I just wanted to mention a few things before we get started. This guide assumes you have already played on Erekir to some extent, whether that be in the campaign or custom games, though more emphasis will be placed on the campaign. While this guide may occasionally mention Serpulo blocks like turrets for comparison, it will also assume that you do not have access to any of these blocks, i.e. you're playing on a non-combined Erekir map. The guide won't go too in depth on the "how," that is how to construct or supply the turrets discussed, but will still take into consideration the costs of these things.


Back on Serpulo, our small turrets were 1x1 Duos and Arcs, but now the smallest thing on Erekir is Breach and its 3x3! Turrets are much more expensive to build and maintain than they ever were on Serpulo, so every one counts. Gone are the days of defending your base with a single Scorch for 15 waves, now to get defense like that you need fancy new materials like "Cyanogen." Turrets must have just gotten worse over the years...

No seriously. Despite me sounding like a Mindustry Boomer, turrets on Erekir do, on average, take longer to kill similarly tiered enemies than on Serpulo. (Tiers will be discussed soon)

One coal Scorch has 180 DPS (17/shot * 10 shots/second +10 DPS from burning). Against a basic Dagger with 0 armor and 150 health it takes (150/180) = 0.83 seconds to destroy one. The basic unit on Erekir is Stell, with 850 health and 6 armor. To get similar "time to kill" you need over 1026 DPS (850/(1026 - 6 armor) = 0.83), and the simplest way to get that is with a Sublimate powered by Cyanogen (1170 DPS), which can be quite expensive.

With turrets being generally less effective while being larger and more expensive to make, picking the right one for the right situation becomes more important than ever, fitting for the second leg of the campaign.

This guide will discuss some of the pros/cons to each turret currently available in Erekir, from Breach to Malign, giving some tips along the way.

I have organized every turret into a different tier based on the earliest you can build them with the standard progression path.

• Tier 1 is every turret you can make while only having access to the plasma bore, the Beryllium tier
  
• Tier 2 is every turret you can make while having access to the impact drill, the Tungsten tier
  
• Tier 3 is every turret you can make with access to the large plasma bore, the Thorium tier
  
• Tier 4 is a little special, as while you can technically access these turrets when you get Thorium, they are singled out by higher damage and costs, the Phase Fabric tier

Enemies are already organized into 5 tiers, so it's not a one to one comparison (Merui require Tungsten despite being tier 1 units). When comparing unit tiers to my turret tiers, think abut it like this:


for example, a base with T2 turrets can easily handle T1 enemies, but might struggle with T2 enemies. T3, T4, and T5 enemies will likely be too much for it. T4 and T5 enemies need either a lot of T3 turrets or some T4 turrets. Again, the turrets tiers are based on progression and not power level. While higher tier turrets are generally more powerful, there are some notable exceptions where a turret in a tier is particularly weak or powerful.

Enough introduction, it's time to talk specifics.

With the plasma bore, the only resources you can get for construction are Beryllium, Graphite, and Silicon. Oddly enough, the only turret you can build with these resources is Breach.

Breach is a simple, straightforward turret, and tied for smallest turret with Diffuse and Sublimate. It's relatively cheap to build and supply, and boats an acceptable range. It's quite run of the mill, with it's main notable feature being piercing shots. Once you go up a tier with access to Tungsten, Breach gets a lot better with longer range and higher pierce. It is the only T1 turret, and the first one you are likely to build. It tends to struggle with Merui and especially Cleroi unless supplied with tungsten, and I find myself preferring the knock back of Diffuse over this if I can afford it. Overall, acceptable early game, but try and replace it with something better ASAP.

With the impact drill, you get access to Tungsten, Oxide, and if the circumstances allow, Surge Alloy. Three new turrets are available, Diffuse, Sublimate, and Afflict.


Diffuse is likely the second turret you would make, right after obtaining Tungsten, adding it to your defensive line along with Breach. Diffuse is a shotgun, spraying Graphite charges over a short distance with very high spread. It fires fast and hard, dealing more damage the closer an enemy is to it by virtue of them coming into contact with more bullets. You'd think then that knock back, pushing enemies away from Diffuse and therefore lessening the damage it deals, would be undesirable. However, the knock back combined with enemies moving keeps them in range of Diffuse for longer, letting it make up for its shorter range. Diffuse and Breach cover each other's weaknesses well, Breach's long range and piercing can pick off slower enemies trying to take shots without getting into range of your shorter ranged turrets, while Diffuse can pick off any enemy that comes too close with its high DPS. It's particularly good at dealing with Merui and Cleroi. I find myself preferring Diffuse in most situations where I need to deal with some T1 and T2 enemies.

Sublimate is akin to Scorch from Serpulo, firing a constant stream of energized Ozone for short range and high damage. That damage is the main reason you'd consider using a Sublimate, as it's complimented by armor piercing, making the ubiquitous armor present on nearly every enemy on Erekir useless against its flame. While already quite good, supplying it with Cyanogen can make it viable for later in the game as well, increasing its range and damage. Though, I don't find myself jumping to use them too often. If my defensive line is close to a steam vent to supply an electrolyser, sure, but Ozone is very useful early game for power and Oxide, so I find myself only using it when it's convenient.

