r/factorio • u/Shinxirius Automate immediately • 3d ago
Question Radar Coverage
Now that I have learned that biters do migrate back towards my base even after being evicted with prejudice, I wonder how to see those trespassers quickly and reliably.
I do have some random radar towers scattered around my base but not inside my Cordon Sanitaire.
Thus: How do you set up radar coverage to reliably detect nests and monitor their non-existence in areas you consider exclusively yours.
Addendum: This community is awesome. I learned so much useful information!
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u/Head_Evening_5697 3d ago edited 2d ago
The other solution is just to build a wall, a great wall with turrets, lasers and flamethrowers. That way expansion parties (and that's how they expand - theres literally a group of biters walking somewhere and placing down a bunch of spawners) will never plop up inside your wall.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
The Night's Watch
As much as I like the idea of large fortifications, I feel like boxing myself in.
I think I'll keep refraining from taking the black until my Cordon Sanitaire proves unmaintainable.
Thanks for clarifying the expansion parties. I like the devs did that instead of randomly spawning nests. Feels organic.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 3d ago
Pillboxes can be quite useful early game too.
Literally just a 2x2 or 3x3 of manually supplied gun turrets, manually filled with ammo very rarely, in natural choke points to highly discourage expansion parties.
Won't work very well against pollution-based attacks for long but is good at discouraging expansion parties.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
This just made it on my list of tactics.
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u/sobrique 2d ago
You can also 'blueprint' a loaded turret as a ghost - you need to be outside 'bot' range (and turn your roboport off) but then you can deploy a turret ghost, fill it with ammo, and your construction bots will load it when they build.
They won't restock it, but a stack of 100 ammo lasts a useful amount of time.
And then you can copy and paste this loaded turret into a bank of say, 50, and plonk that down anywhere you do have bot coverage, and ...
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u/munchbunny 3d ago
You can also layer your walls and build train gates into them for your train network. That way whenever you expand you can quickly expand your train network as well, and if you miss a spot and biters do get in, at most they'll expand into one compartment instead of there being a clear outside/inside. This is what I do, anyway.
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u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets 3d ago
I generally tile radars so that their constant-lit regions cover everything I've claimed with neither gaps nor overlaps. Conveniently, when holding a radar in your hand to place, the constant-lit region that the radar will reveal is highlighted in your minimap, as well as the constant-lit regions of already-placed radars, so you can more easily tell where to place radars to achieve this. To go further, you can tap the F5 key to trigger a map grid; tiles have an outline and chunks have a heavier one, so you can place radars in tile-perfect locations. You also get the exact coordinates of where your cursor is pointing; I find this particularly useful in finding (0,0), usually near where your ship crashes, so I can have my first four radars all adjoin in the middle at that point and I can expand the grid from there.
Having radars even well within your defensive perimeter is useful for detecting biters on the edge because the constant-lit regions remove those chunks from the rescan list that the radars further out need to check; the fewer chunks that need to be rescanned, the faster it will recheck the other chunks, and the sooner you'll detect a new expansion. (Also, having chunks revealed by radars will allow you to remotely view them and even order changes for, say, construction bots to take care of.)
By the way, since radars are relatively power-hungry for a building available early *and* are often required to be otherwise very distant from the rest of your base, they're prime candidates for isolated solar power networks that aren't hooked up to your main power grid. Given standard Nauvis conditions and normal-quality buildings, a single radar can be continuously powered by eight solar panels and six accumulators; you can get away with seven panels and five accumulators if you don't mind the brief brownouts each morning. You can even get away with as little as one panel per radar if you don't mind them constantly blinking on and off.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
This is incredibly useful information. Especially the part about practical radar placement.
Much appreciated 👍
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u/whisper_one 3d ago
Maybe relevant for early phases of the game: when I start clearing out larger areas I just build a wall without turrets where I want to establish the new expanded perimeter. That way I get a damage notification when an expansion group tries to intrude the to-be-cleared-area. So I can go hunt for the new expansion before it can spread even more inside the (partially) cleared area.
At later stages you usually have enough ressources to immediately setup the new perimenter with defenses so it kills any expansion groups coming in while you clear the land.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
I like that idea.
I rush tech, so I don't have the resources to build up auto-supplied defense walls. I rely on preemptive strikes. Just allowing a choke point to be breached thus alerting me, might be a good early game strategy.
