At the end of my last play session I had my To Do list (in no particular order), including a handful of things I wanted to prioritize assembly of:
However, after further review, I'm in serious trouble:
After setting up multiple sources of significant pollution (the initial smelting in my starter peninsula, a large steam power array, and a very large smelting array at the left end of my bus), well I've got pollution hitting a lot of biter bases. My primary issue right now stems from three separate base locations: A (which is really three bases of its own), B, and C, who're conspiring to hammer me on two separate ends of the wall on the peninsula I landfilled over to as I took ores over to the bus smelting array. Attacks aren't quite constant, but they're nearly so (you can see a big incoming biter mess next to the upper-right attack vector arrow). Next up on the concern-o-meter are the sometimes attacks generated by base locations D and E to the lower-right corner of my base. This issue is that I set up turrets here with only a small amount of yellow ammo (well under 50 units per turret) and I can see my wall is already taking damage. Future issues are identified in bases I (which will join with D & E, shortly) and especially F, G, and H which will conspire to attack a new wall section above my bus smelting array.
Maybe I shouldn't have dialed back trees as much as I did? (I definitely shouldn't have dialed back trees as much as I did.)
My first To Do entry is to "take it to" the biters at area A, but any resources I expend in that process are just going to go into the ether. I've got enemy expansion on, and even if I clear out that area, it's only a temporary solution. I've only currently got two red ammo assembly machines in my starter area, and it's not actually clear to me where my next source of iron is coming from. I don't want to just dump starter iron into boatloads of ammo to only give myself a temporary reprieve.
That sort of addresses my bottom-most To Do entry (set up an ammo generating facility on the bus along with some turrets {which I've only been hand-crafting, but that's been fine}). I would be able to hold off the hordes at those two wall segments if I generated boatloads of ammo and belted them to the two separate wall sections getting hammered, but I fear in so doing I'd burn through the majority of my starting iron (yellow ammo is iron-only, red ammo uses lots of yellow ammo, along with copper and steel as its components).
As I type my way through my thought-process I'm settling on trying to mitigate my pollution spread. My pollution source nearest enemy areas A, B, and C is my steam power setup (currently a 1-10-20 set up of offshore pump, steam boilers, and steam engines) and I think I can dial that back meaningfully (at least until I get the bus going). I've got four lines of ores going into my bus smelters (for iron plates, steel, copper, and stone bricks), but the only thing currently attached to the bus is my belts/splitters/underground belts logistics array which is currently overproducing those items in anticipation of me expanding the bus assembly process.
I think I can wean power generation and limit the ores getting sent over to the smelting array in the hopes of dialing back pollution. In the mean time I need to beef up my lower-right wall with significant red ammo, and set up an automated red ammo-distribution to the two wall segments in question.
Looking back on things, my errors would seem to be setting up too much power generation too early and also setting up such a significant smelting array before it was actually necessary.
Hopefully I won't need to revert back to an earlier save to get myself out of this mess, but that's the ultra fall-back plan if it comes to it.
