Shotgun ammo is too cost efficient

[Frightning]

So I've ran the numbers, and the shotgun ammunition, both types, is obscenely cost efficient, for no real reason.
A single mag of regular ammo costs 2 Iron plates and does a total of 20 base raw damage (2x10), twice that much in a gun turret (40=4x10). A single mag of regular shotgun ammo? 10X12X4=480 base raw damage for a cost of 2 Iron plates and 2 Copper plates, or 4 plates total, assuming 1-to-1 value between Iron and Copper plates (not unreasonable), that's 24 times the damage potential for merely twice the cost, even with how the shotgun can miss a fair amount of its damage in practice, it's still stupidly cost efficient. The same sort of thing is happening with the 'advanced' ammo types, Piercing ammo costs 1 Steel plate and 5 Copper plates and has a base raw damage of 50 (5x10), for a damage/plate value, with steel plates worth 5 plates each because that's how much iron it takes, of 5 damage/plate, Piercing shotgun shells? 10X6x16=960 raw base damage for 2 Steel plates and 2 Copper plates, for a 'plate value' of 12, which means it has 80 damage/plate.

Another thing worth noticing, is that shotgun ammo lasts a long time for its cost as well. A full stack of 100 mags of Regular ammo can be fired off in 166.(6) secs by an unupgraded pistol, 100 seconds by an unupgraded gun turret, and 66.(6) by an unupgraded SMG, fully upgraded, these drop to 64.1, 38.46, and 25.64 respectively. By comparison, a full stack of 100 shotgun mags takes the Shotgun 1000 seconds to fire off unupgraded, and 500 seconds for Combat shotgun unupgraded (with 20% damage bonus too). Full upgrades bring those numbers down to 384.62 and 192.31 respectively, still longer than the unupgraded pistol. Basically the problem is that one recipe of shotgun makes 1 mag that gives 10 shots. Too many for what it costs.

So my solution: Change stack size for shotgun ammo (both types) to 200 from 100, remove the magazine value of 10, and make it 1, and make the recipe make 2 Shotgun shells instead of 1 (ditto Piercing shells recipe) for the same costs. With these new numbers, damage/plate values are closer to, but still quite a bit better than, regular ammo and piercing ammo, the new values for shotgun ammos are 24 damage/plate and 16 damage/plate for reg and piercing respectively. (The analogous values for bullets are 10 and 5 respectively) The fire times for full mag stacks would then become 200 and 100 unupgraded which are only marginally longer than pistol and SMG values, and would compare similarly with upgrades.

[Photoloss]

Have you actually tried shooting large/behemoth biters with an SMG? How about walking close to a base and causing dozens of those to spawn every few seconds?

Yes, as you demonstrated shotgun ammo is much more potent than standard bullets, and it has to be. First of all it's a tech unlock, so it has to offer some kind of advantage or improvement. Secondly standard bullets are much more versatile, allowing you to feed your automated defenses from the same production line and supplying your turret creep from the same inventory slots. Additionally the SMG doesn't upgrade well enough to remain viable lategame regardless of cost, and the combat shotgun is intended to replace it as the standard personal weapon.

While dropping magazine size down to 1 might be very drastic messing with inventory demands doesn't change much in general: the shotgun is used as an offensive weapon to kill biter nests and their defenders, and if you're going on a killing spree you can empty your inventory of "standard" gear/resources to fill up on more ammo. Even with endgame power armour it's pretty hard to go through 2+ stacks of shotgun ammo, and by that time you'd easily find space for 20 stacks.

Combat has quite some room for improvement both in mechanical depth and balance, but the resource cost of shotgun shells is the least of our worries right now. Have you run the calculations for mines?

[bobucles]

High tier capsules pump out some SERIOUS damage for their cost. Poison capsules are pretty nice as well.

[Frightning]

Have you actually tried shooting large/behemoth biters with an SMG? How about walking close to a base and causing dozens of those to spawn every few seconds?

Yes, as you demonstrated shotgun ammo is much more potent than standard bullets, and it has to be. First of all it's a tech unlock, so it has to offer some kind of advantage or improvement. Secondly standard bullets are much more versatile, allowing you to feed your automated defenses from the same production line and supplying your turret creep from the same inventory slots. Additionally the SMG doesn't upgrade well enough to remain viable lategame regardless of cost, and the combat shotgun is intended to replace it as the standard personal weapon.

