Ultimate Guide for New Players
By Dicerson.
What Is a Base and to Whom Does It Belong?
In Starship Troopers: Extermination one of the most critical facets is the building of a base. Three of the 4 mission types involve, whether temporarily or as the entire mission, defending a critical structure from hordes of oncoming bugs. This structure is an ARC (or the Mobile HQ in Horde mode), a big yellow… beacon that the bugs really really hate.
So much so that if given the choice between the ARC and a nearby trooper, they will almost always prioritize the ARC. Perhaps it’s a giant Bug-Whistle? If this all-important structure is destroyed, the mission ends- any surviving troopers will be given a new objective of escaping to the dropship, and regardless of how many make it out the entire mission is considered a failure.
So, you gotta defend it trooper! And as brave and courageous as it is to stand your two feet and face the bug hordes head on, it’s also stupid and not very effective. Even Guardians can only take so much punishment! And the strategy that works best is the best strategy. So high command has given us the ability to build Structures!
Every map has “build zones”, which can be seen marked by a grid of green squares whenever the build tool is in your hands (“B” by default on Keyboards). Left clicking builds/repairs a structure, right clicking unbuilds it. Every structure has a cost in Ore, and deconstructing a structure refunds a portion of that Ore unless that structure has not yet been “used”, in which case it gives back all Ore spent on it. For most structures, this means receiving damage- but for “offensive” structures they also stop giving full refund once their offensive capability is in any way utilized.
Any Trooper can build structures, but all Troopers share the same pool of Ore- making it critically important that Troopers communicate to decide what things the Team’s Ore is spent on. Most often, this means designating a “dedicated” builder who gets the first and final say on what structures are built. Though most often in public matches, you’ll end up with several people spending Ore on their own little side projects- which can often end in disaster if any of them are a bit too liberal in their arts.
Keep in mind that, outside of bugs/exploits, structures cannot collide with one another except at the “corners” of the larger squares in a given build grid. The only exception are the “tower” structures that sit on a thin pole, and “small” structures that can be built on top of the larger and flat structures- both of which can be placed more “granularly” at the spots between grid corners and edges, or even in the middle of a grid square (unlike larger structures, which always build either along the edge of the larger squares or directly in the middle of them)
Although this isn’t a Class guide, it is important here to mention the Engineer. Engineers are special in that they are better at building (and more importantly, maintaining) a base than the other classes. Their build tool has “reach” that allows them to repair or deconstruct from a significant distance, and they have a number of powerful tools that can dramatically boost their repair speeds or enable them to buff structures with additional health or enhanced damage.
They also have a small selection of “small” structures that they can build outside of build zones using a separate pool of “free” ore, and which have independent count limits not shared by the “main” base. A good engineer can not only build a base in extremely short order, but also strengthen it dramatically and keep it alive through even the heaviest bug assaults. If you want to be a base builder, Engineer is the class for you!
There are a number of useful (and not so useful) structures in the game, each with unique characteristics and purpose. This first portion of the guide will go over each structure individually, describing what it is, what it does, and how best to place it. General strategies involving combinations of structures or overarching designs will be in the section after!
Ammo Crates / Pallets
Ignore the boxes which are clearly identical to the ones on the ammo pallet- they’re totally different!
This first entry describes two structures- the Ammo Crate, and the Ammo Pallet. The Crate is a thin trapezoidal prism (read: box, it’s a box) that carries 10 “resupplies” which will fully restock all of a trooper’s resources. Primarily ammo and use-limited utilities (including most notably the Engineer’s Ammo Fabricator, allowing engineers to turn a single ammo crate into potentially 150 ammo-only resupplies! If all you need is ammo, use an engineer’s fabricator first!).
They are very small, and so can be placed in very tight locations- sharing grids with larger structures or even being on top of walls and bunkers. Be careful though, an Ammo Crate on top of a structure is destroyed along with that structure- the best place for an Ammo Crate is almost always the ground, preferably at the foot of a ramp wall or a tower ladder. Crates only cost 100 Ore, but there’s a hard limit of 4 crates that can exist at once and once placed they cannot be deconstructed! Don’t place them willy nilly, or your team may have to destroy the crate and waste 100 Ore just to move it somewhere better or unblock a prospective structure.
Ammo Pallets are like Ammo Crates, except larger and carrying 15 ‘boxes’ of high caliber munitions used exclusively by automated sentries and HMG emplacements. They’re also 5 times as expensive at a whopping 500 Ore, youch! Much like ammo crates, they are fragile and blow up easily- try to place them somewhere safe but also near their intended recipients so someone ferrying ammo doesn’t have to call a taxi! Walls that are unlikely to get attacked, or the ground, are ideal locations for Ammo Pallets. If an Ammo Pallets ammo is meant for an Automated sentry, you can often place the pallet on the ground right next to the sentry’s pole- and if there’s a bunker on that grid, it becomes essentially the only time where being inside of a bunker isn’t actively detrimental to the health of your team’s ARC.
