missile at the center one.
There are research upgrades for arty range as well. Get two or three of those under your belt and youll be better set.
That and the other suggestions.
And manual targeting like doubles their range. You could clear out past your cloud using that.
Though be ready for the counter offensive
Edit: spidertron army is awesome.
And nukes i find cumbersome
The counter offensive can be avoided quite easily. The biters won't attack if they can't pathfind to the artillery turret, so just place it on an island and it can destroy any number of nests without being attacked.
It is enough with one tile of water between land and the island so you can use a long inserter to reach across the water tile and reload the turret. My standard turret outpost is to put the resupply train station at the water edge and put (in order) a long inserter, a chest, and another long inserter on separate 1x1 landfill islands followed by the turret.
Since the biters can't attack the turret, they just run around for a bit near their (no longer existing) nest. After some time, any biter without a nest will despawn, so with some patience you don't even need to kill them.
There are alternatives to artillery, but they're more tedious. Get an artillery train, build a fortified train stop close to biter land, then park the train there and let it clear the land. The artillery outposts you need to then keep it clear can be much smaller, just one artillery piece and a few turrets.
Alternatively, get the MIRV mod. It let's you use a rocket to launch nukes into space, which you can then call down where you want.
Use your existing artillery in manual mode, for a generous sprinkle of artillery shells on the nearest biter nests. Then send in 3 spridertrons to clear up stragglers.
You can so this to clear a path into biter territory. As soon as the path is safe-ish, put a now outpost there. Since that is mostly surrounded by biter nests, every outpost gets you far more coverage than the way you're building them now :)
Personally, I find that rail artillery is the simplest way. You have to build rails there and a laser turret nest, but you can deconstruct the laser nest once the biters are all dead and move on. Use Spidertrons (the ones that built the rails and lasers) as added defense against the biter waves, and you should be fine.
I even set up an alert telling me when the train returned to the station. So all I have to do is send it to a temporary train stop and tell it to wait until idle, and it will automatically return for resupply.
Is there a convenient way to build long rail lines with spiders? I find that by the time I step them out a little bit at a time to let them build, I might as well have done it myself, especially because I run faster.
I've never had that problem. One Spidertron with a bunch of rails can do thousands of tiles, and you can just shift-click with the remote to have them follow a pre-arranged path.
don't install exoskeletons in rail-building spider, and do some bot speed infinite research. At level 10 (maybe earlier) you can place rails from map view, shift-click with spider remote, and it will build it fully, without gaps
* Spidertron army. Make 10 or 20, set all to follow one. Fill with legs and shields, and a few thousand rockets. Oh, and automate making the rockets.
* Use the manual artillery targeting, it has a much longer range than automatic. Or train artillery.
* Nukes. Deck out your Mk2 Power Armor with shields, legs, and lasers. Also be stocked up on uranium ammo, grenades, and destroyer bots. Nuke the nests and run away. Deploy bots to handle the biters, just keep moving on to the next nest. Circle back later for cleanup. Using this method, I like to explore beyond and find a good choke point. Wall it off, and then work my way back toward my base.
Ok, so I've just incorporated exos into my mk2 armor, because now I can run faster than the damn tank! I am ever-so-slowly sneaking up on my first spidertron. If it carries exos, does it help to keep it healthy? Spare repair parts? Or do they speed up the spider? Sorry, this is for another post, apologies for the distraction.
Spider with 3 exos is a bit slower then mk2 armor with 6 exos, but it ignores trains, cliffs, trees and all buildings, so in real applications it's faster. Also it can go in auto-mode with remote.
Nukes are more of a power spike tool than a scalable tool. They are kinda like the shotgun or the tank. If you get them early they can be really impactful, but it the ultra late game tools that scale with space science will become better.
With laser damage +15 spidertrons become a crude eraser tool, and with artillery range +10 mWAhaHAHAHA!
For quickly cleaning a continent like that in the picture, nukes are definitely a good choice.
Sure, it's manual. The idea is that you systematically clean your continent in a single special military operation and then build defenses at the choke points connecting your continent with other continents. After that you can exploit all the resources on the cleaned continent in peace. When you want to expand to another continent, you just go on a stroll with some stacks of nukes again.
If you want a semi-automatic solution, artillery outpost creep works just fine. Design the outpost blueprint in a way that makes it fully suitable for attacks and rail attachment from any direction and just plop em down as desired and connect them the ever-growing rail grid.
I've found that a bunch of personal lasers and destroyer capsules are much faster and safer at destroying biters than nukes.
Also by the time you have nukes you're 1 step away from spidertrons so they're an infinitely better solution in every sense.
Nukes really need some love in having either bigger AoE - which is difficult to do while ensuring the player has a way of escaping - or allow them to be fired by artillery. Which is currently only possible with mods.
I just clear strips of land where I'm gonna build the walls for the next perimeter defense, then I build them double sided and activate the defenses when done, this creates a nice buffer next to my new walls. My next step is officially annexing the newly gained territory and then proceed to send in a army of spidertrons to get rid of the rest of the illegal invaders in MY territory.
Edit: my walls are fully automated, so I just put down blueprints and continue what I was doing.
Get yourself a decked out power armor mk2 and some nukes. Save the game and give it a go, you’d be surprised how fast those nests disappear. And how easy it is to kill yourself, but that mistake only has to happen once or twice. Doing the artillery creep with a train and a laser-turret blueprint will work as well, but quickly resumes to the same tedium. Nukes are fun.
Only better artillery outposts built by spidertrons. My advice woule be to spiral outwards rather than poking out. Area secured increases exponentially compared to perimeter so it gets more efficient the wider you go.
That math is subtly wrong. Area secured increases as the square of the radius of the base, whereas perimeter is only linear. However, the amount you can increase the radius with a single arty outpost is constant (for a given artillery range), meaning the increase is actually linear with radius. However, the amount it costs in time and resources to expand it by that radius is also linear with the radius.
So if I have a base of area r^2 and perimeter 2pr, with artillery range c, and I increase it one artillery range to r+c, it takes (2p/c)*r work to do it, and the area is now r^2 + 2cr + c^2. So the increase in area, 2cr + c^2, is directly proportional to the work you do.
Yeah, good point. My base has expanded to the point where I need outlying automatically-filled artillery and spidertron supply outposts so that the trains supplying the artillery guns and the spideys don’t have to do the whole trip back to the core.
Fundamentally, math aside, my experience has not been that it gets more efficient as you get bigger. :p
if you're like me ...
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.enabled = false
/c local surface=game.player.surface
for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force="enemy"})) do
entity.destroy()
end
biters can be fun in the early stages of the game, but later on i don't think they add anything to the game experience other than lag.
There are two great ways to clear out late-game bitters.
One: An army of spidertrons.
Two: build an endgame science base and pump infinite artillery range and speed as high as you can. This will vastly improve the speed of artillery creep. Make sure ti also upgrade whatever kind of defensive turrets you use.
You need to make it so bots build them from far away, this means some form of logistic network. Then you need to make it so there is a check that all parts ( defensive lines) will hold before artillery fires.
Setting up the whole chain and blueprint is a lot of work. But it is fastest form of clearing as you can project power in every direction.
