How many Warps to beat Warptorio? // live playtrough for patreon // part 2 - race against the clock
Added 2023-09-22 07:01:00 +0000 UTCJust a quickie today for those who watched the full first part already, it's part 2 of my unedited final practice run of warptorio!
If you're curious about my blueprints, I added a link to my warptorio blueprint book to the original post (part 1)
Enjoy!
Michael
Comments
Thanks, I'll include it as a PS in my next video post
Michael Hendriks
2023-10-04 18:04:15 +0000 UTCThis is a great explanation. I’d encourage you to post in a more visible place as other Patreons may be interested in it :)
Mike p
2023-10-02 22:05:40 +0000 UTCI 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.
Michael Hendriks
2023-10-02 08:09:36 +0000 UTCI 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.
Iestyn bleasdale-shepherd
2023-10-02 06:28:07 +0000 UTC