Keep in mind that these Pallets are also limited to 4 at most, as are Automated Sentries and HMG emplacements- meaning that if you build too many turrets, you’ll never have enough ammo to go around. Lastly, Ammo Pallets are unique in that their boxes are persistent- you can pick up a box, and drop it somewhere else. The small boxes are indestructible, and once they stop physics-ing their way to the lowest position they can, they “lock” in place unless the ground they’re on is destroyed or something explodes near them. Meaning a great way to preserve Pallet ammo is to take the boxes and push them somewhere else. You can even build a new pallet once the existing one is “expended” this way, effectively allowing a far larger amount of Pallet ammo to exist at once!
Short Walls
There is no glory here.
Short walls are very, very small walls with no walkways or anything special. They’re basically the equivalent of mom rolling out a sheet of saran wrap and cutting a hole in it then sticking it on the fridge. They block pathing, but are so incredibly fragile that even drones can destroy them without too much time investment. The hole is also situated too low to shoot through when standing, and too high to shoot through when crouching unless standing right at the edge- well within stabbing range of warriors and drones.
Their only true use is as Grenadier-nip, place a gaggle of short walls in the corner of a build zone next to a tall piece of indestructible terrain and grenadiers will inexplicably target them; and fail to kill them due to the terrain blocking, taking massive pressure off the rest of the team. Like most small structures, once destroyed a short wall cannot be rebuilt; and they cost far too much Ore to be spamming out willy nilly! Its never really worth it to unironically use short walls inside of a build zone, they cost too much, do too little, and are a bit awkward to place due to their very strange build boxes and “unique” form of grid snapping.
Walls
Walled! Walled! Walled! MY EEEYYYYYYYEEES!
Ahhh, walls. Good ‘ol walls. Made fresh out of a thin layer of tinfoil and carbon reinforcement (read: burnt popsicle sticks). With all of the durability of a wet tissue paper, and the ergonomics of a Tesla cybertruck. Walls are Satan’s way of telling us he still cares. Walls are a large structure that must be built on the edges of the large grid squares. They have two sides, a very mildly sloped “outside” and a concave “inside” with a narrow walkway for troopers to travel along. The inside of a wall is always faced towards the inside of the grid square they’re built on, so keep that in mind when placing them so you don’t accidentally create a jumping puzzle in the middle of a base or trap newly spawned troopers next to the mobile HQ.
The main use of a wall is to serve as a pathing blocker for the bugs, creating a raised partition that Troopers can travel along or stand on as they rain death upon the Arachnid menace. However, troopers, keep in mind that walls are extremely weak and if the one you’re standing on is destroyed by the bugs you’ll end up falling directly into their eagerly waiting jaws.
They are not good places to stand when defending a base for that reason, if you have access to safer firing positions such as the tops of bunkers which have no guard rails, towers with their hanging rails and holes in the floor, or indestructible terrain objects- use those instead. Even a large gate is preferable thanks to their greater durability.
Furthermore, walls have a sort of “guard rail” on them that harms us more than helps us. Due to it, aiming down at bugs attacking the wall is a hassle- only the middle portion of the wall where the rail is lowered is viable as a firing position for bugs that are very close, and the rails also make it tougher to aim at close positions to the left and right of the wall.
Troopers defending from walls very often have to move about, constantly jockeying for a better firing angle- only for the wall to give out underneath them and drop them into the maw of death. Make sure that if you build a wall, it’s not at a point of high Arachnid traffic- or else you’ll spend half the mission rebuilding it over and over again!
Ramp Walls
Ramp up the wall, Ramp it up, While your boots are stamping, And the wall is ramping.
Much like their unramped cousin, Ramp Walls are made out of recycled coke cans and bubblegum scraped straight from the sidewalks of New York. Unlike normal walls, however, the Ramp Wall provides a vital utility function- the ramp! Making it quick and easy for any trooper to get up onto an existing set of defensive structures- especially bunkers. The difference between walking up a ramp to the top of a bunker or set of walls and having to spend several seconds vaulting twice up onto a bunker is night and day and critical to maintaining an efficient defensive formation for your entire team.
Make sure you have good ramps in good spots! Do keep in mind that they are still a wall, and will block movement in all directions except up the ramp- for compact bases, be very careful how you place them. If you place them like a normal wall, that works somewhat- they do still suffer all the same pitfalls as the regular Wall. Low hp, terrible guard rails and thus terrible firing angles.
Gates
Say hello to the brothers, Smalls and Biggie Gates.
Gates are defensive structures that can be opened with the push of a button. Small gates are less durable than normal walls, but Large gates are significantly more durable- second only to Bunkers.