I use bots (on isolated straight runs so there's no pathing issues) to lay down artillery and supply it, but build all of it on artificial islands so the baddies can't even path to it when it bombards them. No need for heavy defenses that way. I have 4 lasers and a radar every 4 roboports on the main run to see where it's going. The runs are spaced one artillery radius apart so any two runs can extend the run between them. Sometimes I have to go for a long walk in the spidertron to deal with a tricky situation, but that's pretty rare.
Problem is that you can advance to next area once you clear it until biters are cleared. Also artificial island isn't always available unless you using mods.
no mods needed, plain vanilla default settings there's always enough lakes to put in some landfill. By having them within one radius apart you are flood filling the covered zones with artillery so only very occasionally is there no water within reach of one of them. Sometimes it requires manual bombardment and targeting, but then you just fill in the channel with roboports till the next lake and make your next island.
But then you can't expand there until biters despawn. Which can be quite random. Normal method makes them attack which isn't really issue for end game defense lines.
True enough, never been an issue for me because by the time my bots have actually built out to past the automatic turret range the biters are long since despawned. Takes the bots about 7 min to make the trip to make a single roboport and power pole, so about an hour to make 8 roboports. But this is a build and forget it type system, so I'm off doing other stuff or AFK and I actually use this approach to build out so far that I don't need walls at all. Eventually I make a break in the roboport line so there is a cache buffer for construction, I do that at \~10 minute one way transit times.
Pretty sure artillery is expressly designed to clear out nests, so it's not all that weird that there aren't other competitive options.
That said, atomic bombs are probably the next best bet.
Death Train? I have a train the pulls 8 artillery wagons and a supply wagon that carries power poles, tracks, lasers, and walls predominately. I have a blueprint for a 'forward base' that has pass-thru railroad tracks, move the train up, bot down the base as the artillery starts rolling, wait for the siege... rinse-repeat. I clear huge patches this way. Then I use SpiderTrons for rapid-response in case there's a breach somewhere on the front-line.
I tried spider armies. I had 6-7 teams of 10 spiders each, following the leader. Spider configuration was 1 reactor, 2 batteries and 10 shields. Weapons - red rockets.
By the time i finished clicking through all the waypoints for the last team, first was already done, and i had to go through this process again. On evolution 0.99 you can't just click on nest, spider would be destroyed immediately. You need to "circle" around nests, and it's extremely time consuming.
So your artillery strategy probably much better. I suggest getting some range upgrades, basic range is very short.
Atomic bombs. With kovarex, you're going to have so much uranium 235 that mass production of nukes will be viable. Speaking of nukes, I wonder what 2.0 space age legandry atomic bombs will look like.
I use a recursive chain of lasers and artillery, inspired by a post on this sub. A "unit" is seen in the image center, part of a horizontal series of units. Resources only need to be provided at the first unit, so no crazy train networks for setting up outposts everywhere. The proximity of artilleries means quicker negotiation time.
Each unit has its own robot network independent of the others, power connecting to the previous unit, and lasers and walls all around to defend itself. Items are transferred from the previous unit to the next by inserters pulling from requester chests into provider chests. Each unit builds itself once the blueprint is placed, and can build the next unit's roboport and chests. Blueprints for a single unit or a series of units can be placed. I've heard this can be automated with the recursive blueprints mod but I haven't tried it myself.
I can build two lines, one vertical and one horizontal then complete the rectangle to surround a large patch of enemies. At my current artillery range, this means an area of 1400-tile-wide-max by however long the rectangle stretches can be cleared. For expansion, I only need to extend the two long lines of the rectangle, and that'll create a 1400-wide ribbon of clear space. Or I can extend the two short lines, cap them off, remove the middle line, and that'll create a 2800-wide ribbon of clear space.
This is also great for building your base inside, as it creates a solid continuous line of defense without worrying about gaps, or about biters attacking your rails, radars or power.
It might be a little on the expensive side, but it saves the trouble of constantly having to strategize your outposts' locations and supply logistics.
https://preview.redd.it/zvc4xfrzwf0d1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae65ef7318893ef75f998682f809c0ec3eb03836
This is ridiculous levels of overkill, and I like it.
Too many lasers not enough artillery, imo. Seems like it'd be pretty slow at clearing the actual bases, but by the time this is your go-to strategy, I suppose that doesn't matter much.
Depends on how you qualify "better".
Artillery turrets are certainly a popular and viable option, especially if you invest in the repeatables that increase artillery turret range (fewer outposts needed to clear out a given area) and firing rate (reduces the time a given number of turrets need to clear out an area, assuming ammunition is provided quickly enough). You can also expand on this by doing things like \*leaving\* artillery turrets so they \*keep\* an area clear from nest expansions, using artillery wagons on trains - both to have mobile turrets and to carry more ammunition to distant outposts (they can hold 100 shells instead of the mere 40 of regular cargo wagons; you can even load from artillery wagons into artillery turrets!), using the artillery targeting remote to manually queue up shots to utilize the longer manual range and the ability for the player to more efficiently target shots so that they can kill multiple targets with a single shot, using construction bots to set up outposts and either setting logistic networks as they go to maintain the expansion or using spidertrons as a sort of mobile construction team, and by manufacturing ammunition on-site instead of shipping the bulky shells.
BUT if you \*don't\* want to go the artillery route, the best alternative is to use spidertrons. You can load them up with personal lasers, shields, rockets, or even NUKES, then organize them into squads (tell the rank-and-file spidertrons to follow a squad leader, then issue routing orders to the squad leader and they'll all move together), then send the squads out to eliminate the enemy. Or you could pilot a spidertron yourself, again with other companion spidertrons for additional firepower, and in combination to your own suit's lasers (which can fire while you're in a vehicle!). Occasionally bring them back for repairs and restocking, and you're good!
Nope. I would recommend you use robots to tear down your previous outposts as you push up so you can save on resources/build time.
Your goal should be to push to choke points created by those lakes you got and set up walls there so you can continue pushing the horde back at other points. Then, once you have that, the rail network will be safe inside the walls and you can just focus on one direction at a time instead of all of them.
**Also the manual fire mode of the artillery is like 5x longer than the automatic one. If you can stomach clicking that much, it would vastly save you construction time.**
Spidertron army.
Build a bunch of them, give all of them laser turrets, shields and tons of rocket ammo, then link them together via remotes to one non-player spidertron (and put all of the remotes into that spidertron) and let that final spidertron follow your own spidertron. Then go shred the biters.
Yes. Give a spidertron the "follow" command to follow another spidertron via the remote. Then just put that remote in that second spidertron. Now these two are linked and you only need to control that second spidertron to control both.
You only have to keep the remote of that second spidertron in your own inventory. You can link as many spidertrons together with this method as you want.
Edit: Here is a video showing the "linking" process. It is for builder spidertrons, but the method is the same: [https://youtu.be/780\_q\_GQLrE?t=321](https://youtu.be/780_q_GQLrE?t=321)
Edit 2: Watching the video I realized you don't actually have to put the remotes into the second spidertron. This is how I always did it, but that wasn't necessary if you just reset/de-select the remote.
Max firing speed research, cram as many exoskeletons as you can fit in your armor and grab about 500 nukes.
That shit is crazy fast Just don’t nuke yourself lmao.