While dropping magazine size down to 1 might be very drastic messing with inventory demands doesn't change much in general: the shotgun is used as an offensive weapon to kill biter nests and their defenders, and if you're going on a killing spree you can empty your inventory of "standard" gear/resources to fill up on more ammo. Even with endgame power armour it's pretty hard to go through 2+ stacks of shotgun ammo, and by that time you'd easily find space for 20 stacks.

Combat has quite some room for improvement both in mechanical depth and balance, but the resource cost of shotgun shells is the least of our worries right now. Have you run the calculations for mines?

Combat definitely has room for improvement beyond basic things like dmg/cost, but the reason I bothered posting this, is that it's such a significant, obvious, and most importantly easy to fix issue. As it stands right now, the Combat Shotgun with reg/piercing ammo outperforms the SMG handedly by every metric you can imagine except being unable to shoot over your own walls and potentially losing DPS against targets due to range (these downsides are inherent to shotguns in general). I'm not even suggesting changing that really, just make the ammo values no longer extreme outliers (which they are w/ current numbers). Even the regular shotgun out DPSes SMG w/ piercing ammo v. w/ piercing shells 96 to 75 base raw DPS (Combat shotgun is over 200 for comparison). The bigger issue imo isn't DPS or even how long the ammo pool lasts when firing continuously, but the cost versus damage returned. The only thing that comes even close to shotgun ammo in dmg/cost are capsules and that's only if the robots live for the full duration, which they usually don't in actual combat (at least not most of them).

[BlakeMW]

Thing is that the shotgun is pretty limited and doesn't have much going for it. It's significantly weaker than the flamethrower (but that's perhaps a balance issue) and the upgrades are expensive because they are not shared (unlike bullets and flamethrower) and it becomes obsolete with Behemoth Biters, like bullets but unlike the flamethrower. it always sucks to upgrade something which is going to go obsolete. (okay the combat shotgun isn't completely obsolete with behemoth biters, it can still contribute a bit of damage on top of capsules and doesn't hurt your own bots unlike flamethrower but it's still seriously meh)
It could be said the only thing the shotgun really has going for it has dirt cheap ammo, although flamethrower ammo is even cheaper when it comes to killing big targets, for example a single spurt of fire will kill a behemoth biter.

I do generally agree though that there are oddities around the shotgun magazine. I'd just reduce it to 5 shells/magazine (same cost) and nerf the hell out the more gamey flamethrower mechanisms and call it balanced.

[Photoloss]

Combat definitely has room for improvement beyond basic things like dmg/cost, but the reason I bothered posting this, is that it's such a significant, obvious, and most importantly easy to fix issue. As it stands right now, the Combat Shotgun with reg/piercing ammo outperforms the SMG handedly by every metric you can imagine except being unable to shoot over your own walls and potentially losing DPS against targets due to range (these downsides are inherent to shotguns in general). I'm not even suggesting changing that really, just make the ammo values no longer extreme outliers (which they are w/ current numbers). Even the regular shotgun out DPSes SMG w/ piercing ammo v. w/ piercing shells 96 to 75 base raw DPS (Combat shotgun is over 200 for comparison). The bigger issue imo isn't DPS or even how long the ammo pool lasts when firing continuously, but the cost versus damage returned. The only thing that comes even close to shotgun ammo in dmg/cost are capsules and that's only if the robots live for the full duration, which they usually don't in actual combat (at least not most of them).

Stop with the raw numbers unless you can quantify the versatility of sharing upgrades with your turrets. And how do you conclude the shotgun is unbalanced and not the SMG? Wouldn't a late-game Assault Rifle with 10x the damage but half the fire rate also bring the two closer together? And why is damage/cost the correct performance metric? By that definition laser turrets would still be OP if they dealt 1 damage per hour if you played long enough.

You also miss some significant downsides: the shotgun has to be aimed to some extent while the SMG will hitscan-instagib small biters even if you just hold the fire button. And more importantly, the shotgun can hit your own structures and will absolutely demolish them, making it unusable within the confines of your factory.