Don’t press the button. Gates open slowly, and while open bugs can and will pour through them like taco bell through- well, you get it. It is marginally faster to get into a base through a gate than it is by vaulting up a wall or bunker (you can vault up walls! First onto the distended portion of the slope, and then onto the lowered middle partition), but most people were raised by cavemen and refuse to close the gate behind them; making gates a huge defensive liability if not properly managed.
However, gates have a critical functionality granted to them as of the 0.8.0 Carnage update in that bugs aggro to them very strongly; but this guide will cover that application in a later section detailing the overarching strategy.
As of the writing of this guide, Large Gates are glitched and do not actually block bug pathing when there are a large number of bugs (as if they’re “pushing” themselves through the gate).
Bunkers
Focused. In his lane. At peace with himself. The Biggest Chungus.
Ahhh, bunkers. Unlike walls, bunkers are actually useful!
For precisely none of the reasons that bunkers are normally useful for! As it turns out, the inside of the “Bunker” is a death trap that also heavily restricts your firing angles and effectively makes fighting out of it suicidal. During laggy moments, inferno bugs can shoot straight through their roofs. Bombardiers and Grenadiers often end up killing people in the bunker when they have significant numbers, and Tigers have legs for days and can quite literally reach in and kill anyone inside of a bunker as if it wasn’t even there.
Even for normal bugs, Drones at the edge of bunkers are practically untouchable from the inside and Warriors’ weakspots are just a tad too low and partially occluded by bunkers’ overly high internal lip (especially when they’re in the middle of their bouncy attack animation). “Some” weapons (read: one weapon, the Flamethrower) are actually unusable from inside of a bunker, even when standing at the very edge- as for some reason the physics of the “flame” part of the flamethrower often decides that rolling over an inch of metal lip is about as difficult as climbing Mt. Everest and that the entire top half of the bug isn’t good enough to collide with.
No, what makes bunkers useful is their roofs! The bunkers are squat, and have no guard rails. Their sides are somewhat heavily sloped, allowing troopers to easily vault up (if a bit slowly) from any angle and to easily shoot down at any and all bugs around the bunker with minimal need to move or shimmy around. Due to their square shape, they provide 360 degrees of open, unobstructed firing angle allowing troopers on a bunker to defend damned near anything nearby as long as there aren’t any other LoS blockers in the field of play.
Even more, bunkers are the tankiest of all structures and though far from indestructible, are far less likely to suddenly pop like a water balloon in a field of cacti; it’s often obvious when a bunker is about to go down, giving troopers time to fall back and find safer positions or time for an engineer to work their magic and repair it between bug swipes or a demolisher to drop a nuke and clear the field. Troopers on a bunker can stand at its edge if they need to to shoot bugs hitting the bunker, and if a Tiger comes along troopers can back off to the opposite side of the bunker without compromising their firing angle on the Tiger (though they won’t have its weakspot unfortunately; still better than being stabbed from inside the bunker!).
There was a time when base design centered entirely on bunkers as anchor points from which all 16 troopers on a team would fight; but with the 0.8.0 update, Bunkers are susceptible to Tigers who need only a single bug corpse of any size (including drones!) to gain the ability to simply walk onto the bunker and leg sweep the entire squad.
And small structures placed on top of them also blow up along with the bunker, making them nigh unusable as platforms for turrets or safespots for ammo. They are still very useful as durable pathing blockers for small bugs, or as a way to protect the ladders of the now far more useful Towers, but their days as the centerpoint of every good base design are over.
Towers
They’re actually taller than this, but I’m standing on my tippy toes.
Towers are an extremely useful defensive structure. A small platform situated on a tall, thin pole with “open” guard rails you can shoot through (except for the closed corner portions) and holes in the platform that allow you to shoot almost directly downwards underneath the tower. This combined with their height advantage makes them, currently, the best firing platform in the game. Their only drawbacks are their small health pools, and that the only way onto them is an awkward and finicky ladder that is very easy to fall off of if you aren’t very careful.
They also are fairly small, so not many troopers can use the same tower at once- and that hole in the floor that you can shoot through is also large enough to fall through. Despite all this, due to the way bugs path and aggro, Towers are the safest structure to be on and will usually be last to die or close to it. Furthermore, since they are buildable at the edges of grid squares, the small square shape of the platform juts out slightly from whatever wall or bunker it’s built on, enabling those on the tower to have defilade firing angles on that wall or bunker.
HMGs can also be built on towers- although the “hard” parts of the platform do block its firing angles. In some cases, it’s possible to build the HMG on the railing of the tower itself- giving it a nearly perfect overview of all 360 degrees of area around it (excepting only directly beneath the tower). The only downside to an HMG on a tower is that ammo cannot be placed on the tower platform, necessitating an ammo ferry from the ground next to the bottom of the ladder.
