Starship Troopers: Extermination – Base Defense Tips

Tips for Protecting Your Base

A few tips I’ve learned through base building:

• A well-placed tower can help non-hunters reach building rooftops, giving those involved better options for coverage and more safety against bugs that have breached the base.
• There’ve been arguments for placing ammo boxes on walls for easier access, but when a wall is destroyed, everything attached to it (manned turrets and ammo boxes) fall with it. It’s better to decentralize them around the base on the ground.
• Bunkers are best used in areas that historically see the most bugs and damage. These locations involve chokepoints, base sections with high exposure, and the outskirts of a base which are often targeted by Grenadiers.
• Walls are cheap, and have a high placing limit. Lining every single free space in the base with walls creates buffer zones that prevent bugs from easily reaching the more sensitive parts of the base. This is often called the Layered Strategy, and there are both pros and cons to it.
• A wall with ramp will prevent bunkers (or even other walls) from being built where the base of the ramp ends, but building bunker or rampless wall first still allows the wall with ramp to be built
• Manned Turrets are best built on wall edges (not the walkways) for best visibility and coverage. Building on the top edge of a bunker is also beneficial. If the bunker is meant to serve as both blockade and grenadier bait, the turrets can be built inside to protect it and the trooper (but will sacrifice the ability to damage drones that are not tall enough to see through the windows).
• Electric fences should never be placed around the ARC. Tigers are still capable of reaching the ARC through the fence, troopers cannot climb over nor crawl through, and the best feature of the fence (ability to stun) goes largely unused until the most dire of circumstances. The position would be better served with a construction of higher durability such as a small gate, or even a wall.
• Electric fences actually have a decent range! You can even place short walls in front of them to drastically reduce the amount of damage the electric fence will take, and the electric fence will still effectively stun bugs on the other side of the short walls.
• Auto Turrets placed on wall edges have great visibility and great effectiveness, but will also be at greatest risk. Auto Turrets placed in the middle of a bunker will be much safer, but also sacrifice some of the vertical visibility needed to handle smaller targets. However, if you want the ultimate strategy, placing auto turrets along an electric fence, which is in turn protected by short walls, will create an amazing synergy where all of the constructions are helping protect each other. The short walls reduce the chance of damage to the fence, the fence stuns whatever gets close to the short walls, and the turrets get to enjoy a lifetime bug buffet.