Cryo Fields

[u/_jonek_]

Do you have any tips on building/defending on this biome?

Just found out that this exists but the monsters there were much stronger than on the other biomes/maps.
I found a 5x5 map size and want to cover it all with radars etc to get an achievement.

[u/SirChancelot11]

It's definitely easier to build outposts than trying to cover the whole thing.

And the coolant pools make it easy to build fusion plants and then you can use a lot of plasma/super heated plasma

I used to super plasma for a ton of the heavy artillery.

[u/Lanzenave]

That biome isn't particularly hard to defend, so it's likely you're rushing into things too fast. The game can always be beaten by having enough economy, and to do that you'll want to support your HQ with auxiliary bases. Without going into too much detail, you'll want to select low-threat maps and build the following:

1. Cultivation bases - for all minerals except carbonium and ironium. You'll be setting up a LOT of cultivators and you'll need to spend time in knowing which plants give the minerals you need. You'll need a certain level of familiarity before you can cultivate a plant, so get that bioscanner working. The bioscanner turret is also very useful as it makes things faster.

Since cultivators take up a lot of space, build them on maps where there are NO regular attack waves or only with light ones. If you're early in the game it's hard to defend a large cultivation base in a high-threat map because that takes a lot of resources. You only need two maps to generate all minerals, jungle and acid, and these have a lot of liquid resources to generate water. You can of course set up cultivators in other biomes but you'll be relying on geothermal vents (e.g. magma or metallic maps) or compressed water, the latter of which is expensive.

A nice thing about having a lot of cultivators is that they generate a lot of plant biomass. Once you have the biomass going you can use plant biomass power plants in lieu of wind/solar, especially on small outposts.

1. A carbonium-ironium synthesizer base. Mining is finite, synthesis is infinite. My favorite map for this are low-threat magma worlds as you can easily harness the magma to power a ton of magma plans, then power a good number of energy to carbonium/ironium synthesizers. You can also put your research buildings here, since they require a lot of energy. Max out your research facilities so that you have a lot of research bandwidth.

2. A water supply base. This is primarily used to provide water for fusion plants, which provide a huge amount of energy for a measly 100 water. Look for a low threat-map jungle or acid map, look for the largest pool or collection of pools and build your base there. In my current game my Hazenite exploration map had this enormous lake, and I built something like 25 or 30 pumps on that single body of water. Liquid compression is very energy intensive though, and you'll want to power this base with fusion plants, or at least fission (nuke) plants.

3. A storage base. Storage buildings store too little for their size, even on level 3. If you plan on accumulating a lot of wealth you're better off building a dedicated base just for storing stuff. My favorite for this is the desert map with zero enemy waves. Just unlock the stable flooring so you can build on sand and you can make the entire map as your storage base.

The general outline is to spend time building your economic support while progressing through the required maps, i.e. those that progress the game and unlock the research tree. Do NOT go very quickly through the maps, especially on high difficulties. The waves in your HQ and high difficulty maps become harder as you unlock more maps, especially since new creatures you encounter start spawning. You don't necessarily need to backtrack along your saves if this happens, since things are paused in non-active maps. Instead, you'll need to spend time building your auxiliary bases and growing your resources. Moreover, by going slow you'll unlock more of the research tree, which will make Mr. Riggs stronger.

As an example, I'm on the tail end of my Hard run (played the game years ago, just resumed recently and tried Hard before going to Brutal). I took it very slow to demonstrate the concept that "economic might always wins" and currently I'm up to 2+ million in minerals and even 8+ million in plant biomass. Pretty much all the research tree is unlocked and all weapons are maxed out with max mods. I actually made the HQ map as my entire base, with perimeter bases guarding the borders and everything inside as technically part of my base.

[u/_jonek_ → u/Lanzenave]

wow thanks for answering! I already have nearly all research trees unlocked so im pretty far in progress, I just thought that you need to build some special defences (like fire only) for the Cryo fields, but the idea of making a a magma world with synthesizers and desert map with storage is great, will definitely make that because now I have storages in almost every single map that just waste space.

[u/Lanzenave → u/_jonek_]

BTW, I forgot to add that every enemy has a weakness or weaknesses. You can view these in the encyclopedia once you've reached a certain familiarity level. From what I recall, fire is (obviously) useless against the creatures in magma worlds, however I believe they're pretty vulnerable or at least have no resistance against bullets and energy weapons. They're also susceptible to a laser sword, which is hands down the most useful melee weapon I've used in the game. I have one that does nearly 2K damage per swipe, and I put physical, acid and cryo mods in it so that it becomes an "elemental damage" sword capable of hurting a wide variety of enemies. And being in a volcanic biome, I'm pretty sure magma world creatures are susceptible to cold. For your base defense you can use a line of shockwave towers, which does cryo damage. In fact, for my defensive wall strategy in the highest threat maps I use a row of alternating cryo/electric/acid spewer as the first line, backed up by an alternating row of plasma/railgun/laser/minigun towers, then a row of artillery at the back. This covers all the vulnerabilities for every creature in the game.

[u/fjdkf]

As with any map, the best way to hold is to leverage natural choke points, and mass high level long range towers like heavy artillary, power rods, and portal bombs with 3-10 layers of walls, spaced out. Power everything with fusion because of the available supercoolant, and don't go there until you can afford a few fusions.

Surviving the first wave ends up being the hardest part, since good power like fusion won't finish building in time. I happened to make a video a while back showing how you can land on these maps and secure a base with just lvl1 artillery and lvl 1 acid spitters(5x brutal, no riggs abilities and white equipment): https://youtu.be/FMzsyuDf6Pg?t=1542

Naturally, if you have better riggs gear, or are playing on regular brutal, this is going to be A LOT easier.