Floodlights
Perfect for ominous bus stops, football fields, and military installations
A lesser known structure, floodlights are just tall poles that- as the name suggests- flood a wide area in front of them with light (depending on your settings, the light may or may not clip through structures- its recommended to have lighting settings on the weaker side for maximum benefit).
Although the “Afraid of the Dark” mission modifier is not currently available, there are still some missions that happen “at night” on Agni Prime- resulting in fairly dark environments that the flood light can help keep lit. Do note that if a flood light is so much as scratched, it automatically turns off and needs to be repaired then switched back on- so place them in safe spots!
Automated Sentry
Don’t worry about the flames, it’s got a very good cooling system.
The Automated Sentry turret is a tall pole structure that can store up to 300 rounds of high caliber munitions, as the name suggests they are automatic and need only an ammo ferry to keep them supplied. Due to their high placement, they often provide extremely effective covering fire in a wide area around them. They are a bit daft, though, and don’t know that their bullets cannot phase through structures and will often end up wasting ammunition on bugs partially clipped into terrain or other structures.
But, if placed well to mitigate this risk and consistently supplied, a single automated turret can take a massive amount of pressure off a specific area by cleaning up small bugs or contributing to kills on tigers. A single, dedicated trooper can feed all 4 automated sentries at once if they so desire by placing all of them around the same bunker, and placing multiple ammo pallets inside that bunker- enabling one trooper to effectively output the damage of 4 or 5.
HMG Emplacement
The HMG emplacement, similar to the Automated Sentry, is a high caliber turret. However, it is not automated and requires a trooper to actively use the turret. The reward is that the turret has far higher raw damage output and if used well can kill ridiculous numbers of bugs or easily clean up tigers, infernos, gunners, and grenadiers. But while the trooper using the turret can get off of it to feed it ammo, it is most efficient to have a second trooper nearby to feed ammo as necessary- using the time between boxes to fire their own weapon or use their own tools otherwise (or ferry ammo to multiple other turrets). Also unlike the Automated turret, the HMG is not on a pole and can be placed on top of other structures- including the guard rails of walls and towers.
Do note however that if an HMG is destroyed, it cannot be freely rebuilt- and they cost a whopping 2000 Ore! Remember, Walls are made of old poker cards and fold easier than laundry. Don’t put HMGs on walls! Do put them on Towers! Also note that HMGs have a “minimum” downwards firing angle, meaning that they can only aim down so far and so often cannot cover the structure they are placed on. Bunkers in fact being the only exception, a well placed turret can aim down just far enough to shoot bugs hitting a bunker it’s on; but be careful when putting HMGs on bunkers.
Tigers can and will catch the turret itself in their sweep, along with any of its nearby ammo pallets. You can make an HMG on a tower that covers a nearby bunker by putting the tower on the “back” corner of the bunker- from the railing of that tower, an HMG can aim down far enough to hit bugs on the “front” side of the bunker. But not walls- poor, poor walls.
Shock Fence
Example of a shock fence being used for its ideal purpose- humane bug containment.
The Shock Fence is an expensive, but very powerful defensive structure. Placed similarly to walls, but consisting of an open metal frame that can be shot through (by normal guns- remember, fire is magnetic and is repelled by the gaps in a chain link fence! So sayeth the government; unless of course you phase your flamethrower through an adjacent dimension and stick the barrel directly through it!), they project a massive area of electric shock in front of them, and a smaller area to the sides and behind them.
Placed well, a shock fence can stun several bugs and dramatically slow their advance- buying time for turrets and troopers both to clean the bugs up before they have a chance to chew on the walls. However, they are fragile, cost 4000 Ore, and don’t do much besides- and so are often one of the last things a base will build with excess ore.
Based? On What?
Now amply armed with the nectar of knowledge, we descend into the depths of the harrowing hell that is base building.
When designing a base, the single most important factor to consider is Line of Sight. Our biggest advantage over the bug hordes, indeed our single only true tool and weapon, are guns. Guns, unfortunately, that cannot bore through structures or terrain. If you cannot see the Bug, you cannot shoot the Bug. Therefore, dense base designs with ridiculous numbers of walls placed haphazardly all over the grid are not just weak- but actively detrimental to the entire team.
They provide the Bugs more cover than us, and hamper our movement far more severely; a bug can simply chew through the cardboard that walls are often made of, we must go over or around them (or waste ore by deconstructing them). It is therefore critical for any and all base designs to ensure that every angle of approach is covered by defilade firing positions- what is a defilade firing position? Essentially, it’s any position which “covers” another. For example, if one trooper is standing at a spot, and you are positioned such that you can shoot at and around that spot (including to that trooper’s sides/behind) then you are “in defilade”. It’s much easier to think of it as being able to shoot backwards towards an ally, thus covering them from any bugs chewing on their ankles.