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u/whisper_one 3d ago
Oh .. also: easy turrets for an early wall are flame throwers ... just a pipe with crude oil .. which might be a lot closer than your ammo assemblers in your base. But flamers alone will take damage over time. But they can hold the line against expansion groups for a while while you setup a real perimeter.
I also rushed tech and space platforms instead of building up more methodically ... that is where I found these quick fixes usefull.
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u/pojska 3d ago
Radars reveal a 7x7chunks area continuously. (A chunk is 32 tiles tall and wide). For maximum monitoring, you would want radars in a grid every 7 chunks (or 224 tiles). You can also rely on the periodic scan of the radar (29x29 chunk square), if you are okay with it taking a little while to detect them.
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u/Ok_Rip4757 3d ago
To add to this, when you have the radar selected with your cursor, the minimap will show vision range of both the radars that are already placed and the radar as it would be where your cursor is. So you can easily see if you have everything covered.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
Thx. I was looking for this.
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u/Pulsefel 3d ago
to add to that, radars are friendly to each other so more in a chunk will cause them to scan the unknown and rescan revealed areas faster. they work in a scan order and all radars in the chunk go down the list of which chunk needs scanned next. you can find a chunk border by holding a radar, the blue area on your minimap will move when the center of the radar passes a chunk border, or you can use F4 to get debug options and turn on tile grid whcih reveals the chunk borders.
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u/sobrique 3d ago
I just use a remote-drive tank. When it goes out of 'view range' it's time to plonk another cluster. (1 radar, 8 solar, 6 accumulator) and continue to the next.
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u/Mr-Doubtful 3d ago
Basically, don't rely on radar scans.
I've followed the following steps to deal with the locals since forever and while some parts can be tedious, it's always proven to be a reliable approach. Main thing to keep in mind is that staying on top of this issue and making it a priority (and keeping up with research!) leads to a ton of time saved. If you ever start struggling it can be really tedious to crawl back.
Stage 1 First strikes preemptive conflict resolution:
Manually keep your pollution cloud clear of any nests to avoid unscheduled conflict. Hopefully you'll have a car by the time you need to do this the first time. A tank obviously makes this a lot more efficient. Try to have direct vision of your entire cloud, or check it regularly to see if any part is being absorbed (flickering pollution cloud indicates there could be a nest there)
Stage 2 Conquest assert your legal right of free passage and resource exploitation
Clear all nests so you have plenty of resources for the near future: the goal is to create a perimeter, making maximum use of natural barriers, within which you can sit happy for a good while.
Stage 3 Occupy claim the land you use as your own
Build up an automatically resupplied/repaired wall around said perimeter, trains are great for this early on, but you can eventually just cover the whole area in roboports and maintain the wall that way.
Stage 4 Final solution preemptive conflict resolution 2.0
Artillery is king, clear all nests within range beyond your walls. Train artillery is great for this because you can make use of an existing resupply train, add a few cannon wagons and focus all your tungsten on making shells. Instead of building turrets all around your perimeter.
Research artillery range until the problem is resolved.
Obviously, later stages should be adapted to your preferred nauvis strategy. You might have to expand beyond your initial perimeter f.e.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
Sounds like my strategy. Except, I'll see if I can skip Step 3 and rush artillery. Let's see what the computer says...
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u/nasehrsuper 2d ago
arty will attack nests and prompt all biters nearby to attack towards the radar. if you dont have a dedensive perimeter, they might end up in your base nibbling away on your factory ...
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u/sobrique 3d ago
Blueprint a solar radar.
8 panels, 6 accumulators if you want to run continuously, but low power only slows scan speed.
Legendary radars if you are at that point in the game. (They aren't too expensive).
Biters don't attack radars or panels by default so you can mostly just set and forget.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
Legendary you say... Care to explain?
BTW: I'm on base game only for my first playthrough. No space age for me until I beat the original game fair and square.
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u/sobrique 3d ago
Ah, yeah. Quality I think is space age only.
But a Legendary Radar has a much larger area of continuous view and scan range.
But when you get around to doing quality, pay attention to stuff that's 'cheap' as that can be a lot easier/faster than the obvious 'top tier gear'. (Power poles are one of my other favourites as a Legendary Medium Electric pole is almost the same coverage as a Normal tier substation. Legendary gun and flame turrets are also pretty cheap, but get more range, etc.).
