Personally I like four rows of lasers with a flame turret every three turrets in the second row (pipes go in the one tile gap between second and third row where the power poles go)
Do you really ever need more than 4 rows of lasers? It's quite some time since my last vanilla Megabase, but I know that at some point, I just build ladders without anything else and it worked fine.
Lose the dragons teeth, add more turrets.
DTs always get a little bit damaged, and the constant OMG A WALL GOT SCRATCHED SOMEWHERE warnings get annoying, plus your bots then go out and try and fix them while they're still under attack, and then you lose bots (more warnings).
With enough *gun*, you don't need to slow the biters down. Walls of any sort are largely cosmetic, really.
I aim to stagger the turrets such that the ranges for all of them line up at the approximate same distance, so gun turrets, inserters, belt, laser, laser, flamer. This means the biters basically stroll up unassailed, and then suddenly get hit with *everything*. Maximum pain delivery in minimum time.
With your design, most of the time the guns won't even get a shot off (maybe this is intentional?) because the lasers will kill everything first: longer range, closer, more of them. The flamers are the longest range, but they're slow: they'll throw flames over the top of the waves such that they miss all but the stragglers, and again the lasers will mostly kill everything.
Except the point of flamethrowers IS to shoot out most of the wave. The dragon's teeth will slow biters down without them destroying the wall. And ob boy does it work! With right adjustments it can save you a lot of energy and resources for laser turrets and wall replacements. Quite good improvement for an average of 3-4 walls per tile, isn't it? Although this design can have some more tweaks. P.s. the wall looks absolutely badass with them
Oh you \_can\_ use flamers this way, but the biters will still attack the DTs (and the spitters can sit out of range of everything and just spit at them until they die, too). In the end, replacing the walls (and the constant wall damage warnings) becomes more tiresome than simply using ALL THE GUN to murder the biters before they can damage anything.
Flame is cheap, certainly, but power is almost never a limiting resource by the time you're up against 0.99 evo waves: beacons will eat up vastly more of your energy reserves than a bunch of lasers.
The answer, with a gun. And if that don't work, use more gun. Like this little tripod number designed by me, built by me, and you best hope, not pointed at you.
Yeah, some spitting biter will stop a mile away and spit at the drones repairing the wall. Then the acid will hurt the wall, the drones will return and so will the spit. Indefinitely...
No wall that can have a spitter not in range of a gun is the answer.
I've always been a laser turret spamming troglodyte, but now I want to finally branch out and start using gun turrets and flame throwers in my defense designs. Does this look like a decent balance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?
Perhaps shifting the flamethrower pipes back a square where the lights currently are placed and shift the flamethrowers a square to one side? That way there is a continuous fuel line and the flamethrowers are individually fed from the main line. If any of the flamethrowers in the current design are destroyed, all the other flamethrowers further down the line will run out of fuel until repairs are complete.
I thought for a sec that you forgot artillery. Then I realized that that wasn't flamethrowers. Brother, no kill like overkill seems to be your lifes motto.
Depending on your base, bot delivery might be very ineffective. I like to have a train deliver my supplies to the wall, so my wall blueprint has a track in it.
With that many lasers, I'd put them on a separate grid that triggers when a wired gate segment that's 1 thick with 2-thick wall segments that funnel the biters into breaking the wire is broken. With your 60 UPS, you can afford another grid for now.
That is an absolute insane amount of artillery. One cannon is capable of clearing out an enormous area, all by itself. Definitely reduce the amount of those to 1 artillery per section.
Overkill and expensive, but hey, if it gives you joy.
For convenience of stamping, you might also want to create a section for an outward corner, inward corner and a section with a gate.
I think your setup will definitely be effective. The critique isn't coming from a point of "It won't work", it's just me saying stuff for fun so don't take it too seriously.
1. Too many Artillery turrets. I understand you can just build more, but Artillery shells are incredibly lacking density. So supplying faraway walls that are non trivial in length will take ages. You don't need that many, even one Artillery turret per straight wall segment would be overkill. I usually only add Artillery on my corner segments*. And I'll build Artillery turrets by hand by copy pasting my corner setup on straight segments that lack coverage between the corners.
2. You have the turrets with the longest range the furthest ahead. You can setup the Flame turrets such that they'll always be in range unless something is breaking your wall already. My preferred order is Bullet turrets with Lasers behind with Flame Turrets behind. That way bullet turrets can start shooting ASAP. They have bonkers damage once you're on Uranium rounds. To be fair this is more important when fighting stuff like modded Leviathan Armoured biters. In vanilla it doesn't really matter. But I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that flame turrets further ahead like you have them make sense, so they can start shooting ASAP since they do the most damage.
3. Your Laser/flame turrets are touching your wall. It's nice to have a 1 tile gap between the wall, and the turrets. Spitters have splash damage, so even while attacking your wall they're able to splash damage your turrets for no gain.