Examples of Defilade positioning in Starship troopers includes: Troopers positioned on indestructible terrain outside of a build zone- building walls that position can cover is fairly safe, assuming you know your team plans to make heavy use of that position; Bunkers placed “jutting out” from the walls or gates besides them, such that a trooper standing on the bunker has 270 degrees of open LoS to fire within- including the exposed “fronts” of the walls and gates built next to that bunker; Towers built on the edge of a wall or bunker give any trooper standing on them a narrow- but usable- defilade firing angle on the wall or bunker the tower is built on the edge of.
If you want to know just how critically important Defilade firing is, google what a military “Star Fort” is- and you’ll see very clearly what that looks like.
Example of a bunker placed in Defilade with a set of adjacent walls
Unfortunately, we can’t build star forts in ST:E as we are restricted to a square building grid and plastic cutting boards loosely taped together.
Another critical thing to create when designing a base are “Killboxes”- in essence these are specific points that are designed to draw in large numbers of bugs so that they can be quickly and efficiently killed without much hassle; the one true love of any user of AoE weaponry such as demolishers and flamethrowers.
The most basic kind of killbox is essentially the above example of a Defilade bunker, but with a second bunker- or a wall- on the other side with something in the middle to draw them. This could be a ramp wall that gives them an active path up the bunker (not recommended), a demolisher’s Lure, or a small gate providing them a “path” to the inside of the base.
Furthermore, with the arrival of the 0.8.0 Carnage update, a factor never before seen in FPS games adds a new layer to the design considerations.
Bug Corpses. When Bugs die, their corpse stays behind- a corpse that other bugs can walk on top of. If enough bugs die in a spot, a natural ramp is formed that allows future bugs to walk directly over whatever fortification was once there.
While it is easy enough to clear out corpses between waves, during particularly dense hordes only an Engineer with a Flamethrower or a very dedicated Demolisher can hope to keep the bugs from inevitably ramping over your base’s walls and bunkers. However, in some ways, this can be a boon instead- the bugs can’t destroy their own corpses. And so comes the first of two potent overarching base designs
The Ogre- er, Onion
Overhead and in-game Example of an optimal, 2 layer Onion
Dark Red are gates, the large gray squares are bunkers, gray lines are walls/ramp walls, the small black-outlines squares are towers placed to block tiger climbing. The big yellow circle is the ARC. There are only 3 buildzones in the game that can fit an “optimal” Onion, but it’s no less effective when its proportions are slightly adjusted and specific positions moved to account for terrain! Each bunker and its gates creates 3 killboxes, 2 on the first ring and 1 on the second, and is protected from Tigers by the towers which themselves provide decent defilade on the entire outside of the Onion.
I’ve not used the 4 spare towers or Shock Fences in this design, but they can easily be added as needed to provide HMG locations or to make some killboxes harder for bugs to get through. First-ring gates not only make killboxes but protect internal ramp walls from bugs in the event of breaches along the wall. Gates in the second of course also make killboxes and provide paths to the Arcs protective walls, for emergency situations where you’re on the last line of defense.
The Onion base is a very simple design – Onions have Layers. Bases have layers. Bases are Onions. Unlike the honeycomb design, which creates lots of small pockets for troopers to get stuck in and walls to block internal base LoS, an Onion base is made up of “rings” of defensive structures. If the bugs manage to ramp over or breach the outer ring, they immediately enter a killbox on the inner ring which the troopers can fall back to if needed via a well placed gate which bugs cannot path over (unlike the walkways of walls and ramp walls).
This buys an incredible amount of time, and in most cases an Onion base will have only 2 actual rings as most build zones are too small to fit a third. Onion bases also typically place Bunkers inside the first ring, which gives those bunkers defilade on the second ring and thus turns the entire second ring of the Onion base into a giant killbox. Just make sure to place a tower on the front of the bunker within the first ring so Tigers don’t walk up onto it and proceed to violence all over your walls.
The buildzones which lend themselves very naturally to an Onion design are those of Agni Prime, which feature prominent hard terrain features that grant natural defilade on the first ring in addition to the bunkers on the second. Onion designs, however, are less useful if your team has a dedicated engineer or demolisher that is very good at keeping corpses clear- though in a way an Onion design could be considered one that does not need such a role filled to be effective, thus freeing up a trooper to focus more on killing than cleaning.
However, Onion bases have 2 major weaknesses- first is that they are often very large, requiring a significant amount of minimum space to even be buildable. There are some buildzones with awkward shapes, or where the Arc or MHQ spawns literally at the very edge of the zone, making an Onion design fundamentally impossible. Their large size also means that Troopers have to stay mobile in order to cover all of its angles, constantly running along its edges lest one side of the onion be neglected and compromised too early in a wave. The second weakness is that they are expensive, as they require a large number of walls and, often, bunkers and other defensive structures to create the internal killbox in the second ring.
