Can someone give me an example of appropriate turreting?

[mindloss]

I'm sure it depends on the situation, but in general, what's a reasonable number/type of turrets to have as your day-to-day defense? I was just reading another forum post discussing how if you don't have some kind of intrinsic defense, you tend to die accidentally sooner or later... a lot.

But I've played 10-15 games now, and still don't have much of a handle on turrets. I know tricks like force fields and gravity/tractor turrets for incoming waves, but I don't know if the rest of the time I'm supposed to have two sniper turrets, or twenty sniper turrets, or half a dozen MRS turrets and a few lasers... you get the idea. Any advice is appreciated.

[Cyborg]

a couple things:

1) It really does depend. The enemy AI will use a specific combination of ships. Whether or not they are spire campaign also matters. You need to choose the appropriate turret.
2) I often moved my turrets outwards as my territory expands, and I typically have the 50%-maximum of all turret types that I have unlocked, however, most of them are powered down. This is because you are often paying for powering turrets that are not being used. This is especially true of snipers, which are quite expensive. This is about efficiency, although I'm sure someone else will tell you it's not necessary.
3) You are looking for a recipe to answer a procedurally generated game. You're doing it wrong.

Enjoy!

[x4000]

Yep, everything that Cyborg said is pretty well true for me as well -- though I rarely power down my turrets.

Typically what I do to start out with is place a ball of about 5 basic turrets near each wormhole on my home planet, and near my command station, just as preventative measures.  I also tend to put 15-20 sniper or spider turrets somewhere on that planet, and as time passes I'll layer in some missile and laser and flak turrets at a rate of about 5 per wormhole and the command station, too.  That gives me pretty broad coverage on each ingress point and my command station, so that casual invaders get stomped fast and bigger stuff like raid starships at least takes some ongoing damage as well as causing the "you shot me" alarm instantly when it fires back at my turrets.

That's just kind of my opening move with the turrets, from the first couple of hours of the game, and I tend to do that vaguely the same way each time.  But aside from that, all the specifics of where I go from there really vary heavily.  Like Cyborg, usually I try to keep the most turrets on sort of the front lines, or at least on the bottleneck leading into my group of planets if I have such a bottleneck yet.  But I also try to leave some turrets on my inner planets to provide some defense in depth, as well as occasionally some turrets along travel paths between wormholes to add even more to that if the AI is being particularly slippery that game.


Generally speaking, think of turrets like any other ships, except that the turrets are stronger, longer-ranged, but immobile.  You want them hammering from a distance on any wormhole ingress into your territory, as they can vastly speed up your rate of victory in a battle or even turn the tide.  But if you rely on them alone, and AI ships move out of their range on the planet, then you're helpless.  So that's where a group of ships in FRD is always needed to help out with that.

[keith.lamothe]

I don't have a prescription for the full list of turrets, but all "edge" wormholes that AI ships could come in through (or warp in from) get tractor turrets.  And tachyon coverage, if the AI is using cloaking ships.  All wormholes leading from an "edge" planet that I own deeper into my territory get a forcefield generator (and I usually place the command station under that field too) to forcibly prevent entry unless the AI ship is immune to forcefields.  That tends to add enough "speed bump" effect that I can have a moment to regroup and send in another counterattack if I'm in a rolling-defense situation, and also serves as a safety net if I just don't notice something attacking.  If I have a chokepoint world (or my homeworld if I really can't keep them from coming in from multiple directions) I've been known to put my entire sniper turret and spider turret caps there (I will sometimes low-power those), arranged in a ring around the system (picked that one up from a player).

[NickAragua]

As a frame of reference, whenever I place turrets, I use ctrl-shift-clicks (meaning: groups of five, repeated).

Before anything else: I generally play on difficulty 7. Sometimes, my turrets stop waves. Sometimes they don't. Usually, I need to bring in fleet ships for backup anyway. However, the setup I'll outline generally puts a stop to random small-scale AI incursions that occur between waves or as a result of my raid starships decimating guard posts on nearby worlds.

There are two types of turret setups in my mind - "casual" and "wave defense". The casual setup is meant to blow up the occasional AI stragglers that wander into that system (it'll happen occasionally, regardless of how badly you don't want it to). Put down some sniper turrets for really small groups, and maybe some missile turrets for medium sized groups.

With wave defense, it's all about repeated evaluation. Start with a blob of 25 of each turret. Missile Turrets to do damage, Basic/Laser/MLRS to take fire (they don't seem to do nearly as much damage as missile turrets but they do absorb fire), Sniper Turrets to shoot down long-range jerks. I've also had positive experiences with Heavy Beam turrets and heartily recommend a few of them for wave defense if you can spare the knowledge. As Keith said, put tractor turrets around the hostile wormhole, I recommend enough to capture half an average wave. If the bad guys have lots of Neinzul ships, plop down a bunch of flak turrets too. I occasionally bring in starships (light, maybe flag+) to power up my turrets as well. If you've got the resources, plop down some minefields around the wormhole, and maybe some lightning turrets next to your tractors.

Once you've set up, see if your setup stops a wave. If it doesn't and you have to bring your fleet in, double up on everything and re-evaluate.

Always keep a pair of remains rebuilders on hand to quickly rebuild lost turrets, and possibly a pair of mark 1 engineers, too.

Consider using a logistics command station to slow the bad guys down so your turrets can get more pot shots in, or a military station to translocate them around the system. The best defensive position I ever had in this game was next to a gravity drill with the hostile wormholes on the other side of the system. The AI would lose probably 50-75% of a wave getting across the system, only to be translocated as soon as they got close. And then the mining golem showed up. I couldn't get to it fast enough because of the gravity drill, and then I got so pissed off that I abandoned that game. I'll miss that planet.