I can't believe you can get Afflict so early, with it being only T2. The main requirement for this one is the 100 Surge Alloy, which can take a while to get after acquiring Tungsten. Still, I pre-prepare the area where an Afflict will be built and count down the seconds until I have 100 Surge. Afflict is likely the best turret in all of Erekir. It requires only power and heat, and you can make heat with power so it really only uses power. Assuming you can keep up with it's high power demand, Afflict is a sight to behold, taking down enemies and their projectiles at the same time over very long range. The ball it fires does respectable damage, then splits into many more smaller bullets to pierce through enemy groups. Since Slag can be converted directly into heat with slag heaters, anywhere near Slag pools are great places to build Afflict to try and save on its high power requirement. While I did just call it the best turret, I should mention that there are other higher tier turrets that out-damage it, and ones that out range it, but Afflict is just so good for its cost, so amazing for its tier, that it can carry you for a very long time. Even when you have "better" turrets with higher DPS to take out enemies with, Afflict can easily take out enemy projectiles, preventing them from contacting your walls at all. All this without mentioning its siege capability, out-ranging many other turrets and piercing through enemy walls to take out more sensitive structures behind them. It might not be the highest DPS, but Afflict will always be the best turret to me.

With the large plasma bore, you gain access to Thorium, and are able to get every other resource in the game. As previously mentioned, I have separated the turrets that require Phase into their own tier (more explanation in the T4 section) so T3 consists of Titan, Disperse, Lustre, and Scathe.

Titan, as the name would suggest, is a big and splashy turret. It lobs Thorium shells over long distances (though notably only 5 tiles more range than Afflict) for large AOE damage. Titan is special in a couple ways, being the only turret to require 2 resources to fire (if you don't count power/heat as a resource) making it more difficult to supply. Additionally, Titan can only hit ground targets, making it useful for taking pot shots on enemies as they approach or on the walls of an enemy base. The high AOE damage makes it naturally great for taking out swarms of enemies, though it's slower shots tend to miss if it fires at something too fast, such as Eludes. Overall a great turret for ground defense, but I find it somewhat situational given its 2 resource requirements. If there happens to be Thorium near where you want build some turrets, it works out well. The same is true for Hydrogen from steam vents, even more so as you cant transport Hydrogen by Unit Cargo Drones like you can Thorium. If the situation allows, Titan is never a bad option.

Scatter is all grown up! Disperse is the quintessential anti-air turret, blotting out the sky with Tungsten shots to deal massive damage to everything in its large range, as long as it's in the air. There isn't a whole lot to say about this one, it's just the classic flak cannon players of Serpulo would compare to a larger version of Scatter. Notably, it only uses Tungsten as ammo, which can be somewhat of a downside in certain maps where Tungsten is more limited. This restrictive ammo also means that it becomes much less desirable if enemy air units attack an area far away from Tungsten sources, as leading a long, unprotected duct line can risk cutting them off of their ammo. In that situation then, are there any other options? I'll discuss this more in their own sections, but Disperse is the most reliable if you can feed it Tungsten reliably. Lustre can struggle to hit faraway and/or moving targets with its slow laser. Sublimate and Diffuse do great and ok damage respectively, but both suffer from short range making them more likely to be picked off by enemy air units before they can even fire. Smite and Malign are great, but also very expensive to build an maintain. The best alternative (as always) is Afflict, with better range and crowd control than Disperse, but as mentioned it eats up a lot of power. Just like it's cousin Scatter on Serpulo, Disperse is a solid anti-air turret that can get outclassed in the later game.

Something you might have noticed is that Erekir has fewer "power only" turrets than Serpulo does. Arc, Lancer, Parallax, and Meltdown all directly use power, while turrets like Ripple and Scorch can be run off of pure power via cultivators and coal centrifuges. Afflict and Malign both use power as well as heat, and as heat can be made from power you can run both of them on pure power if you want. In a similar vein as Ripple and Scorch, Lustre can be run off of pure power as it's fuels by Nitrogen, and the only way to get Nitrogen is with an atmospheric condenser, which uses power and heat. The Nitrogen can then be stored in the turret, in the condenser, or even in tanks if you want. In this regard, Lustre is possibly the easiest turret on Erekir to supply, only requiring middling power to run an atmospheric condenser which over time will store large amounts of Nitrogen for later use. It is the lowest maintenance turret, with no ducts or complex heating system required. You think I'd like it more then, given its ease of use, but it just has one glaring problem, its very slow. The laser it fires does amazing damage but tracks incredibly slowly, and only damages a single unit at the end of the laser. It so often lags just behind the enemy unable to deal any damage. However, its good range and damage make up for this somewhat, allowing it to make up for the lost damage on single, slower moving targets. Despite seeming useful in any situation based on it's Nitrogen fuel, it still ends up being a bit situational.