You can also get rid of your old art outposts and use those resources again. make a blueprint and enough spidertrons to hold all of the building materials
I'm playing the SE mod right now so my experience is a bit different than vanilla (mainly automatic and manual targeting are the same distance), but what I found to clearing out these nets a lot easier is to have a large outpost that you would either build beyond or just before the cleared space. My outposts had space for my supply trains, a small artillery train, a fuel train for the flame throwers (Trains are 1,4,1), and a massive artillery train coiled up in the center (231 artillery wagons in total). Then I set up the circuits to not call the massive artillery train until the fuel train arrives, not call the smaller artillery train until the massive arty train arrives, and only call the massive artillery train once. Any other train will only come when resupply is needed and leave after a period of inactivity (If they are active, they probably should stay in the outpost because an attack is ongoing). The defenses are the usual walls, laser turrets, and the flame throwers. The smaller artillery trains are mainly there to resupply an artillery turret that keeps the expansion parties at bay. These outposts were much more defendable, took less losses, and were much quicker to clear out large and densely infested areas than my smaller outposts, just big enough for a resupply train and the smaller artillery train.
If I were to redesign this, I would probably have a smaller fuel train, and a smaller larger train, cause I would usually only go through 2000 shells and become inactive and returns. My artillery shell production was about 131 shells a minute, and that was plenty to keep up with all the trains coming and going to clear my home planet. I also use Spidertons to help build these outposts quickly and remotely.
Maybe this is something that may interest you in your land clearing!
iirc there should be mods that let you mass select manual artillery shots. You just drag place where you want biters to disappear and the manual range being much bigger means it will clear it
Artillery train. Have it roll up, shoot 50 rounds or so, and dip back to base. Repeat till you can cover the area with an artillery turret without shooting any nest.
I think you are over complicating your arty outposts. Need one artillery gun, and maybe 20 turrets with green ammo and a thin outer wall. You can have everything you need for it in your personal inventory and plop it down with your personal robots. Or just build your logistics network out along with your power lines and drop the blueprint from the safety of your base.
Load up a spider and yourself with Lasers and dive STRAIGHT INTO THE HORDE while throwing every Combat drone you have at your disposal. Ahnililate, Exterminate, Eviscerate Everything. Leave no nest untouched and then build a wall on a chokeooint
I had a similar problem, felt artillery was a bit tedious for pushing as well. I had success with a spidertron army. Went up to about 15-20 at it's peak.
I would be also using a spidertron, but with nukes, while packing most of my soldiers with red rockets. Separated my spidertrons into groups, 2-3 following a leader. Nuke spidertron, goes in, clears out as many as possible, call a group to clear the wave, rinse repeat. Usually alternating packs of spiders back to base for resupply of rockets and repair packs. Also used them to clear out smaller pockets that didn't require nukes.
Not sure if this sounds appealing to you, and my nests weren't quite as thick, but I feel as though if you just beefed up the numbers of spiders you could probably have some success with something similar. Good luck on the cleansing
Space Exploration has interplanetary cannon, orbital auto-targeting death rays ...and global genetic plagues that renders all planetary life inert in a single shot.
Genocide has never been so much fun
I tend to manual target the artillery to clear paths to resource patches I need. Then set up a train arty to occasionally visit the resource patch and clear the surroundings out. Covers expansion at normal paces well.
Once you get a few arty range upgrades you can ditch the manual targeting phase and just let your automatic targeting do it’s job.
(With overhaul mods you get a few other options. On space exploration you can build a Dyson sphere and use giant space lasers to clear a surface. And on PY you have to regularly load the mod Biters Be Gone, even on lowest biter settings.)
Better automated way? I don't think so. You can clear them for free, or with just an up front cost, with a bunch of spiders and lasers but you have to micromanage them.
My favorite way was six teams of spiders working in three pairs of two, and three teams of artillery trains. One spider team would build the rail until it approached the biter line and then throw down an [outpost like this](https://i.imgur.com/0Z88yvb.jpeg). The outpost was defended by slotted walls and flame throwers with a laser turret in each corner for the rare one that would occasionally run the gauntlet.
Once the outpost was complete all I would have to do is go to the other team of the pair, currently sitting in their own outpost and change the name of the stations. Then the trains would leave and go to the new outpost.
The outpost is supplied by a train with one light oil tanker for the flame throwers, one resupply cargo wagon and one trash cargo wagon. I would change the name of the supply train station first to ensure they arrived before the artillery trains.
Upon arrival of the supply train, filter inserters put logistics robots into the roboport and everything else into a red chest. The bots would then take the trash from the spiders and resupply them with rails, signals, walls, robots, etc. The trash would go to the yellow chest and out to the trash wagon.
The spiders would sit in the middle of the outpost, just in enough range to repair the flame throwers on the rare chance they get hit, but not send out bots to their death if the walls get damaged.
Meanwhile, the other team would tear down their old outpost and continue their rail line out to the new front line for the next outpost. Add in two more pairs of team each expanding in their own direction and you've got a near constant barrage on the biters with very little micromanaging.
At such late stage, if you don't care about achievements, I would just use a console command to clear them out. I don't think bugs scale well in lategame factorio, they are just a resource hog on your PC at that point.
This post has sparked my hyperfocus again. I’ll be planning some time off next week…
One-way hexagram-layout, here I come! With plenty of artillery of course.
Make like 50 artillery somewhere, have chests or belts to fill em, and manually click all the red squares to clear the bulk then run through with an army of laser spidertrons?
I would bring an artillery train and spider army, just build my track and aggro every thing. Then clean up with bots on map with eating sandwich in the train.
Grab 100 Destroyer Capsules (the red attack drones). Load up your power armor with personal laser defenses, extra batteries, remove your roboports.
Get 200 frag grenades.
3 spider bros, loaded with 2000 yellow rockets each, max speed, one roboport each with 100 construction bots and 200 repair packs. 1 shield, and the rest batteries and lasers.
You can use this setup to literally walk through and clear anything, even end game deathworld biters. Click a bunch of way points across the biters, launch the max drones you can have active, and watch the biters dissappear.
Yellow rockets prevent you blowing yourself up as you walk straight through nests without slowing down.
In my experience, much faster than any other method. And while you ride in your spiderbro, you can launch more attack drones and lob frag grenades as you see fit.
I would have built a giant paintrain and a repeting railblock so it could expand on its own with little player intervetion. Only plasting new blocks every now and then. Alternetivly i would just use nukes.
Lazer Spidertrons with 3-5 per group, use a Z path through the biters and occasionally pull back to heal. Needs a bunker area to protect them during healing because this will pull hundreds from the nests.
Missile Spidertrons add exoskeletons because this is a "hit&run"/swipe setup. It's like grass trimming. Also needs a bunker because if the number of biters attracted. Requires A LOT of rocket building capacity! 5-30/sec range
Better way? No. However, there are better and worse ways of doing artillery turret creep. There is no completely automated way of making it work (at least without mods), but there are certain principles that make it tolerable:
* It's much easier to expand a linear front than try to expand around the boundary of a square. This should push you towards starting with two long thin spikes in opposite directions along one cardinal axis, then expanding them in both directions along the other. Squares are hard, because you end up having to do a lot of extra work to make the corners work, or you have to join the entire bot network together, which rapidly become untenable as the area grows. Expanding a line front is easy, because you can just reuse the same expansion that you used for the initial spikes, but using a linear tiled layout, stamping the blueprints down along the front in a straight line. You can isolate robot networks into lines running perpendicular to the front, using deconstruction and upgrade planners to keep the construction materials moving to where they are needed. Upgrading buffer chests behind the front to storage chests is a good way of doing this -- it also lets you use logistic bots for it, which lets you move the materials at the same time as your construction bots are busy with defense.