[Frightning]

Combat definitely has room for improvement beyond basic things like dmg/cost, but the reason I bothered posting this, is that it's such a significant, obvious, and most importantly easy to fix issue. As it stands right now, the Combat Shotgun with reg/piercing ammo outperforms the SMG handedly by every metric you can imagine except being unable to shoot over your own walls and potentially losing DPS against targets due to range (these downsides are inherent to shotguns in general). I'm not even suggesting changing that really, just make the ammo values no longer extreme outliers (which they are w/ current numbers). Even the regular shotgun out DPSes SMG w/ piercing ammo v. w/ piercing shells 96 to 75 base raw DPS (Combat shotgun is over 200 for comparison). The bigger issue imo isn't DPS or even how long the ammo pool lasts when firing continuously, but the cost versus damage returned. The only thing that comes even close to shotgun ammo in dmg/cost are capsules and that's only if the robots live for the full duration, which they usually don't in actual combat (at least not most of them).

Stop with the raw numbers unless you can quantify the versatility of sharing upgrades with your turrets. And how do you conclude the shotgun is unbalanced and not the SMG? Wouldn't a late-game Assault Rifle with 10x the damage but half the fire rate also bring the two closer together? And why is damage/cost the correct performance metric? By that definition laser turrets would still be OP if they dealt 1 damage per hour if you played long enough.

You also miss some significant downsides: the shotgun has to be aimed to some extent while the SMG will hitscan-instagib small biters even if you just hold the fire button. And more importantly, the shotgun can hit your own structures and will absolutely demolish them, making it unusable within the confines of your factory.

Indeed, shared research is the most attractive feature of the SMG. Realistically, the most useful characteristic of a weapon to measure its usefulness is TTK (time to kill), but that is a very variable number depending heavily on the target being shot at. dmg/plate is a useful way to compare bullets and shotguns for a number of reasons:
-They both deal physical damage, and the damage instances are of similarly small sizes, 2 for Regular magazines, 4 (x12) for Shotgun shells, 5 for Piercing magazines, and 6 (x16) for Piercing shells (note that Combat shotgun does x1.2 those damage values before upgrades due to its 20% damage bonus, so the Combat shotgun has damage instance values of 4.8 and 7.2 respectively), thus they are similarly affected by physical resistances on enemies.
-They have roughly similar raw DPS, with shotgun being higher but having potential to miss and other downsides, including much less accessible Piercing ammo, the Combat shotgun exists partially to address this as well as to be the ultimate general purpose equippable weapon for late game (especially with Piercing shells).

The superiority in raw damage/sec of shotgun shells would imply that cost should be to equal or greater than (or at the very least similar to) cost regular magazines (ditto piercing stuff), but that is not what we see, not even close. Also the firing times also suggest that number of shots per resources and per stack for shotgun shells are too high, relative to regular magazines (again ditto piercing stuff) which coincides with previous point, and naturally recommends my proposed solution (fixes two ways in which shotgun shells are outliers at once).

[Deadly-Bagel]

the Combat Shotgun with reg/piercing ammo outperforms the SMG handedly by every metric you can imagine except ... potentially losing DPS against targets due to range

Actually a single pellet of armour piercing shotgun ammo does more damage than bullet of armour piercing rounds (assuming research is at the same level) so it still outperforms at max range.

Your suggestion is a bit simple and there are many problems with weapon balance, the whole system needs an overhaul. Take rockets for example, there is literally zero reason you should even make them, let alone use them. The closest thing they have to being "useful" is that they provide an upgrade path to the rocket silo.

Here is a more comprehensive topic on weapon balance.

[Frightning]

the Combat Shotgun with reg/piercing ammo outperforms the SMG handedly by every metric you can imagine except ... potentially losing DPS against targets due to range

Actually a single pellet of armour piercing shotgun ammo does more damage than bullet of armour piercing rounds (assuming research is at the same level) so it still outperforms at max range.

Your suggestion is a bit simple and there are many problems with weapon balance, the whole system needs an overhaul. Take rockets for example, there is literally zero reason you should even make them, let alone use them. The closest thing they have to being "useful" is that they provide an upgrade path to the rocket silo.

