How many Warps to beat Warptorio? // part 4 - a fully automated Space Base

Hey all :) I'm about halfway through the editing of the penultimate episode of the  "100% achievements on 100% evolution" series. Normally I would post the weekly progress regardless, but an incomplete episode doesn't make sense at this stage, as we have only 2 achievements left: the next episode is dealing with minions, and the finaler one is gonna need to get us the 20M green chip one... and of course... anyway,

Below are some timestamps which you can use if you don't intend to watch everything. Not all of them are not "chapters" per se, some of them are funny or notable/important moments, but the one with the double timestamps are the "full chapters", the more interesting building parts between all of the other odd jobs which need to be done. I'll include them in the youtube video description as "chapters" for easy browsing.

0:00:00 - 0:48:50 Setting up Yellow and Purple science

2:17:30 Power Armor mk2 / obsoleting the car

2:54:30 The Great Resource Moving Operation

3:43:55 Making mk3 modules for warp beacon four & more

4:24:30 How (NOT) to mass-move resources!

4:42:35 Walk of Shame 

5:01:33 / 5:20:45 / 5:34:30 Warp beacon 6 (final size) and 7 and 8 

5:34:30 - 6:34:06 Setting up Logistics Network (full automation) (R)

6:00:00 Fully automated yellow/pueple science and spidertron tech

6:14:52 Explosive rockets for spidertron

6:41:15 Rocket Silo Research / endgame tech exploration

6:54:12 Designing Steel Smelting under the Warp Beacon (insane productivity)

7:26:46 This is why you make a safety save!

8:07:45 Switching on steel (properly this time)

8:32:55 SpiderBen

8:47:22 Spidin Time

9:06:27 Unlock Planet selection for warps and world type discussion

9:17:30 Building the rocket silo and sattellite setup

9:37:38 Lab belt weaving and rocket launch

Enjoy!

Michael

PS I wrote a detailed answer to the question below, and got adviced to put the answer in a more visible place, as more of you may be interested in the explanation, so I'll copy/paste both the question and answer below. The original question can be found under the 2nd warptorio video post.

Question:

I responded extremely positively to your decision to warp into the middle of the biter base... and thinking about why I did, I realized that it's significant for your content in general.

All of your series have a similar problem: they start high intensity and then... kind of peter out.

The beginning is always so incredibly compelling - how on earth will he overcome this seemingly impossible challenge?!? But then by half way through we already have all the answers to the questions that the series posed. You're really, really good at dramatizing this process and eking out the maximum amount of tension (and humor) from the journey... but the tail ends of series always feel somewhat flat compared to the start.

So this unexpected hurdle (warping right into the heart of a biter base) really resonated with me, because it upped the stakes right when I was starting to feel that the series might be entering "solved" territory.

I'm not sure there's a generic solution to this problem, but perhaps holding a secret wild card in your back pocket for the home stretch is something you could think about planning into future series.

It's extra tricky though... if you fail at the beginning of a series, you can always restart and then end up airing the version where you just barely scraped through by the skin of your teeth... but a genuine danger near the end, something tough enough to evoke genuine tension, runs the risk of causing a series failure once you (and we) have already invested many hours into it.

So it's a very tricky problem. But one worth pondering, I think.

Answer:

I guess it's kind of the nature of biter-focussed factorio challenges. In vanilla, biters are mostly an early-game problem. On default settings, "biter victory" is achieved as soon as you research military 2, which gives you the power to clear out enough nests with cheap grenades to not be attacked at all anymore for the rest of the game, if you wish. (see my no spoon guide or the "self balancing factory" here on patreon)

In high-biter challenges, "biter victory" can usually be claimed upon getting flamethrowers (see A 90 minute opening strategy for "Impossible DeathWorld Map Seeds"). You can go beyond, as in the ultimate deathworld challenge, the "biter" part of the challenge ended not before expanding and had secured the resources to research and build a spidertron. But there it ends, there are no biter settings which defeat a spidertron. Even if not completley OP, the spider is sturdy enough to hit and run and grind away at the biters.

In general, in the beginning there's quite a wide "zone" where it is very tense and difficult, but still savable. Later on though, that zone becomes increasingly narrow, and you're either on the correct side of the line and have an easy time, or on the wrong side and there's no "real" way to save yourself, but you have to F up majorly to be on the wrong side. An example would be, having gun turret defense, researching red/green bullet damage (7,2 damage/bullet) but leaving it at that, not researching military science nor other turrets, This deals adequate with medium biters/spitters, but once you cross into big biter land, you're suddenly defenseless, as 8 armor big biters tak only fractional units of damage against 7,2 dmg gun turrets. Even than, you can still save the base by just switching everything off, whcih stops pollution and thus attacks, and slowly restarting the base beeling whatever defense upgrade you need.

For Warptorio, I'm basically almost fully evading biter attacks, which is funny as it's quite a biter-focussed mod. However, even if you defend above ground, there is no "real" biter challenge/tension to be had. You just warp away before you run in trouble, and you should warp away even earlier than that, as soon as the ammo cost starts exceeding your iron/resource intake. Defending "in a fair way" above ground while NOT autowarping (AND not cheesing biter attacks in other ways, like purposely not unlocking the harvester/boiler floor or smt) is impossible (or is it)

I feel that Rampant will be the first truly full biter focussed challenge where the biter/survival tension will be real all game long, as they keep evolving in different factions with different immunitities, and both the nests and worms, as well as the biters themselves keep getting stronger and stronger.

/tangent I guess, but yeah. Once you learn the basics, biters are not (and are not meant to be) a big challenge in factorio. When I do challenge maps, I usually figure out a way to start out WAY down on the "power curve", which is why the early stages of the challenges are so biter-tense. Once you finally manage to catch up on the power curve and "overtake" the biters, that part just disappears, and the challenge/focus shifts from survival towards achieving the goals I set for the challenge.