The Maze
Overhead and in-game Example of an Optimal Maze
6 gates, 3 on each side, to maximize the surface area around which bugs are attracted to the gates. Double walled on the gateless sides to discourage direct pathing. Towers both externally and internally on the bunkers to provide tiger protection even in the outer killboxes. Lots of room for miscellaneous defenses, like turrets on the towers and shock fences on the killboxes. Empty space between bunkers on the gateless sides can be used for ramp walls and ammo boxes. Much like the Onion, this is an optimal design you’ll only very rarely get to build- most Mazes are gonna be a bit wonky.
The second of the two most effective base designs is relatively new, the Onion has been around since before 0.8.0- though it wasn’t particularly effective compared to the now obsolete bunkerfort designs- the Maze however works only thanks to changes to Bug pathing which came in the Carnage update. Bugs used to path “directly” to the ARC or a spotted trooper, slapping whatever structures got in their way. This meant that bases had to defend all angles effectively, with many a base falling to small packs of drones or warriors slowly chewing away at a neglected wall or unmanned bunker until a hole was created for other bugs to path into.
Now, however, bugs calculate a “path of least resistance”- using the corpses of their comrades and walkable angles like walkways, ramp walls, or bunker rooves, they will route themselves even along relatively windy paths to get to their target if it would be faster than just chewing through whatever structure is in front of them.
With one caveat- they ignore gates. For one reason or another, Bugs don’t consider gates to be a pathing blocker- and so when drawing their paths they will frequently attempt to walk ‘through’ gates around walls or bunkers to get up the ramp walls inside of a base, or to just get straight to an “exposed” ARC or Mobile HQ (which are often protected by a ring of gates). Naturally, when they then bump into the gate, they smack it. As a result, the Maze design was born.
The design is simple- use primarily otherwise weak walls to form a pathing blocker around the base. But replace just one of them on each side (preferably a max of two- one on one side and one on the opposite) that the bugs will flock to in droves. Then place a second gate immediately behind it, with the sides blocked by internal walls or bunkers- thus creating a potent killbox the bugs will cast themselves into like gollum into the fires of Mt. Doom.
Flamer Engineers love this design, as it lets them sit calmly in one spot and hold the trigger as legions of bugs run into the flames. You can amplify the effectiveness by extending the maze, placing more gates and running the bugs all along a long path on their journey to the Arc or a bunker’s Ramp wall.
However, the Bugs have a limit to how long they will tolerate a path to be. If your maze is too long- such as its entrance being on the opposite side of the base from the bug, or the maze being a long spiral around the ARC in the center, bugs will give up and start chewing on the walls instead- which will fall in short order and compromise the entire design. One must strike a careful balancing act, and make sure that the bugs are satisfied with the path they are taking.
Tigers are also a concern for the Maze design, as in addition to gates, Tigers ignore Bunker pathing as well- and will ram their heads face first into bunkers and walls adjacent to them as if they weren’t there; resulting often in them walking up the bunkers as soon as even a single bug gets underfoot. Be careful with how and where you place your walls and bunkers with this design! Shock fences also make excellent amplifiers of maze-based killboxes.
Bunkerfort
Overhead Example of a Cross variation of the Bunkerfort
Towers were a useful, but optional, addition to this design. This particular variation is now extremely vulnerable to Tigers and will often collapse if more than 1 or 2 spawn at a time, so I won’t be making an in-game example; avoid using these for now.
The Bunkerfort is an old and obsolete base design that was meta-defining before the 0.8.0 update. Back when bugs ran direct paths and couldn’t walk up obstacles, bunkers were the premiere defensive structure, and all good base designs were the myriad ways a bunker could be placed to provide defilade to adjacent walls or gates while using the troopers on the bunker as bait to draw the bugs to attack it instead of the base itself. A Bunkerforts “ideal” form is a trio of 3 bunkers placed corner to corner around the grid square on one side of the arc- with the opposite grid square enclosed by two ramp walls and the fourth bunker on the far edge.
The exposed sides of the arc are protected by durable small gates. This design was compact, minimizing the amount of movement any given trooper needed to do to get a firing angle on a surge of bugs but not so compact that a single inferno or grenadier shot could wipe the team, and had almost 0 blocked LoS both internally and externally with all 4 bunkers providing powerful defilade on their adjacent bunkers.
Turrets placed in this design can fire nearly anywhere around the base, and shock fences could be used to shore up weaker sides and buy incredible amounts of time. The design could be easily shortened to just 4 bunkers around the arc if even more compaction was needed, or extend to fit around oblong corners or objects- for particularly wonky build zones like those of Valaka, you could use the natural hard terrain to form indestructible corners where a well place bunker was all but unkillable.
