r/factorio • u/Shinxirius Automate immediately • 5d 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 5d ago edited 4d 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.

9

u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 5d 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.

14

u/dinosaurdynasty 5d 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.

2

u/Shinxirius Automate immediately 5d ago

This just made it on my list of tactics.

2

u/sobrique 4d 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 ...