You will also want to place specialized turrets in response to the type of ships the AI deploys. Ships that are immune to forcefields and/or tractors? Put down gravity turrets. Snipers? Anti-sniper turrets. Missile ships? Anti-missile turrets. Astro Trains or anything else that fires dark matter shots? Anti-dark matter turrets.

[Fleet]

This thread needs pictures. Also post difficulty and AIP.

I find myself changing between different turret placements. Sometimes all located at the hostile wormholes, and sometimes completely decentralized along a path between the wormhole and my command station. I usually build equal numbers of basic/mlrs/laser/missle.

[zebramatt]

Lines of gravity turrets are good.

[Ranakastrasz]

Lines of gravity turrets are good.

I actually never thought to do that until a while ago when I saw a image where someone covered the line to their command stations/wormholes with them. Its quite evil, due to the simplistic path-finding.

[Echo35]

Build turrets until everything is dead

But seriously, I usually pack 5-10 Tractor Turrets (Mark level depends on how far in the game I am, as their strength increases significantly), clusters of 10-30 mid range stuff (Normal turrets and MRLS turrets) and clusters of 5-10 long range stuff (Laser turrets and missile turrets).

[SNAFU]

I've only recently started experimenting with setting up beachheads (i.e. mobile builders, FFs, turrets, etc.) on all AI worlds adjacent to my own and I must say the results have been so impressive I don't think I can go back to simply turtling my side of Wormholes anymore, the pros so outweigh the cons. Basically 5-20 of every turret type (normal ship cap, and you could probably exclude flak turrets) can take out incredible amounts of ships over their lifetime if placed next to a WH to one of your systems.

My theory (such as it is ) is that waves by their lonesome aren't particularly dangerous; a bunch of a homogenous fleet ship type plus a starship or two and possibly support (depending on the AI). Set up some hard counter turrets/fleet ships and you're golden. Nevermind that you can gate raid and make sure there is only one possible ingress for waves at all.

But what *IS* a problem for me (and I'm gonna wager alot of other players) is not just the wave, but the threat ships camping the other side of the WH, the serendipitous CPA or Exo-wave, all of which appear almost simultaneously with the wave. 500 Mk II fighters is just an annoyance. 500 Mk II fighters plus another 300+ mixed threat ships that were camping the other side of the WH is dangerous. Add in the possibly THOUSANDS of ships of every kind released from a CPA and it's a train wreck. God help you if they throw in an Exo-wave, with its couple dozen of Mk V ships and lightning fast speed boost from the lead ship!

Fortunately, something all 3 of these 'extra' events have in common is that they all travel from different locations inside AI territory, tend to string themselves along across multiple systems until they reach the one adjacent to your border worlds, form up on their side of the wormhole and then go through as a single cohesive group. By setting up turrets on the other side, CPA and 'freed' (threat) ships can be defeated in detail as they try to move to their side of the WH; they'll just congo line into your turrets' field of fire.

One way to look at it is that 100 fighters together will beat a missile turret, but a missile turret will beat 100 fighters if they approach one at a time.

[Martyn van Buren]

How do you locate beachheads?  I've never got the hang of them; it seems like there are always too many hostile worlds on my border.  I tend to play on realistic maps, so my bottleneck worlds usually have three-five hostile wormholes leading in.  I don't reckon you can set up and maintain beachheads on the 20+ hostile border worlds this leads to if you have a few fronts, so I tend to avoid them unless I find that one world tends to be the main conduit for attacks.

[TechSY730]

How do you locate beachheads?  I've never got the hang of them; it seems like there are always too many hostile worlds on my border.  I tend to play on realistic maps, so my bottleneck worlds usually have three-five hostile wormholes leading in.  I don't reckon you can set up and maintain beachheads on the 20+ hostile border worlds this leads to if you have a few fronts, so I tend to avoid them unless I find that one world tends to be the main conduit for attacks.

On some maps, a true beach head may be impractical or even impossible. However, you can set up a "psuedo-beachead" by destroying all AI warp gates adjacent to your planets except for one adjacent to your beachhead. This way, all standard waves will come in only one place. With some more sophisticated "deep" warp gate killing, you can even make it more likely that exo-waves will come in through your beachhead.

That only really leaves freed ships, hybrid hives, and cross planet attacks, but those are the exception, not the rule

[Ktoff]

Lines of gravity turrets are good.

I actually never thought to do that until a while ago when I saw a image where someone covered the line to their command stations/wormholes with them. Its quite evil, due to the simplistic path-finding.

Wouldn't this be something nice for the more difficult AIs? A pathfinding taking into account time to get to a point (avoiding grav turrets) and while we're at it, maybe also avoiding turrets that are far away from but in the way to a target. (X is the target, O is the turret, ^is the attacking ship) with maybe some weighing of additional time vs. expected damage....

X
.\
...\
.....\
O...¦
...../
.../
./
^

[Martyn van Buren]

That is a really lovely ASCII diagram.  Kudos.

[superking]

I place a blob consisting almost all my missile turrets in the middle of whichever system is receiving waves, since they can reach anywhere in system. usually with a FF in the middle, switched off, that I can switch on if the rest of the system falls to pieces, and 20-30 MRLS turrets. Large numbers of  bombers are the biggest threat, and missile turrets are the natural counter- they can also function against various starships.

I scatter spider turrets around my systems in very small numbers (5?) and sniper turrets in small numbers (10?)

I throw tractors & flak close to offensive wormholes, which is often good for clearing out fighters. then I roll in with bombers to remove the cruisers.

I dont make basic turrets until I have more energy than I need