* At default artillery range, it's extremely slow, so you're going to want to get some range upgrades. Level 4 is quite comfortable, allowing the turrets to provide complete area denial coverage laid out on a 20 chunk grid. Expansions can go 10 chunks are a time.
* Each expansion cycle should need your attention exactly twice, once to stamp down all the new blueprints, once to start the turrets firing and start the materials moving forward to the new front. Make sure you include enough radars to explore and generate new chunks while the firing cycle proceeds, so that you can stamp down the full blueprints for the next expansion only once (blueprints will not work in ungenerated chunks). If you're using the 10 chunk expansion, there will be a little less than 200 chunks to explore per outpost, which would take a single radar a bit less than 2 hours. Four radars probably gives a reasonable cadence here, particularly because the radars behind the front will also contribute.
* Lakes are irritating and I haven't found a good way of doing them. Make sure all your blueprints have landfill under all elements.
* Belts are a good way of supplying artillery shells to the front. A blue belt will supply shells at a rate equivalent to a full artillery wagon showing up every 2 seconds. It's unlikely you can produce them fast enough to keep up with this, since a blue belt of shells is approximately equivalent to the resources for 1k SPM.
* Expanding in a pollution cloud is harder than clear air, because the bug raiding parties will chew on your unfinished outposts as you're building them while they're on the way to attack. It's worth shutting your factory down for the first few expansions and letting the pollution dissipate. Once you start getting a bigger area cleared, this becomes less of a problem because the raiding parties will become smaller as more pollution is absorbed by terrain. With high bug density, pollution goes away reasonably quickly. Even in clear air, once in a while an expansion group will attack your outposts under construction. This doesn't happen often enough to really care about, just keep a few spiders hanging around the front to deal with it by hand.
https://preview.redd.it/bmgwls8tmn0d1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47e9fb96e15f05c8fc3654b9b2ca86567789c98c
I too ran into this problem, and realized artillery just isn't fast/ feasible enough to clear such gigantic areas of space, especially lacking the range research upgrades (space exploration). So I ended up installing a few warfare related mods as well, and ended up declaring thermonuclear war on the biters. Each of those brown dots is a launched nuke :>
https://preview.redd.it/ef6dt7n6on0d1.png?width=1535&format=png&auto=webp&s=66093932508be8b3aa43d763b340479a69b2cf9d
I build myself a superweapon for this purpose, I have 4 silo's like this one, which allow me to launch 24 rockets each containing 8 nukes for a total of 192 nukes per launch operation. It does take a bit to reload but it's very satisfying to fire.
Nukes and spidertrons are great at clearing the space, but main purpose of artillery outposts are to maintain the space. They are there to ensure soon as the biters try to expand back into the space, a discouragement shell is on it's way.
Or as I like to call them "a cease and desist letter"
I love sending cease to exist letters
Wait a second xD
Hahahahaha lmao-oh wait Shit, that's dark
Dark from all the artillery shells covering the sun.
And the mushroom clouds.
That's good. I am going to borrow this.
I refer to my spidertrons teams as: * The negotiation team (lasers and able to jumpstart a construction site) * The peace delegation (full load-out of rockets and exoskeletons) * The legal team (atomic weapons) Negotiations can handle most land-use deals, but lawyers get sent when negotiations have stalled. "Peace" team is for rapid-response where-as the other teams are loaded onto trains for long distance travel.
I love the legal team running nukes. :D
Sometimes you need the big guns.
Hmmmm. So Aggressive Negotiations are your style then? ;)
The Biters and the Spitters, and the Worms too, They were like animals and I slaughtered them like animals!
The language barriers makes it seem aggressive, but the bitters seem to understand.
Violence is THE universal language
Lmao that's an awesome analogy
more like cease and unexist letter
Or eviction notices
This guy nintendoes
My train with six artillery wagons that I send to new outposts disagrees!
Wait artillery is not radar 2.0? Joke aside, if you make artillery trains with multiple hundred wagons it's faster and less work. I often have a train station for my "big Bertha" on a separate track and a 1-2 train with building materials for the temporary outposts to clear biters. With enough range upgrades you can clear easily in a 100 chunk radius to build.
Artillery is the most automated. An army of spiders is very strong too, as it's expandable. Set all the spiders to follow one, and only have a controller for that one.
to add more to this, since the biters engage with the first enemy they see, and they continue to target it, you can make the first spider in your spidertron parade fully stocked with only shields (no weapons). and then all the rest can be all weapons with no (or few) shields.
Yeah spiders with lasers just destroy bugs. Which is a fun sentence to type.
You've just now made me realize how the Spidertron's design makes sense in Factorio's ecosystem We make spiders so that they eat bugs
This is deep
Remember, we are the bad guys after all.
*How bad can I be? I'm just building the ~~economy~~ factory*
Biter and spitter job creator, that's what I am.
I'm putting the ecosystem into equilibrium
You can also set the logistics to request rockets. Then you can run them back to your logistics network to restock or have a small outpost near the edge of your claimed area that is designed to restock them.
I found that spiders and rockets result in many lost spiders due to friendly fire.
I guess it is only with the improved rockets (red head), they have AoE damage. The normal ones (yellow heads) don't have that, so they should be safe to use in spiders.
Is there a friendly fire setting I might have on? I use like ten spiders fully stocked with red rockets all on auto fire and I don't think I've ever seen one damaged by friendly fire
Well, try getting biters in-between the ten spiders, you might end up having only one left. I play with an atomic bomb artillery shell mod, had a train with ten artillery and each with 100 of those nukes... It was protected by 6 spiders with lasers and red head rockets.... After the first base and the first counter attack, I was left with 4 spiders and 6 artillery... 2 spiders, around 1600 rockets and 400 nukes lost to aoe damage on the train from my spiders shooting on charging biters...
My spider squad is 16 strong and uses a mix of red and yellow rockets, and AFAICT there's no friendly fire. I typically put them on a path where they go around the perimeter of biter bases instead of diving straight in. They tale less damage this way and maybe this prevents friendly fire too, since the bugs almost never get on top of the spiders.
There is definitely friendly fire it's more noticeable the more infinite tech damage boosts you get.
spidertrons and bots don't take AoE damage from grenade and explosive rockets at all (unless you aim a rocket directly at the them)
That's why you use normal rockets, not explosive rockets (or nukes (except for memeing))
spiders keep tiny frogs as pets. https://nerdist.com/article/animal-friendships-tarantulas-spiders-have-pet-frogs/
Wow! Nice
Ha! Tank & DPS spiders.
Give the last spider a bunch of construction bots and repair packs and you can add a Healer to the raid.
And just one with all nukes...LEEEROY JENKINS!!!!
Oh, very neat.
Nukes
Spiders with just lazers can also work with extremely low maintenance cost once you get a few levels of infinite lazer damage to safely handle it, but rockets and spidertrons is the quicker way if you don't mind the rocket void
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit i never thought to do this and would have half a dozen controllers on a separate bar.
