Source
Kano96•

Nice, all of those designs are quite interesting. As for the funneling, I think I can help you out a bit. Afaik, to make it work you have to:

  • Have only clean edges. No rounded shapes, no diagonals. The biters tend to slide left and right along the wall, when you have these impurities in the wall they tend to get stuck and then aggro the wall.
  • Don't make it too big, this is probably your main issue. The funneling will always fail sometimes, you don't want those biters outside the range of your flameturrets when it happens. Also note that funneling relies on the fact, that biters don't collide with each other when in frenzy. So, you always want your flamethrower to aggro the biters, so the collisions stop and they can run into the funnel and stack up.
  • Don't use rampant. Rampant mod makes funneling impossible. Other biter mods that mess with pathing probably do as well.

Here's my current version of an artillery outpost, with a video demostrating how insanely busted funneling actually is in vanilla.

Also, there's a bug with biters not forming proper groups when attacking in 0.18.36, so right now is probably not a good time to test funneling.

8
muddynipsOP•

Going over some of my wrong assumptions for designing artillery stations. I'm sure this is old hat to lots of you, but just thought I'd share.

3
warbaque•

Nice journey :)

Some of my experiences, I'd like to share in case you find it interesting.

I also spent quite some time refining my artilery station design, and after many hours this is where I finally ended up. (All building materials fit inside single wagon, bot repair is disabled when flame turrets are active to prevent mass suicides)

And how everything looks from supply stations point of view.

5
muddynipsOP•

I really like your design. Could you possibly post blueprints of those? I’d love to test them out.

1
warbaque•

Blueprints were at the bottom of the post, but here you go :)

And as Kano96 said, pathing bug in 0.18.36 makes almost all designs overperform at the moment.

2
lesethx•

You make me inspired to improve and post my outpost design. I love the extra space in the middle; I filled mine with solar panels and batteries in case the power was cut for any reason, so it could last for a bit (as well as gun turrets using regular and uranium ammo, but the design prioritized uranium ammo).

I especially liked the rounded corners. Too bad it seemed to problematic to keep; the corners are the troublesome spot on my outposts.

2
DaikonSwimming•

This might go slightly against the spirit of the post, but I normally just put a ton of lasers around a piece of track and call the artillery train. Sure, I might lose a laser or two, but when you have a grid of around 100, that's acceptable and holds well into the 99.9% evolution stage.

After that, I build standard laser walls at the edge of the land grab and run artillery trains behind them to keep biters at bay.

I don;t want to rely on just outposts, because eventually, somehow, a biter will slip through.

1