memes

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

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

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

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

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

What works for me:

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

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

3. Build up military tech alongside your other tech

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

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

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

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

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

The easy solution is fire.

At some point, biters almost always overwhelm my defenses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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