The longest range turret by far, Scathe seems too good to be true. Over 150 tile range, large AOE damage, and it even had to get nerfed because it revealed too much of the map. It's OP, right? Wrong. The main use I have for Scathe is as an expensive radar to reveal large portions of the map, fitting then that it got nerfed here. Its large rockets require 20 carbide each to fire, which is just ridiculous. The rockets deal good damage, but they fire so slowly that the DPS is quite low. Partly due to the long distance it fires over, it tends to miss a lot, the expensive, high damaging rockets exploding uselessly 10 feet behind the enemies it's firing at. Ok, it's not for units for then, it's for taking pot shots at enemy bases from 2 miles away. Here too, it's useless. The rockets can be easily shot down by enemy turrets making them veer off in the wrong direction and explode too far away to hit anything. Scathe is useful in only 2 situations: as a glorified radar, or for preventing the enemy from building. The campaign map "Siege" demonstrates this, with a far off Scathe preventing you from setting up anything within its range. Even that can be easily worked around. If you build walls closer to the Scathe and away from what you want to protect, it will fire at the walls and leave the other things alone. This entire time, I haven't even metnioned that it can only hit ground targets, further limiting its small uses. Scathe is an utterly useless turret that you almost should always build one of, just so you can carry it around with an air unit and quickly reveal the map. Anuke, if you're reading, please buff this one.

It's the biggest of the big, the T4 turrets have finally arrived! I'll admit, I don't often get to build these as they're quite expensive and difficult to supply, but when you do it's hard not to feel invincible. As mentioned before, I've separated these two turrets, Smite and Malign, into their own tier as they stand out from the T3 turrets in a few ways. Firstly, they are larger than every other turret, being the only two 5x5 turrets. Second, they are much, much more expensive to build requiring Phase Fabric, a difficult resource to make en masse, and difficult to supply as well. Lastly, they do much more damage than other turrets, as a reward for all the struggles it takes to build and maintain them. They even get their own special animation while firing! Smite and Malign are truly something else.

Of the two T4 Turrets, Smite is the one that you'd be more likely to build. It fires a single lightning shot that pierces through enemies and deal massive damage. The shot also shocks everything around it, in addition to the pierce this makes it great at crowd control when enemies are in a line, which happens more often then not. It's a bit similar to Lancer and Meltdown in this way, where the best way to take advantage of its piercing shots is to line them up with enemy lines. Compared to Malign, Smite it much easier to supply as it only needs Surge Alloy, and you'll probably deliver it via unit cargo loaders at this point, so it can go pretty much wherever. It really only struggles a bit in 2 regards, being a little bit too short range to deal with the higher tier air units, and struggling to hit multiple targets if they aren't in a line. These aren't that much of an issue however, as by now you should be able to identify the best place to build a Smite where it can fire on a line of enemies. Not too much to say about this one, it's just pretty good, as you'd expect.

Finally, the ultimate turret. The digest DPS. The most utility. Fueled by nothing but heat and power. Malign is akin to meltdown, being the premier power only turret of Erekir. But unlike Meltdown, you can't just put it anywhere. It requires a massive 90 heat for full fire rate, necessitating some kind of heat system to fully take advantage of it. Your reward for pumping huge amounts of power or building complex machinery to heat the thing is slightly underwhelming. It doesn't have enough range to natively target T4 or T5 air units, which are the main units you need to worry about in the late game where a Malign would be possible. Additionally, it can struggle to deal with high level crowds as well as something like an Afflict or even a Smite when build properly. But those are minor nitpicks. Malign is a force to be reckoned with, dealing with anything T3 or below effortlessly. Even if you can't afford that high heat cost to run it, it still fires with just a few electric or slag heaters. It may not be able to deal with T5's this way, but it can definitely help whittle down enemies that dare think they can approach it. I feel this one would much better with some kind of logic system in the campaign, so that you an turn off all the heating while it isn't in use and have it automatically turn back on when enemies are in range. That's possible in mixed maps right now, but this guide is for pure Erekir only, so unfortunately Malign needs a lot of heat, and it needs it constantly. While a little disappointing due to its great expense, it becomes the strongest turret tin the game if you can afford its steep maintenance cost.

So there you go, that's the guide. I've spend a few days collecting data, playing the game, and writing this guide, so thank you for reading it. While it's mostly done, I'll still keep it active for a while to add feedback from the comments, so if you want to add something (especially if you disagree with one of my assessments), please comment it.
For those of you who've read my other guides, you probably recognize this for what it is: a spiritual successor to my "Basic Block Defense Guide" I made a few years ago now. You can go check it out if you want, but it's unfinished and I have no plans as of now to finish it. The info in it is still mostly good, if you want some basic info on game mechanics and the first half of Serpulo's turrets assessed.
I'm not going to ask you to "like and subscribe" or anything, I'll only ask that you be nice in the comments here and other places, to me and to others.
Hopefully this helped you out a bit, Erekir is a big and scary place, it's nice to have a guide.

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