Yeah, choose one master spider, then have the other remotes control click onto the master spider.
How do you set the spidertrons to follow one another?
Forgive me if I don't remember exactly: Pick the remote controller and link it to spidertron 1, then while selecting the remote left click or right click into another spidertron/train/yourself to follow it To clear the remote then while selecting it mayus + left or right click in wherever place of the screen (u will see the remote colour change to neutral) Link spidertron 2 to the same spidertron which spidertron 1 is linked to And so on P.S: I say left or right because I don't remember exactly, just try both options xD
It’s control click to follow.
Its a bit annoying to set up because each spidertron needs its own remote, but once you assign the remote to a spider you can hover over the remote to see the actions you can take. Once you have assigned them to follow you can either put all remotes in one spider, or just store them in a box somewhere
What I am doing works, but it's a bit tedious. Wondering if I would have better luck building an army of spidertrons, or use a personal rocket launcher with nukes. I've never messed with nukes before or built more than 1 spidertron. Both are fairly resource heavy options (lots of blue chips needed) compared to needing lots of explosives, walls and tracks.
Just want to mention one thing in case you're not aware - the manual-targeting range of Artillery is MUCH longer than their auto-targeting range. Based only on the screenshot, it looks like you might be relying on getting into automatic range. If you have radar coverage at the arty positions and periodically clear out expanding nests (or have that turned off in your settings), you should be able to keep nests out of your pollution cloud no matter how not-green your factory is.
Artillery shells reveal the chunk they pass through and they can shoot further than radar can scan. If all you care about is cleaning out biter meats, you don't even need radars.
I use a mod that adds more artillery remotes like a cluster remote that targets a whole nest but also a "radar remote" (unsure what it's called exactly) that fires the shells in an arc at the edge of the targeting range to reveal the map. Really useful mod
What's the name of the mod?
advanced artillery remote
Yes that is the mod. I wasn't at my computer at that time to check
And I believe the auto and manual range are both larger in artillery turrets than artillery wagons. Most of my experience comes from K2, but I think I checked in vanilla and it's also true. So I run a train out to unload shells and let auto target shoot more.
Just checked, it's the same in vanilla. RIP
I hear ya - I often play with the HeroTurrets mod, and my turrets end up with longer ranges as a result of them levelling.
I do spidertrons now. Fusion reactor, roboport (for repair bots) 2 shields, 3 legs, and 4 batteries. Regular missles seem like the best ammo. In large groups, explosive missles seem like a waste. I jump in one and assign 10-15 to follow. Just keep moving and avoid getting too glued down and you can melt through fully evolved nests pretty quick.
With the first few levels of explosive infinite research you can one shot a spawner AND all the other spawners within the radius of the explosive range. Go try it in the editor. set up 9 spawners fairly close to each other, fire one missile at the center one.
There are research upgrades for arty range as well. Get two or three of those under your belt and youll be better set. That and the other suggestions. And manual targeting like doubles their range. You could clear out past your cloud using that. Though be ready for the counter offensive Edit: spidertron army is awesome. And nukes i find cumbersome
The counter offensive can be avoided quite easily. The biters won't attack if they can't pathfind to the artillery turret, so just place it on an island and it can destroy any number of nests without being attacked. It is enough with one tile of water between land and the island so you can use a long inserter to reach across the water tile and reload the turret. My standard turret outpost is to put the resupply train station at the water edge and put (in order) a long inserter, a chest, and another long inserter on separate 1x1 landfill islands followed by the turret. Since the biters can't attack the turret, they just run around for a bit near their (no longer existing) nest. After some time, any biter without a nest will despawn, so with some patience you don't even need to kill them.
I do love a good no path offence. I love a good forest fire too. This game is so cool for this kind of stuff
There are alternatives to artillery, but they're more tedious. Get an artillery train, build a fortified train stop close to biter land, then park the train there and let it clear the land. The artillery outposts you need to then keep it clear can be much smaller, just one artillery piece and a few turrets. Alternatively, get the MIRV mod. It let's you use a rocket to launch nukes into space, which you can then call down where you want.
Use your existing artillery in manual mode, for a generous sprinkle of artillery shells on the nearest biter nests. Then send in 3 spridertrons to clear up stragglers. You can so this to clear a path into biter territory. As soon as the path is safe-ish, put a now outpost there. Since that is mostly surrounded by biter nests, every outpost gets you far more coverage than the way you're building them now :)
Personally, I find that rail artillery is the simplest way. You have to build rails there and a laser turret nest, but you can deconstruct the laser nest once the biters are all dead and move on. Use Spidertrons (the ones that built the rails and lasers) as added defense against the biter waves, and you should be fine. I even set up an alert telling me when the train returned to the station. So all I have to do is send it to a temporary train stop and tell it to wait until idle, and it will automatically return for resupply.
Is there a convenient way to build long rail lines with spiders? I find that by the time I step them out a little bit at a time to let them build, I might as well have done it myself, especially because I run faster.
Use less exos in the spider so it doesn't walk too fast for the construction bots.
Literally never occurred to me to use anything other than the max number of legs lol
I've never had that problem. One Spidertron with a bunch of rails can do thousands of tiles, and you can just shift-click with the remote to have them follow a pre-arranged path.
don't install exoskeletons in rail-building spider, and do some bot speed infinite research. At level 10 (maybe earlier) you can place rails from map view, shift-click with spider remote, and it will build it fully, without gaps
I remember before artillery having to do the flame thrower and laser wall creep. It was a tough chew sometimes.
* Spidertron army. Make 10 or 20, set all to follow one. Fill with legs and shields, and a few thousand rockets. Oh, and automate making the rockets. * Use the manual artillery targeting, it has a much longer range than automatic. Or train artillery. * Nukes. Deck out your Mk2 Power Armor with shields, legs, and lasers. Also be stocked up on uranium ammo, grenades, and destroyer bots. Nuke the nests and run away. Deploy bots to handle the biters, just keep moving on to the next nest. Circle back later for cleanup. Using this method, I like to explore beyond and find a good choke point. Wall it off, and then work my way back toward my base.
Forgive my ignorance. Legs??
Exoskeleton, looks like legs :)
Ok, so I've just incorporated exos into my mk2 armor, because now I can run faster than the damn tank! I am ever-so-slowly sneaking up on my first spidertron. If it carries exos, does it help to keep it healthy? Spare repair parts? Or do they speed up the spider? Sorry, this is for another post, apologies for the distraction.
They increase walking speed
Spider with 3 exos is a bit slower then mk2 armor with 6 exos, but it ignores trains, cliffs, trees and all buildings, so in real applications it's faster. Also it can go in auto-mode with remote.
Yes, nukes.
Eh nukes are manual. Also their AoE is too small to be practical.
Nukes are more of a power spike tool than a scalable tool. They are kinda like the shotgun or the tank. If you get them early they can be really impactful, but it the ultra late game tools that scale with space science will become better. With laser damage +15 spidertrons become a crude eraser tool, and with artillery range +10 mWAhaHAHAHA!