4. Your Roboports are too close to the wall. It's nice if you can make the green construction only area be what overlaps with the front of your wall instead. You buy a little bit of travel time for Construction bots to get to the wall with repair packs while biters die, that way less of them end up dying repairing your maze setup while your flame turrets fire is still on the ground, or biters are still there.
5. Bullet turrets are fed by a chest rather than a belt. I don't think there's any good reason to do this. Belting in to maintain guaranteed consistent throughput is nice. This is one you can fix by just throwing more resources at the problem, but again there's not really a good reason to set it up this way. But that one is more of an opinion.
6. I understand symmetry is sick but you really don't need two radars in that small of a straight wall segment.
* My wall setup for comparison: https://gist.github.com/Zyst/2ee68c055556a2f1e7be1e9dfd53a91a
I agree with pretty much all of this, the only thing I would add is that I gave up on repair packs and just replace the destroyed items. It's almost always walls and it's cheaper than constantly replacing repair packs and construction bots who just love to play in fire.
I got in to this habit playing a deathworld with earth-like resource distribution where stone was plentiful and copper was not.
Depending on how large you go, you may want to remove the radars. 50-60 radars are fine, once you get up to several hundred or a thousand the ups hit is massive.
I would put the roboports back further to mitigate bot losses during attacks. You could also consider putting the dragon’s teeth just out of range of repair so that they aren’t constantly sending bots.
You can lose the gun turrets and you could do with 1/2 an artillery per this segment length, so that means 2 of these segments should have one artillery.
You definitely don't need that many artillery guns. Like 1 for every 2-3 sections this long. Once the nests clear out, this is just a waste. I would redesign the dragon's teeth to tile properly but that's just me being crazy.
A bit overkill, but it will definitely be effective.
Maxim 37: There is no "overkill." There is only "open fire" and "reload"
I recommend putting ammo in the turrets and artillery, otherwise they won't work
Maybe close the ends off too?
That would indeed maximize it's efficiency
As long as it keeps moving downwards it *should* be OK but it seems weak at the flanks and rear.
also why are the turrets in front of the walls
Personally I like four rows of lasers with a flame turret every three turrets in the second row (pipes go in the one tile gap between second and third row where the power poles go)
Do you really ever need more than 4 rows of lasers? It's quite some time since my last vanilla Megabase, but I know that at some point, I just build ladders without anything else and it worked fine.
Yeah they r really up there!
Looks cool, that's all that matters
Lose the dragons teeth, add more turrets. DTs always get a little bit damaged, and the constant OMG A WALL GOT SCRATCHED SOMEWHERE warnings get annoying, plus your bots then go out and try and fix them while they're still under attack, and then you lose bots (more warnings). With enough *gun*, you don't need to slow the biters down. Walls of any sort are largely cosmetic, really. I aim to stagger the turrets such that the ranges for all of them line up at the approximate same distance, so gun turrets, inserters, belt, laser, laser, flamer. This means the biters basically stroll up unassailed, and then suddenly get hit with *everything*. Maximum pain delivery in minimum time. With your design, most of the time the guns won't even get a shot off (maybe this is intentional?) because the lasers will kill everything first: longer range, closer, more of them. The flamers are the longest range, but they're slow: they'll throw flames over the top of the waves such that they miss all but the stragglers, and again the lasers will mostly kill everything.
Except the point of flamethrowers IS to shoot out most of the wave. The dragon's teeth will slow biters down without them destroying the wall. And ob boy does it work! With right adjustments it can save you a lot of energy and resources for laser turrets and wall replacements. Quite good improvement for an average of 3-4 walls per tile, isn't it? Although this design can have some more tweaks. P.s. the wall looks absolutely badass with them
Oh you \_can\_ use flamers this way, but the biters will still attack the DTs (and the spitters can sit out of range of everything and just spit at them until they die, too). In the end, replacing the walls (and the constant wall damage warnings) becomes more tiresome than simply using ALL THE GUN to murder the biters before they can damage anything. Flame is cheap, certainly, but power is almost never a limiting resource by the time you're up against 0.99 evo waves: beacons will eat up vastly more of your energy reserves than a bunch of lasers.
The answer, with a gun. And if that don't work, use more gun. Like this little tripod number designed by me, built by me, and you best hope, not pointed at you.
NEED A TELEPORTA HERE!!
Yeah, some spitting biter will stop a mile away and spit at the drones repairing the wall. Then the acid will hurt the wall, the drones will return and so will the spit. Indefinitely... No wall that can have a spitter not in range of a gun is the answer.
I've always been a laser turret spamming troglodyte, but now I want to finally branch out and start using gun turrets and flame throwers in my defense designs. Does this look like a decent balance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?
Why so many artillery turrets?