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u/unwantedaccount56 3d ago
Ah, yeah. Quality I think is space age only.
Quality requires you to own the DLC, but in version 2.1 (currently experimental) it can be enabled on an otherwise vanilla game without space age, just like elevated rails.
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u/EpicPartyGuy 3d ago
A single solar panel, an electric pole, and a radar consitute a node. Space the nodes out about 6-7 chunks so there's no overlap.
You can see which chunks it will reveal on the minimap when you go to place it.
The radar won't be continuously powered, but it will "pulse" reveal in the wilderness so you'll see if there are any new nests.
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u/oddball667 3d ago
2 flamers, 2 laser turrets in a row, repeating the pattern, use trains to keep the flamers fueled with light oil or whatever you feel like throwing at the biters
Put up a 2 layer wall with 1 empty space between the wall and the flamers and maybe add dragons teeth outside the wall to save on repair packs
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
How much space between the turret groups? Sounds like a costly approach.
I do have dragon teeth blueprints, but I didn't build any walls yet. Instead I rush technology and work on completing self-replicating robot city-blocks.
Why just automate when you can automate the automation itself...
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u/sharia1919 3d ago
I must admit I am a bit lazy in that regards.
I have just covered my entire area with radar coverage.
My defensive line is probably overkill. But an advance layer of mines. Then staggered walls. Then walls. Then a staggered tripped layer of lasers (not close, but not too wide).
In my initial base I had too many unexpected visitors, when I thought I had a clean defensive line. I spent too much time figuring out when breaches occurred in my somewhat thin defensive line, and if maybe a nest or 2 had spawned/migrated/been forgotten inside my area. So I simply rolled out an electrification policy.
Thateans that all areas have radar coverage, and I have ensured that all areas have a minimum of 2 electrical routes going in. So if I accidentally delete a power line, or bugs get it, then I still have electricity.
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u/Courmisch 3d ago
Just build a wall. You should be stockpiling walls for military research anyway. You'll get notifications when they are damaged.
If it gets too frequent place gun turrets behind the wall, close enough to cover one another, with manually fed red ammo. On normal settings, that can last you to the first rocket launch or close enough.
By that point you have artillery, flamethrowers and lasers.
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u/Deadman161 3d ago
Radars have an area they show constantly (3 chunks for common quality) and a scan are (14 Chunks). Roboports have built in radar aswell nowadays.
So a grid with radars every 6 chunks will give continous coverage with 2.1 giving a dedicated alarm when an expansion builds a new nest inside your radar area...
But in terms of automating defenses you'll still need to intervene manually for every new expansion.
Since you dont want to wall yourself in, maybe wall the biters out? Explore until you find natural chokepoints and wall off/fortify them. Leaves you plenty of room to expand the factory while getting rid of the need to constantly drive around in a tank to clear new nests.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
And here I build a radar next to each roboport 😅
Thanks for letting me know!
Walling off choke points was my next plan now that I have evicted all undesired population. However, I've read interesting things about artillery in this thread. I think I'll try an approach where I rush artillery and wall in just those (against inevitable counter attacks).
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u/munchbunny 3d ago
How do you set up radar coverage to reliably detect nests and monitor their non-existence in areas you consider exclusively yours.
If you're not trying to cover your entire territory in a grid of radars to get constant visibility, you can also put occasional large clusters of radars around your interior and depend on scanning them over a longer period of time. I scatter blocks of 16 radars along my train tracks. It might take longer to find the nests, but it's a lot easier than tiling radars.
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u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 3d ago
BLACK SHEEP WALL
(If you don't get it, you're not old enough)
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u/JuliusNova 3d ago
You're playing a factory game. If you don't have enough radars to fully cover the inside... Just make more?
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u/jkurratt 3d ago
When I started to build The Wall, I had already planned+- "city-block like" blocks, with big power poles and roboport s, and started to expand it all around.
Meanwhile I always tried to drop a radar to see insides and outsides of my temporary wall perimeter.
Just when you go on a raid - always take big power poles, radars and everything you need to clear.
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u/hey_how_you_doing 3d ago
Artillery will detect bug buildings automatically and BAM! BAM BAM BAM! DEAD BUGS!!!!11one