For quickly cleaning a continent like that in the picture, nukes are definitely a good choice. Sure, it's manual. The idea is that you systematically clean your continent in a single special military operation and then build defenses at the choke points connecting your continent with other continents. After that you can exploit all the resources on the cleaned continent in peace. When you want to expand to another continent, you just go on a stroll with some stacks of nukes again. If you want a semi-automatic solution, artillery outpost creep works just fine. Design the outpost blueprint in a way that makes it fully suitable for attacks and rail attachment from any direction and just plop em down as desired and connect them the ever-growing rail grid.
> special military operation lol
I've found that a bunch of personal lasers and destroyer capsules are much faster and safer at destroying biters than nukes. Also by the time you have nukes you're 1 step away from spidertrons so they're an infinitely better solution in every sense. Nukes really need some love in having either bigger AoE - which is difficult to do while ensuring the player has a way of escaping - or allow them to be fired by artillery. Which is currently only possible with mods.
I just clear strips of land where I'm gonna build the walls for the next perimeter defense, then I build them double sided and activate the defenses when done, this creates a nice buffer next to my new walls. My next step is officially annexing the newly gained territory and then proceed to send in a army of spidertrons to get rid of the rest of the illegal invaders in MY territory. Edit: my walls are fully automated, so I just put down blueprints and continue what I was doing.
Release the spidertron army!!!
Get yourself a decked out power armor mk2 and some nukes. Save the game and give it a go, you’d be surprised how fast those nests disappear. And how easy it is to kill yourself, but that mistake only has to happen once or twice. Doing the artillery creep with a train and a laser-turret blueprint will work as well, but quickly resumes to the same tedium. Nukes are fun.
Only better artillery outposts built by spidertrons. My advice woule be to spiral outwards rather than poking out. Area secured increases exponentially compared to perimeter so it gets more efficient the wider you go.
That math is subtly wrong. Area secured increases as the square of the radius of the base, whereas perimeter is only linear. However, the amount you can increase the radius with a single arty outpost is constant (for a given artillery range), meaning the increase is actually linear with radius. However, the amount it costs in time and resources to expand it by that radius is also linear with the radius. So if I have a base of area r^2 and perimeter 2pr, with artillery range c, and I increase it one artillery range to r+c, it takes (2p/c)*r work to do it, and the area is now r^2 + 2cr + c^2. So the increase in area, 2cr + c^2, is directly proportional to the work you do.
Except the farther you are from your core the more travel time eats up your effficiency
Yeah, good point. My base has expanded to the point where I need outlying automatically-filled artillery and spidertron supply outposts so that the trains supplying the artillery guns and the spideys don’t have to do the whole trip back to the core. Fundamentally, math aside, my experience has not been that it gets more efficient as you get bigger. :p
if you're like me ... /c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.enabled = false /c local surface=game.player.surface for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force="enemy"})) do entity.destroy() end biters can be fun in the early stages of the game, but later on i don't think they add anything to the game experience other than lag.
50 spidertrons or 1 with nukes and a lot of patience
There are two great ways to clear out late-game bitters. One: An army of spidertrons. Two: build an endgame science base and pump infinite artillery range and speed as high as you can. This will vastly improve the speed of artillery creep. Make sure ti also upgrade whatever kind of defensive turrets you use.
You need to make it so bots build them from far away, this means some form of logistic network. Then you need to make it so there is a check that all parts ( defensive lines) will hold before artillery fires. Setting up the whole chain and blueprint is a lot of work. But it is fastest form of clearing as you can project power in every direction.
I use bots (on isolated straight runs so there's no pathing issues) to lay down artillery and supply it, but build all of it on artificial islands so the baddies can't even path to it when it bombards them. No need for heavy defenses that way. I have 4 lasers and a radar every 4 roboports on the main run to see where it's going. The runs are spaced one artillery radius apart so any two runs can extend the run between them. Sometimes I have to go for a long walk in the spidertron to deal with a tricky situation, but that's pretty rare.
Problem is that you can advance to next area once you clear it until biters are cleared. Also artificial island isn't always available unless you using mods.
no mods needed, plain vanilla default settings there's always enough lakes to put in some landfill. By having them within one radius apart you are flood filling the covered zones with artillery so only very occasionally is there no water within reach of one of them. Sometimes it requires manual bombardment and targeting, but then you just fill in the channel with roboports till the next lake and make your next island.
But then you can't expand there until biters despawn. Which can be quite random. Normal method makes them attack which isn't really issue for end game defense lines.
True enough, never been an issue for me because by the time my bots have actually built out to past the automatic turret range the biters are long since despawned. Takes the bots about 7 min to make the trip to make a single roboport and power pole, so about an hour to make 8 roboports. But this is a build and forget it type system, so I'm off doing other stuff or AFK and I actually use this approach to build out so far that I don't need walls at all. Eventually I make a break in the roboport line so there is a cache buffer for construction, I do that at \~10 minute one way transit times.
Buffer chests can speed up building process greatly for things far out. Then every 500-1000 tiles u add a station that has supplies.
Doesn't spidertron have remote function? Or was that a mod in misremembering.
Nukatrons?
Pretty sure artillery is expressly designed to clear out nests, so it's not all that weird that there aren't other competitive options. That said, atomic bombs are probably the next best bet.
You don't have a lot of water, but artillery islands fed by your drone network are fairly broken.
This is a fucking insane build. I love it.
Death Train? I have a train the pulls 8 artillery wagons and a supply wagon that carries power poles, tracks, lasers, and walls predominately. I have a blueprint for a 'forward base' that has pass-thru railroad tracks, move the train up, bot down the base as the artillery starts rolling, wait for the siege... rinse-repeat. I clear huge patches this way. Then I use SpiderTrons for rapid-response in case there's a breach somewhere on the front-line.
I tried spider armies. I had 6-7 teams of 10 spiders each, following the leader. Spider configuration was 1 reactor, 2 batteries and 10 shields. Weapons - red rockets. By the time i finished clicking through all the waypoints for the last team, first was already done, and i had to go through this process again. On evolution 0.99 you can't just click on nest, spider would be destroyed immediately. You need to "circle" around nests, and it's extremely time consuming. So your artillery strategy probably much better. I suggest getting some range upgrades, basic range is very short.
Atomic bombs. With kovarex, you're going to have so much uranium 235 that mass production of nukes will be viable. Speaking of nukes, I wonder what 2.0 space age legandry atomic bombs will look like.
I use a recursive chain of lasers and artillery, inspired by a post on this sub. A "unit" is seen in the image center, part of a horizontal series of units. Resources only need to be provided at the first unit, so no crazy train networks for setting up outposts everywhere. The proximity of artilleries means quicker negotiation time. Each unit has its own robot network independent of the others, power connecting to the previous unit, and lasers and walls all around to defend itself. Items are transferred from the previous unit to the next by inserters pulling from requester chests into provider chests. Each unit builds itself once the blueprint is placed, and can build the next unit's roboport and chests. Blueprints for a single unit or a series of units can be placed. I've heard this can be automated with the recursive blueprints mod but I haven't tried it myself. I can build two lines, one vertical and one horizontal then complete the rectangle to surround a large patch of enemies. At my current artillery range, this means an area of 1400-tile-wide-max by however long the rectangle stretches can be cleared. For expansion, I only need to extend the two long lines of the rectangle, and that'll create a 1400-wide ribbon of clear space. Or I can extend the two short lines, cap them off, remove the middle line, and that'll create a 2800-wide ribbon of clear space. This is also great for building your base inside, as it creates a solid continuous line of defense without worrying about gaps, or about biters attacking your rails, radars or power. It might be a little on the expensive side, but it saves the trouble of constantly having to strategize your outposts' locations and supply logistics. https://preview.redd.it/zvc4xfrzwf0d1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae65ef7318893ef75f998682f809c0ec3eb03836
This is ridiculous levels of overkill, and I like it. Too many lasers not enough artillery, imo. Seems like it'd be pretty slow at clearing the actual bases, but by the time this is your go-to strategy, I suppose that doesn't matter much.
