Tertius wrote: Fri Nov 08, 2024 6:56 pmI certainly don't want to spoil your fun. I built a sophisticated almost-zero-power wall like this myself, tinkering with it took about a week I guess, but after I was finished and I was satisfied how it did work, I realized what I wrote above.
A wall without any energy control worked the same for my factory, so I asked myself for what all these circuits, switches, battery-detectors are for? Every tiny chunk-sized wall segment (or in my case: 50 tiles, coverage of one roboport) needs one set of them. For nothing in the end. It worked as well without, and it worked better, because it was more reliable and more stable due to less complexity. It also lowered the energy usage spikes, because the moment you connect a wall segment, the empty energy buffers of the lasers get filled in addition to the power required for firing. This doesn't take place with always-on lasers.
The wall shown in this thread is also slightly too weak for the late game with behemoth enemies (it tries to counter this with an excessive amount of laser turrets). It can happen the lasers are not enough to handle a larger amount of them in time. Add flamethrower turrets, and you need just one line of laser turrets, and just spaced with a 2 tile gap. And since you always need some detector turrets for energy control, the amount of switched off lasers decreases even more and the need for energy control as well. You need just one single oil well for a whole giant megabase defensive wall around everything including the mines.
So I rebuilt it again without including any energy control.
I admit I just play with vanilla default settings for enemies. Since I don't really have fun with enemies in a factory builder, I will certainly never increase enemy difficulty.
1): energy spikes don't matter when you have accumulators--its literally the whole point to them that they handle them. and you don't need that many (no more then you with always-on certainly).
2): complexity doesn't matter once you have the blue-print setup; (what failure modes did you encounter anyway? I feel like you'd briefly mention at least one if they were actually overly complex in some un-mitigatable way... but maybe not?...this is exactly the thread to discuss what issues were found while exploring this idea....)
3): handling the ultra-late-game, where the waves are actually reaching the upper limit of what they ever reach, slightly less well also doesn't count for much---by that point in the game, *EVERY* (conventional) problem is trivialized by "just throw down more <insert requirement> down" except UPS-concerns and we are not (just) talking about the problem space for mega-bases (their almost *DEFINED* by UPS-optimization concerns in my opinion).
4): What about deathworld runs then? pretty sure you will need more then 1 row of lasers and flamer in the late game then---and in the early game you need the resources that your casually supposing can be thrown away for the powering of this. Theres a point to be mad that lasers aren't very viable till later on--not right as you unlock them; and nuclear power+flamers+lasers is roughly the point deathworlds stop being particularly challanging....but I can easily see someone want to try to make lasers work anyway.
5): even a 1-row using flamer turrets still would cut the passive drain by...(looks at the example pictures) roughly a ratio of 13-to-1? thats hundreds of solar panels worth of drain saved even for a modest base; easily into the thousands by the time your get to post-rocket.
edit:
lets just go into the numbers so we don't have to argue over whether or not its actually worth it based off just intuition.
its a touch under 2 turrets per panel and 21 accumulators for 25 panels for powering the drain; so for 12 turrets in a row (since one has to be left active for a row of 13 (example pictures before) that's 6 panels and a touch over 5 accumulators.
Next, we have to pay for one accumulator in this print, (it's still helping to power the wall and we are actually over 5 accumulators); but lets just round down and say we are saving 6 panels and 4 accumulators.
so 6 panels and 4 accumulator---even with conservative rounding in your favor with your scenario. that works out to 20 batt, 90 green-c, 30 copper-p, 30 steel and 8 iron....its worth noting that this is enough to pay for about 3-4 turrets....that's ~~ 1/3 of your row
This is *not* nothing if your actually resource-constrained or time-constrained in how fast your factory can convert resources into parts for your wall; especially since its pretty plausible that the first thing you do after unlocking/setting up batt/solar/accum/lasers is putting up walls reliant on these and so your going to be putting these all down as your factory can make them--which means your bottleneck will be on your production of exactly these things.
(I'd even point out that since flamers on their own are useless, you probably would want to start with the lasers first---so fastest-time-to-complete-wall is likely a function of your production time of turrets+power-for-them.)
....
Now; you could easily change the numbers around by using steam instead of SP/accum (or nuclear); but I think my point still stands:
between the walls, poles, flamer turrets, pipes, etc, being unaffected either way; I think its reasonable to LOWBALL this as being 10-20% cheaper walls in addition to a lot of saved space, time spent expanding power, factory time for the parts for the wall, etc.
....and thats with OP-flamers, no re-balancing mods, no endgame+ enemies to necessitate multi-row lasers (even with flamers), and on (I assume) roughly vanilla world-settings, where your not constrained in how much resources/space you have to spend on your defenses or power-production; and probably not really time-pressured.