However, with the 0.8.0 update, the Bunkerfort design is dramatically weaker. Not terrible, mind you, but far from optimal. With such a compact base, bug corpses pile up much more quickly- and now that small structures pop along with the bunkers, there is little room to place ammo and nowhere safe to place turrets that gives them strong defilade. Furthermore, bugs will harshly path to the gates protecting the arc and ignore the bunkers- or if you use walls, they’ll path to the walls since they have less health and similarly crash right into the weakest point of the design.
Not to mention that Tigers need very little to get onto a bunker, and with how many bug corpses can pile on a compact bunkerfort this is all but guaranteed to happen in a given mission; and with almost the entire team condensed into this small area, it only takes 1 Tiger to rip through the base and wipe out the entire match.
The Honeycomb
Example of a Cross Variation of a Bunkerfort, with Stage 3 Terminal Public Lobby
This was physically painful to draw. There is no logic. Only Madness and Despair. I could not bring myself to add the litter of random towers, automated sentries in the middle of the base with no firing angles, and ammo pallets inside inaccessible wall pockets. Leave such things to your nightmares, if you want an in-game example join random Horde or Arc Quickplay.
This is a BAD base design- in fact, it’s difficult to call it a “design” at all. I place this here to give players knowledge on what NOT to do, and how to spot it when it’s happening and work to undo the damage before it’s too late and the Ore is permanently wasted. As we all know, Honeycomb is a structure often featured in the hives of Bees, and what are Bees? Bugs. So naturally, a Honeycomb base design is favorable for the Arachnids- and thus is our Arch Enemy. What do you mean Arachnids and Bees are different? That’s treasonous talk right there. Anything with more than 4 legs is a bug, and all bugs are bad! Kill ‘em all!
But what IS a Honeycomb base? Put simply, it’s what happens when 3 or 4 different people all try to build at once. Mindlessly, thoughtlessly, and carelessly plopping down walls and gates and who knows what else in whatever open grid square they can- thinking that it can’t possibly hurt to have more walls. But little do they know, it can. Ohhhhh boy it can.
For one, in Arc and Horde missions especially, Ore is a limited resource. It is imperative that it be spent efficiently and effectively, plopping 4k worth of ore in walls and gates that only cover a quarter of the base and leave an entire side thinly defended at best- or exposed at worst- is a very, very fast way to wipe an entire match at the first bug horde.
For two, as mentioned before, LoS- and especially Defilade firing angles- are critical to beating back the arachnid tide. Walls are fragile and need to be defended, but defending them from the wall itself is annoying at best- and near impossible at worst. It is important that troopers on a bunker or tower have the ability to aim at the zones in front of walls or besides their or other bunkers in order to shoot bugs that are actively striking the base, giving time for engineers to repair the damage before the next bugs strike.
But if every single grid edge has a wall or gate, then no given trooper on any wall or bunker can aim further from that bunker than a single grid before they come face to face with said wall or gate. Troopers on a tower might be able to shoot over one nearby wall, but they certainly can’t shoot over the wall on the second grid.
For three, bugs in general love to sometimes clip through walls, where the honeycomb design serves to occlude them from sight and give them time to silently chew on a potentially vital point of fortification. Resulting in a sudden and unpredictable collapse of a defensive line and the subsequent death of the entire base as the horde of bugs re-paths to the new breach, covered in their advance by the complex honeycomb, and charges up a randomly placed ramp wall somewhere in the middle of the mess.
Lastly, honeycomb bases are a nightmare to traverse. Otherwise clear walkways become clogged by the shitty guard rails of sideways walls or ramp walls, gate posts, tower poles, etc., and pockets can form where a trooper’s only way out is a double vault up a nearby wall- which can critically prevent them from defending an angle in a tight situation.
Tips, Tricks and Tactical Advice
Placing Defensive Structures
The game has a grand total of three “defensive” structures- that is, structures which are not merely chunks of HP that block bug pathing but which actively aid in base defense. These are HMG Emplacement, Auto-Sentries, and Shock Fences. It is important when placing these structures to consider their “area of effect”.
For the Shock fence, this is a relatively large area; specifically the tile in front of the fence and each tile adjacent to it (so 6 tiles in front and 3 behind); assuming line of sight. For the turrets, this is more or less line of sight. You want your Auto-sentries to have Defilade on killboxes or the base’s walls just as much as you want allied troopers to- and so usually you are placing them at the edges of the base, where they won’t end up shooting the back of a wall or the roof of a bunker because they see a bug’s pinkie toe and instead aim at it as though they have wallhacks (narrator: they do not).
For HMG turrets you want to make sure that they have good firing angles- both on bugs outside the base, but also on bugs attacking portions of it. Note that HMG emplacements have a minimum downwards firing angle, so usually they can’t aim at stuff that is nearby and beneath them- one way to resolve this is to place them at a particular point on a bunker; but for reasons outlined in a different tip this is a bad idea.
