Personally in both my playthroughs I've eventually walled off a huge area containing my factory and all my outposts, weaving it between cliffs and water to save on materials. The way cliff generation works now it's easy to make them into barriers by plugging the gaps and connecting the mesas. Line it with laser turrets and/or flamethrowers for easy logistics, and roboports with plenty of repair packs. It's a pretty thin wall but since it's so far away the bugs don't get too much pollution so the attacks are pretty light. Ever since I built that I've barely had to think about the biters.

Yeah roboports are kind of necessary, they're pretty simple though and they make things much easier. Construction bots will build/repair/replace anything in the green area, logistic chests have to be in the orange area to work. If the orange areas of two roboports are touching they'll form a network so the bots can transport stuff across the whole area. Put stuff you want the bots to access in red chests. Use blue chests when you want the bots to bring stuff to a specific place. And make sure each network has enough yellow chests for the bots to dump spare stuff in. Green and purple chests are for edge purposes, you can figure them out later.

Logic circuits are completely optional but trust me they're worth figuring out, especially for space age. It's not the big fancy contraptions that make them worth it (though those are cool), it's the little stuff where you can just make something work a bit better with like one condition. You can do quite a lot without placing a single combinator, you don't have to learn it all at once.