There's definitely a bit of a learning curve I'm finding, especially since there's a lot of information not readily expressed (my main complaint). For that mission specifically, note that there are two metal veins you can place miners on, one each just above/below the reactor. These help keep you supplied. The Info Center is to the immediate right of the base; this will show you significant details about your waves.

Between those two things ^, you can set up a pretty solid defense in well under 30min. If you push out into the tunnels, you can find a lot of supplies (mines, rockets, etc.), but it's not needed. If you're unsure on how to actually defend, the ideal for these types of game is concentrating enemies to a single point and using that to more easily defeat them with turrets, your guns, mines, etc.

For this mission specifically, you can accomplish that by surrounding your base with walls, except one point (use a gate). To force enemies there, you can dig a tunnel as a "loop" around your base, letting enemies from anywhere go for the weak spot with a ton of turrets.

In my experience I didn't even need to wall off everything. Basically of all the arrows coming to your base, one line will be wider, bigger than the others. I just made sure that wherever this wide line passed through, everything was fortified/defended, and almost all enemies followed this path. No idea why the other ones were being displayed at all, very misleading.

Info center shows paths from all spawners and there are many spawners on this map. Holding Space shows all paths at once. Presing Space shortly iterates through enemies groups that will attack. You can See that majority of them are just one worm. Only one paths has like more than 100 spiders and one bigger monster. There you should focus your defences.

But you are right this is not intuitive and we might improve that mission

I finished around half of the campaign so far. And I agree that the difficulty of some missions can vary drastically, if you need a few minutes to figure out what you are supposed to do.

But my only complaint is that the storage building and repair gun unlock so late in the campaign.
I played the game during early access for around 80 hours and I believe they are far more important than the lumen beam, machine gun, sniper turret, scout center or lab.

But at least all early missions that have multiple waves, also have repair guns in loot crates. It makes exploration a lot more meaningful.

Originally posted by Ziipher:

Originally posted by Frosty:

Campaign design really sucks. Even early mission very hard if yu not good at this kind of game. Reaching campaign mission defensive recon now. Only 30minute to built defense that enemy will come everywhere? The hell yu thinking?

Don't do Def Recon mission before doing the main mission below to unlock drills. Make sure you also save your lumens from previous missions to get drill upgrades. I was 3/5 for defensive recon and it made it "cheese". You can drill right into the info center near the base, then start building defense.

Get the 4/5 drill asap after that. That is the best upgrade in the game.

or you can just go south a bit and get explosives from the chest throw the explosives at the wall which detonates it. Then build like 3 turrets on the right side. Then skip the next 23 mins.

Honestly iv been playing on the hardest setting and while the game is weird its not really hard.

If you have troubles with large enemies or monster nests: use the rocket launcher,
the game will become so much easier.