Factorio: A Unified Defense Strategy

I want to explore approaches for base defense in Factorio (a realtime strategy/logistics/automation game) and how the four different types of turret (gun, laser, flamethrower and artillery) can be used together effectively. It is my view that a highly effective approach to base defense will make use of all of these units, but I’m going to test my hypothesis with some practical experimentation.

Background

After searching for a recent article on base defense in Factorio, that weighs up the four turret types, I was left lacking. True, I did not perform a thorough search, and perhaps I didn’t want to find anything, so that I had an excuse to write my own piece.

My friends and I have a weekly multiplayer game, in which we continue the construction of our empire, crack jokes and make logistical errors that take hours to reconcile (I’ve used that sentence before…). My aim with this article, is to convince them, that building a mixed defence will work the best at defending our borders. If it turns out I’m wrong, and that an all-laser defence is in fact the all-round best approach (a seemingly common opinion) then so be it, but at least I’ll know for sure.

Method

Rather than break it all down into a load of maths, figuring out the relative costs of different methods, and boring myself to death, I’m going to set up a simple experiment. I will take a save file from our weekly multiplayer game and make some copies. Each copy will contain a different defensive strategy, which I’ll open up and run at an greatly increased game speed. Increasing the game speed will allow me a glimpse into the future. Enemy attacks will happen more frequently and eventually the base will likely be overrun as walls crumble and resources dwindle. But, hopefully a discernible difference between methods will be observed.

Success will be measured by the time it takes enemies to overrun the base, causing a game over. The longer this takes, the better, as far as this experiment is concerned. I’m not taking into account the cost of each method.

Note: I am not claiming this method is 100% scientific and without flaws. Perhaps others will expand on my idea….

Here are the different approaches I will use:

  1. Gun turret only (belt fed with piercing rounds) - baseline
  2. Laser turret only (with ample power and accumulators) - expected to perform better than guns only
  3. Gun and laser turrets - expected to perform better than the previous two approaches
  4. Gun, laser and flamethrower turrets - expected to be the best performer so far
  5. Gun, laser, flamethrower and artillery turrets - expected to be the best performer over all

Freeze time: /c game.player.surface.freeze_daytime=BOOL

Enable long reach (rather than god mode):

/c local reach = 10000
game.player.force.character_build_distance_bonus = reach
game.player.force.character_reach_distance_bonus = reach

For infinite free crafting:

/c game.player.cheat_mode=true

New idea:

Enable cheat mode:

/c game.player.cheat_mode=true

This gives infinite free crafting.

Now unlock all items/research:

/c for name, recipe in pairs(game.player.force.recipes) do recipe.enabled = true end

Eternal day:

/c game.player.surface.always_day=true

Use F4 and then show-tile-grid

Create some pollution:

/c game.player.surface.pollute(game.player.position, 1000000)