Factorio – Identifying Vulnerabilities in Wall Defense Strategy

factorio

I'm starting to build a bot-fed wall defense. I'm new to using things like flamethrowers and modularized factorio.

The wall is based on alternating between flamethrower turrets and another turret like Flamethower, gun, flamethrower, laser, repeat. The gun turrets and flamethrowers are stocked by bots from around my base. I keep a stack (200) red ammo, and 30 barrels of oil in my requester chests for backlog. Every 4th module I manually add a radar, and if I need a train path in/out I'll remove the gun turret at the top and make a path through the accumulators and add gates in the walls.

This is only my second play though and biters are a lot stronger in 0.17 than they were when I started in 0.16.

What are my main weaknesses in this setup?

What should I be looking out for?

Image:
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Blueprint String:

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Best Answer

You're going all out on supply redundancy!

I am not in the habit of using flamethrower turrets, so I can't comment on how effective the defense will be overall. But I do often use gun turrets, and I have some suggestions:

  • Belt-fed gun turrets can only fire as much ammo as can be supplied by the one belt all the turrets share. You're not using very many guns, but you still might manage to empty out the belt temporarily, so the turrets have to wait for fresh ammo. Consider carefully how many turrets you want to supply from one belt — watch how your turrets handle a wave and how quickly the belt fullness recovers from that.
  • For extra super mega redundancy, consider using burner inserters for ammo (with some fuel on the unused lane of the belt to keep the inserters running). This way, if this section loses electricity (thus shutting off both lasers and fluid unbarreling) it still has the ammo reserve on the belt itself.
  • If you move the gun or laser turrets closer to the wall, more of them will be in range of any given point on the wall and so more can concentrate fire on a single enemy. I don't know whether it is possible to do this without putting them at risk from the flamethrowers.
  • Remember that the amount you need to request in a requester chest depends on how far away the supplier is (due to bot travel time) and the rate of use. On portions of your perimeter farther away than your provider chests, you may wish to use larger requests than 200 ammo and 30 barrels, or consider sprinkling buffer chests around (which can then supply any nearby requester as needed).
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