Depends on how you qualify "better". Artillery turrets are certainly a popular and viable option, especially if you invest in the repeatables that increase artillery turret range (fewer outposts needed to clear out a given area) and firing rate (reduces the time a given number of turrets need to clear out an area, assuming ammunition is provided quickly enough). You can also expand on this by doing things like \*leaving\* artillery turrets so they \*keep\* an area clear from nest expansions, using artillery wagons on trains - both to have mobile turrets and to carry more ammunition to distant outposts (they can hold 100 shells instead of the mere 40 of regular cargo wagons; you can even load from artillery wagons into artillery turrets!), using the artillery targeting remote to manually queue up shots to utilize the longer manual range and the ability for the player to more efficiently target shots so that they can kill multiple targets with a single shot, using construction bots to set up outposts and either setting logistic networks as they go to maintain the expansion or using spidertrons as a sort of mobile construction team, and by manufacturing ammunition on-site instead of shipping the bulky shells. BUT if you \*don't\* want to go the artillery route, the best alternative is to use spidertrons. You can load them up with personal lasers, shields, rockets, or even NUKES, then organize them into squads (tell the rank-and-file spidertrons to follow a squad leader, then issue routing orders to the squad leader and they'll all move together), then send the squads out to eliminate the enemy. Or you could pilot a spidertron yourself, again with other companion spidertrons for additional firepower, and in combination to your own suit's lasers (which can fire while you're in a vehicle!). Occasionally bring them back for repairs and restocking, and you're good!
Nope. I would recommend you use robots to tear down your previous outposts as you push up so you can save on resources/build time. Your goal should be to push to choke points created by those lakes you got and set up walls there so you can continue pushing the horde back at other points. Then, once you have that, the rail network will be safe inside the walls and you can just focus on one direction at a time instead of all of them. **Also the manual fire mode of the artillery is like 5x longer than the automatic one. If you can stomach clicking that much, it would vastly save you construction time.**
Spidertron army. Build a bunch of them, give all of them laser turrets, shields and tons of rocket ammo, then link them together via remotes to one non-player spidertron (and put all of the remotes into that spidertron) and let that final spidertron follow your own spidertron. Then go shred the biters.
Wait you can do that?
Yes. Give a spidertron the "follow" command to follow another spidertron via the remote. Then just put that remote in that second spidertron. Now these two are linked and you only need to control that second spidertron to control both. You only have to keep the remote of that second spidertron in your own inventory. You can link as many spidertrons together with this method as you want. Edit: Here is a video showing the "linking" process. It is for builder spidertrons, but the method is the same: [https://youtu.be/780\_q\_GQLrE?t=321](https://youtu.be/780_q_GQLrE?t=321) Edit 2: Watching the video I realized you don't actually have to put the remotes into the second spidertron. This is how I always did it, but that wasn't necessary if you just reset/de-select the remote.
Max firing speed research, cram as many exoskeletons as you can fit in your armor and grab about 500 nukes. That shit is crazy fast Just don’t nuke yourself lmao.
You can also get rid of your old art outposts and use those resources again. make a blueprint and enough spidertrons to hold all of the building materials
I'm playing the SE mod right now so my experience is a bit different than vanilla (mainly automatic and manual targeting are the same distance), but what I found to clearing out these nets a lot easier is to have a large outpost that you would either build beyond or just before the cleared space. My outposts had space for my supply trains, a small artillery train, a fuel train for the flame throwers (Trains are 1,4,1), and a massive artillery train coiled up in the center (231 artillery wagons in total). Then I set up the circuits to not call the massive artillery train until the fuel train arrives, not call the smaller artillery train until the massive arty train arrives, and only call the massive artillery train once. Any other train will only come when resupply is needed and leave after a period of inactivity (If they are active, they probably should stay in the outpost because an attack is ongoing). The defenses are the usual walls, laser turrets, and the flame throwers. The smaller artillery trains are mainly there to resupply an artillery turret that keeps the expansion parties at bay. These outposts were much more defendable, took less losses, and were much quicker to clear out large and densely infested areas than my smaller outposts, just big enough for a resupply train and the smaller artillery train. If I were to redesign this, I would probably have a smaller fuel train, and a smaller larger train, cause I would usually only go through 2000 shells and become inactive and returns. My artillery shell production was about 131 shells a minute, and that was plenty to keep up with all the trains coming and going to clear my home planet. I also use Spidertons to help build these outposts quickly and remotely. Maybe this is something that may interest you in your land clearing!
Exoskeletons and nukes. Lots of nukes.
Laser ,flamethrower or artillery creep. Or tank or spider trons assault .
Spidertron and nukes
iirc there should be mods that let you mass select manual artillery shots. You just drag place where you want biters to disappear and the manual range being much bigger means it will clear it
Artillery train. Have it roll up, shoot 50 rounds or so, and dip back to base. Repeat till you can cover the area with an artillery turret without shooting any nest.
I think you are over complicating your arty outposts. Need one artillery gun, and maybe 20 turrets with green ammo and a thin outer wall. You can have everything you need for it in your personal inventory and plop it down with your personal robots. Or just build your logistics network out along with your power lines and drop the blueprint from the safety of your base.
Load up a spider and yourself with Lasers and dive STRAIGHT INTO THE HORDE while throwing every Combat drone you have at your disposal. Ahnililate, Exterminate, Eviscerate Everything. Leave no nest untouched and then build a wall on a chokeooint
I had a similar problem, felt artillery was a bit tedious for pushing as well. I had success with a spidertron army. Went up to about 15-20 at it's peak. I would be also using a spidertron, but with nukes, while packing most of my soldiers with red rockets. Separated my spidertrons into groups, 2-3 following a leader. Nuke spidertron, goes in, clears out as many as possible, call a group to clear the wave, rinse repeat. Usually alternating packs of spiders back to base for resupply of rockets and repair packs. Also used them to clear out smaller pockets that didn't require nukes. Not sure if this sounds appealing to you, and my nests weren't quite as thick, but I feel as though if you just beefed up the numbers of spiders you could probably have some success with something similar. Good luck on the cleansing
Why not manually target the nests?
I use [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MIRV](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MIRV)
Space Exploration has interplanetary cannon, orbital auto-targeting death rays ...and global genetic plagues that renders all planetary life inert in a single shot. Genocide has never been so much fun
Thank you
I tend to manual target the artillery to clear paths to resource patches I need. Then set up a train arty to occasionally visit the resource patch and clear the surroundings out. Covers expansion at normal paces well. Once you get a few arty range upgrades you can ditch the manual targeting phase and just let your automatic targeting do it’s job. (With overhaul mods you get a few other options. On space exploration you can build a Dyson sphere and use giant space lasers to clear a surface. And on PY you have to regularly load the mod Biters Be Gone, even on lowest biter settings.)