Instead, place HMG emplacements on the railings (to get them above the opaque walls) of towers that are 1 tile or so inside the base (or at least 1 tile away from the side you want the HMG defending)- this gives them both a distinct elevation advantage providing purview of nearly the entire surrounding area (and thus the ability to shift attention to nearly any portion of the base in case of a breach), but enables their minimum firing angle to cover the fronts of adjacent bunkers or potentially covering intentionally placed killboxes within a Maze or Onion. Example given below.
In-game Example of a rearwards tower HMG position- these can be hard to find good spots for, and keep in mind bunkers usually have a big fat tower in the way to block Tigers
Securing Small Structures
Small structures- Ammo crates/pallets, Short Walls, and HMG emplacements- can be placed on top of other structures. There was once a bug long ago where they would float in the air, intact, if the structure they were on was destroyed. This has since been fixed, however, so now if a structure is destroyed- so too is anything on top it. Moreover, unlike the larger structure, the small structures CANNOT be rebuilt.
This is a problem- for one it means placing anything on indefensible outer walls is idiotic, as walls are made of tin foil so all it takes is one stubborn warrior or a lucky grenadier/bombardier to permanently destroy a 2000 ore turret or delete a vital ammo crate/pallet during defense.
However, even bunkers are not indestructible and in many cases multiple grenadiers/bombardiers/tigers can very very quickly melt down a bunker and everything on top of it- so if you put all your eggs in one basket and place your ammo, turrets, stim stations, etc. on top of a bunker more than likely at some point during the match it will be destroyed and you’ll lose it all.
So then, how DO you secure these structures? There are 2 ways- the first is to place them in a Tower, Towers aren’t very tough; but bugs rarely ever attack them over other structures. Even a tower placed at a base edge will usually only be mildly scratched even during an intense bug assault because a wall or bunker underneath the tower blocks the bugs from striking it- and once that structure goes, new paths open up and the bugs quickly lose interest and go for the deeper parts of the base instead.
As a result, towers- if they die at all- die only because they’re one of the last structures in the base or a grenadier or bombardier got VERY lucky and whittled down the last few bits of hp of a tower at the edge of their explosive radius (they- like normal bugs- almost never target the tower directly unless something is horribly wrong) or it got caught in a Tiger’s swipe (which is somewhat rare but can happen).
Unfortunately, of the small structures, only the HMG emplacement can be placed in towers. For Ammo Crates/Pallets, it is better to place them either on the ground at the foot of a ramp (bugs do NOT target ammo at all, and they only take damage from explosions that happen almost on top of them) or on a wall that is well inside a base and unlikely to be attacked at all unless the entire base is collapsing (at which point long-term ammo supplies are the least of your concerns).
This is not to say it’s always a bad idea to put ammo on a bunker- if you have good reason to believe a particular bunker is fairly safe (such as it having already survived multiple large attacks with only minor damage), then by all means use the bunker as a platform. Just make sure to be careful, and use foresight and good judgment!
Don’t do this- that poor, poor ammo box.
Bunkers may seem like convenient spots, but all it takes is one unfortunately aimed grenadier shot to wipe it clean like a shamwow
It’s a few extra steps to get down the ramp, but this ammo will never get destroyed!
My favorite way to secure HMG/Sentry ammo- the wall is internal, and thus unlikely to get destroyed unless something is seriously wrong. It takes a couple extra steps, but you gotta wait out the longass “pickup” animation anyways. Don’t skip leg day!
Clip That!
Some structures can “clip” into other structures, if placed in a certain order. Sometimes this is against common sense, sometimes it’s necessary for a structure to be placed in a way that makes any sense at all. Ramp walls, for example, can be placed even if their ramp or walkway “clips” into a wall placed parallel to them- but only if you place the ramp wall after the normal wall.
The normal wall will, for some reason, detect ramp walls as an obstruction and thus block placement. So if you are putting a Ramp wall on an inside corner, place the ramp second!
“Huh, weird, I guess it makes sense- the walkways do intersect!”
“Or not? Ohhh I see, Ramp walls are male. Ladies first!”
Examples of “nonsensical” clipping involve the Bunker. Bunkers, sort of like the Ramp Wall, can sometimes clip into other already existing structures when placed- even though those existing structures could not ordinarily be placed clipping into a bunker. For example, Small Gates and Shock Fences both can be placed first and left unbuilt- then a bunker placed on top of the unbuilt gate/fence afterwards to create an extra secure face on a bunker.
The downside is that the gate or fence actively blocks firing angles from the bunker, making that side almost impossible to defend from the bunker itself. Use this trick only if you want to make a specific portion of wall or bunker very very tanky with no need or desire to actively defend it (or if it is already defended from a different angle).
Probably a bug- don’t get too comfy using this!
Another type of clip are “natural” clips that are clearly intended design- primarily those of Towers and Auto-sentries being placeable “over” other structures such as bunkers or walls. Not much to say there!
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