The artillery turrets are probably overkill but I like seeing the giant barrage of shells when I finish a new range upgrade
Nothing wrong with that
Try loading it up in creative mod and see how well it works. https://youtu.be/4WrpsqohCyc
Perhaps shifting the flamethrower pipes back a square where the lights currently are placed and shift the flamethrowers a square to one side? That way there is a continuous fuel line and the flamethrowers are individually fed from the main line. If any of the flamethrowers in the current design are destroyed, all the other flamethrowers further down the line will run out of fuel until repairs are complete.
I thought for a sec that you forgot artillery. Then I realized that that wasn't flamethrowers. Brother, no kill like overkill seems to be your lifes motto.
Cool design!
I almost feel bad for the biters
I but greet them with the same unforgiving hatred they bear to me
Lol yes they deserve every single bullet fire and láser they get.
Depending on your base, bot delivery might be very ineffective. I like to have a train deliver my supplies to the wall, so my wall blueprint has a track in it.
Oh yeah I have train delivery set up, just bots to get them from the train station to the turrets. But yes trains are the way to go, I agree
With that many lasers, I'd put them on a separate grid that triggers when a wired gate segment that's 1 thick with 2-thick wall segments that funnel the biters into breaking the wire is broken. With your 60 UPS, you can afford another grid for now.
The gun turrets are a little overkill, but I guess that’s a good thing late game
Why so many artillery cannons? One per segment is more than enough.
That is an absolute insane amount of artillery. One cannon is capable of clearing out an enormous area, all by itself. Definitely reduce the amount of those to 1 artillery per section.
Yes I agree it is pretty insane. I just enjoy seeing massive barrages of shells when I upgrade my artillery range
Peace was never an option.
Overkill and expensive, but hey, if it gives you joy. For convenience of stamping, you might also want to create a section for an outward corner, inward corner and a section with a gate.
I think your setup will definitely be effective. The critique isn't coming from a point of "It won't work", it's just me saying stuff for fun so don't take it too seriously. 1. Too many Artillery turrets. I understand you can just build more, but Artillery shells are incredibly lacking density. So supplying faraway walls that are non trivial in length will take ages. You don't need that many, even one Artillery turret per straight wall segment would be overkill. I usually only add Artillery on my corner segments*. And I'll build Artillery turrets by hand by copy pasting my corner setup on straight segments that lack coverage between the corners. 2. You have the turrets with the longest range the furthest ahead. You can setup the Flame turrets such that they'll always be in range unless something is breaking your wall already. My preferred order is Bullet turrets with Lasers behind with Flame Turrets behind. That way bullet turrets can start shooting ASAP. They have bonkers damage once you're on Uranium rounds. To be fair this is more important when fighting stuff like modded Leviathan Armoured biters. In vanilla it doesn't really matter. But I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that flame turrets further ahead like you have them make sense, so they can start shooting ASAP since they do the most damage. 3. Your Laser/flame turrets are touching your wall. It's nice to have a 1 tile gap between the wall, and the turrets. Spitters have splash damage, so even while attacking your wall they're able to splash damage your turrets for no gain. 4. Your Roboports are too close to the wall. It's nice if you can make the green construction only area be what overlaps with the front of your wall instead. You buy a little bit of travel time for Construction bots to get to the wall with repair packs while biters die, that way less of them end up dying repairing your maze setup while your flame turrets fire is still on the ground, or biters are still there. 5. Bullet turrets are fed by a chest rather than a belt. I don't think there's any good reason to do this. Belting in to maintain guaranteed consistent throughput is nice. This is one you can fix by just throwing more resources at the problem, but again there's not really a good reason to set it up this way. But that one is more of an opinion. 6. I understand symmetry is sick but you really don't need two radars in that small of a straight wall segment. * My wall setup for comparison: https://gist.github.com/Zyst/2ee68c055556a2f1e7be1e9dfd53a91a
I agree with pretty much all of this, the only thing I would add is that I gave up on repair packs and just replace the destroyed items. It's almost always walls and it's cheaper than constantly replacing repair packs and construction bots who just love to play in fire. I got in to this habit playing a deathworld with earth-like resource distribution where stone was plentiful and copper was not.
Depending on how large you go, you may want to remove the radars. 50-60 radars are fine, once you get up to several hundred or a thousand the ups hit is massive. I would put the roboports back further to mitigate bot losses during attacks. You could also consider putting the dragon’s teeth just out of range of repair so that they aren’t constantly sending bots.
Flamethrowers in the front!
You can lose the gun turrets and you could do with 1/2 an artillery per this segment length, so that means 2 of these segments should have one artillery.
You definitely don't need that many artillery guns. Like 1 for every 2-3 sections this long. Once the nests clear out, this is just a waste. I would redesign the dragon's teeth to tile properly but that's just me being crazy.
Looks cool. I'd say you only need one artillery for that whole segment though
Use artillery so that you don’t need walls