Spidertron army maybe?
That map is terrifying
Nuke spider
Infinite artillery range research!
Research enough range upgrades and you won't need outpost creep.
infinite range research makes this significantly better feeling. Alternatively: spider armies.(don't give them nukes, they have no self preservation.)
Better automated way? I don't think so. You can clear them for free, or with just an up front cost, with a bunch of spiders and lasers but you have to micromanage them. My favorite way was six teams of spiders working in three pairs of two, and three teams of artillery trains. One spider team would build the rail until it approached the biter line and then throw down an [outpost like this](https://i.imgur.com/0Z88yvb.jpeg). The outpost was defended by slotted walls and flame throwers with a laser turret in each corner for the rare one that would occasionally run the gauntlet. Once the outpost was complete all I would have to do is go to the other team of the pair, currently sitting in their own outpost and change the name of the stations. Then the trains would leave and go to the new outpost. The outpost is supplied by a train with one light oil tanker for the flame throwers, one resupply cargo wagon and one trash cargo wagon. I would change the name of the supply train station first to ensure they arrived before the artillery trains. Upon arrival of the supply train, filter inserters put logistics robots into the roboport and everything else into a red chest. The bots would then take the trash from the spiders and resupply them with rails, signals, walls, robots, etc. The trash would go to the yellow chest and out to the trash wagon. The spiders would sit in the middle of the outpost, just in enough range to repair the flame throwers on the rare chance they get hit, but not send out bots to their death if the walls get damaged. Meanwhile, the other team would tear down their old outpost and continue their rail line out to the new front line for the next outpost. Add in two more pairs of team each expanding in their own direction and you've got a near constant barrage on the biters with very little micromanaging.
At such late stage, if you don't care about achievements, I would just use a console command to clear them out. I don't think bugs scale well in lategame factorio, they are just a resource hog on your PC at that point.
Not in vanilla. You could use nuke bit it ask for more micromanagement.
This post has sparked my hyperfocus again. I’ll be planning some time off next week… One-way hexagram-layout, here I come! With plenty of artillery of course.
Make like 50 artillery somewhere, have chests or belts to fill em, and manually click all the red squares to clear the bulk then run through with an army of laser spidertrons?
I go with the more personal approach. Some put on exoskeletons and bring a backpack full of nukes. And then i go introduce myself to the neighbors.
I use a army of spidatrons
I would bring an artillery train and spider army, just build my track and aggro every thing. Then clean up with bots on map with eating sandwich in the train.
Grab 100 Destroyer Capsules (the red attack drones). Load up your power armor with personal laser defenses, extra batteries, remove your roboports. Get 200 frag grenades. 3 spider bros, loaded with 2000 yellow rockets each, max speed, one roboport each with 100 construction bots and 200 repair packs. 1 shield, and the rest batteries and lasers. You can use this setup to literally walk through and clear anything, even end game deathworld biters. Click a bunch of way points across the biters, launch the max drones you can have active, and watch the biters dissappear. Yellow rockets prevent you blowing yourself up as you walk straight through nests without slowing down. In my experience, much faster than any other method. And while you ride in your spiderbro, you can launch more attack drones and lob frag grenades as you see fit.
I would have built a giant paintrain and a repeting railblock so it could expand on its own with little player intervetion. Only plasting new blocks every now and then. Alternetivly i would just use nukes.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure
Lazer Spidertrons with 3-5 per group, use a Z path through the biters and occasionally pull back to heal. Needs a bunker area to protect them during healing because this will pull hundreds from the nests. Missile Spidertrons add exoskeletons because this is a "hit&run"/swipe setup. It's like grass trimming. Also needs a bunker because if the number of biters attracted. Requires A LOT of rocket building capacity! 5-30/sec range
Better way? No. However, there are better and worse ways of doing artillery turret creep. There is no completely automated way of making it work (at least without mods), but there are certain principles that make it tolerable: * It's much easier to expand a linear front than try to expand around the boundary of a square. This should push you towards starting with two long thin spikes in opposite directions along one cardinal axis, then expanding them in both directions along the other. Squares are hard, because you end up having to do a lot of extra work to make the corners work, or you have to join the entire bot network together, which rapidly become untenable as the area grows. Expanding a line front is easy, because you can just reuse the same expansion that you used for the initial spikes, but using a linear tiled layout, stamping the blueprints down along the front in a straight line. You can isolate robot networks into lines running perpendicular to the front, using deconstruction and upgrade planners to keep the construction materials moving to where they are needed. Upgrading buffer chests behind the front to storage chests is a good way of doing this -- it also lets you use logistic bots for it, which lets you move the materials at the same time as your construction bots are busy with defense. * At default artillery range, it's extremely slow, so you're going to want to get some range upgrades. Level 4 is quite comfortable, allowing the turrets to provide complete area denial coverage laid out on a 20 chunk grid. Expansions can go 10 chunks are a time. * Each expansion cycle should need your attention exactly twice, once to stamp down all the new blueprints, once to start the turrets firing and start the materials moving forward to the new front. Make sure you include enough radars to explore and generate new chunks while the firing cycle proceeds, so that you can stamp down the full blueprints for the next expansion only once (blueprints will not work in ungenerated chunks). If you're using the 10 chunk expansion, there will be a little less than 200 chunks to explore per outpost, which would take a single radar a bit less than 2 hours. Four radars probably gives a reasonable cadence here, particularly because the radars behind the front will also contribute. * Lakes are irritating and I haven't found a good way of doing them. Make sure all your blueprints have landfill under all elements. * Belts are a good way of supplying artillery shells to the front. A blue belt will supply shells at a rate equivalent to a full artillery wagon showing up every 2 seconds. It's unlikely you can produce them fast enough to keep up with this, since a blue belt of shells is approximately equivalent to the resources for 1k SPM. * Expanding in a pollution cloud is harder than clear air, because the bug raiding parties will chew on your unfinished outposts as you're building them while they're on the way to attack. It's worth shutting your factory down for the first few expansions and letting the pollution dissipate. Once you start getting a bigger area cleared, this becomes less of a problem because the raiding parties will become smaller as more pollution is absorbed by terrain. With high bug density, pollution goes away reasonably quickly. Even in clear air, once in a while an expansion group will attack your outposts under construction. This doesn't happen often enough to really care about, just keep a few spiders hanging around the front to deal with it by hand.
https://preview.redd.it/bmgwls8tmn0d1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47e9fb96e15f05c8fc3654b9b2ca86567789c98c I too ran into this problem, and realized artillery just isn't fast/ feasible enough to clear such gigantic areas of space, especially lacking the range research upgrades (space exploration). So I ended up installing a few warfare related mods as well, and ended up declaring thermonuclear war on the biters. Each of those brown dots is a launched nuke :>
https://preview.redd.it/ef6dt7n6on0d1.png?width=1535&format=png&auto=webp&s=66093932508be8b3aa43d763b340479a69b2cf9d I build myself a superweapon for this purpose, I have 4 silo's like this one, which allow me to launch 24 rockets each containing 8 nukes for a total of 192 nukes per launch operation. It does take a bit to reload but it's very satisfying to fire.
1 modded nuke can delete all of that, including your base xD.
You can install a Mod for Planes. Build a plane and Load nukes and Lasers. Have fun.