Factorio Forums

I'm doing a playthrough where I'm only using gun turrets. I know there are various advantages and disadvantages of using them compared to lasers but I was suprised by a few of them and they make gun turrets much more annoying to use.

Blueprints don't copy the ammo status of the turrets so you can't load them with bots, but the worst part is that the construction bots also have to remove all of the ammo when deconstructing so it takes a lot of time for them to remove all ammo from them even with stack bonuses. It would be great if a bot could carry a full stack of ammo.

When automating the loading of the turrets there is no way to limit the number of magazines in the turret, this means they will always be at a full stack unless the supply line runs out. This is a problem if they get destroyed since the full stack of ammo also gets destroyed. This makes gun turrets much more expensive to use than laser, especially if using piercing ammo.

Berjiz wrote:When automating the loading of the turrets there is no way to limit the number of magazines in the turret, this means they will always be at a full stack unless the supply line runs out. This is a problem if they get destroyed since the full stack of ammo also gets destroyed. This makes gun turrets much more expensive to use than laser, especially if using piercing ammo.

Wait, what? Don't inserters only load a few magazines per turret? I didn't think they loaded a full stack automatically...

Inserters load exactly 10 magazines per turret. When using turrets in any number they should be belt fed, you can feed the belt with a requester chest if you like.

What is true is that gun turrets are much more expensive than lasers, especially if using piercing ammo. The solution: Don't use piercing ammo. With bullet upgrades the gun turret damage gets as high as 19.36 even firing regular ammo which one-shots small biters and small spitters (and if things die to 1 regular bullet... you don't want to fire 1 AP bullet) and also rips big nasty holes in big biters with their measly physical resist of 8. As for Behemoths, well they still take 7.5 damage and it's still cheaper to kill Behemoths with regular ammo than piercing. Though using gun turrets at all in the Behemoth era is very masochistic (before the late big biter era I consider gun turrets absolutely superior to laser turrets but in the end game they chew through far too much ammo).

It must have been my manual loading that messed stuff up, 10 seems to be a good number. There still a bit of a problem with the bots though, especially if loaded manually.

If you don't need extremely high loading speed (as in just occasional attacks), this setup is not bad:
x <-- x <-- x --> x --> x

And then another inserter feeding the middle turret from a chest. Drop some ammo in the chest and it will be automatically distributed. But it takes a while.