Here is a more comprehensive topic on weapon balance.

Actually, rockets have one major thing recommending them: they outrange Medium worms (and at red+green science only). Also damage type is explosive, so effective DPS can actually be greater than Piercing ammo and Shotgun shells against Medium biters midgame. (I'm sure the new OP Flamethrower does way better though)

[Deadly-Bagel]

Actually, rockets have one major thing recommending them: they outrange Medium worms (and at red+green science only). Also damage type is explosive, so effective DPS can actually be greater than Piercing ammo and Shotgun shells against Medium biters midgame. (I'm sure the new OP Flamethrower does way better though)

Base damage of a rocket is 60 explosion, medium worms have 5/15% explosion resistance so you're doing about 46 damage to them (do rockets have a physical damage element? It's not documented on the wiki). Medium worms have 350 health, so without research you're looking at 8 rockets to kill one worm. At one rocket per second, you're got to survive biters for ~7 seconds to kill one worm (as they will aggro you when the first rocket hits) assuming you didn't get aggro to get into range. Research to improve damage is much more expensive and less effective than shotgun and straight off the bat requires purple science.

I think I'd rather invest the sulphur into batteries and walk up a half dozen laser towers, they outrange medium worms too. Interestingly, the same amount of sulphur goes into a rocket as a battery, of which you need 12 for a laser turret. By the time you take out three medium worms, you could have two laser towers which mid-game would be enough to walk into a medium base even without any laser research.

[Photoloss]

The superiority in raw damage/sec of shotgun shells would imply that cost should be to equal or greater than (or at the very least similar to) cost regular magazines (ditto piercing stuff), but that is not what we see, not even close. Also the firing times also suggest that number of shots per resources and per stack for shotgun shells are too high, relative to regular magazines (again ditto piercing stuff) which coincides with previous point, and naturally recommends my proposed solution (fixes two ways in which shotgun shells are outliers at once).

And this is where I disagree. Why do we compare the raw resource cost of a factory component used in multiple machines (vehicles also have SMG slots!) with a higher tech personal use item? Where do you factor in the research cost of upgrading the shotgun in addition to the SMG/lasers for base defense? How do you assign a proper cost to the risk of death, which should technically equal "chance of death while using weapon" x "all resources produced since last save point before death"? Again, how can solar powered laser turrets ever be balanced if they have no upkeep cost at all by your metric?
And how do you determine the correct direction of a change even if we accept an imbalance as proven? Why not advocate a stronger bullet hose instead? Nowhere do you show that the current SMG stats are closer to a "desirable" balance state than the current shotgun.

[Frightning]

Actually, rockets have one major thing recommending them: they outrange Medium worms (and at red+green science only). Also damage type is explosive, so effective DPS can actually be greater than Piercing ammo and Shotgun shells against Medium biters midgame. (I'm sure the new OP Flamethrower does way better though)

Base damage of a rocket is 60 explosion, medium worms have 5/15% explosion resistance so you're doing about 46 damage to them (do rockets have a physical damage element? It's not documented on the wiki). Medium worms have 350 health, so without research you're looking at 8 rockets to kill one worm. At one rocket per second, you're got to survive biters for ~7 seconds to kill one worm (as they will aggro you when the first rocket hits) assuming you didn't get aggro to get into range. Research to improve damage is much more expensive and less effective than shotgun and straight off the bat requires purple science.

I think I'd rather invest the sulphur into batteries and walk up a half dozen laser towers, they outrange medium worms too. Interestingly, the same amount of sulphur goes into a rocket as a battery, of which you need 12 for a laser turret. By the time you take out three medium worms, you could have two laser towers which mid-game would be enough to walk into a medium base even without any laser research.

...and thus you've shown that laser turret creep is OP, imo (even gun turret creep is pretty ridiculous, but at least they don't outrange medium worms).

Also, rockets have quite a bit of travel time, easy to get 2-3 rockets in the air before the first one lands, and then biters take time to run you down (if not pre-aggro'd due to proximity; which does not happen if they are passive, but does if they are aggressive), so you can get 4-5 rockets out before really needing to switch to another weapon to deal w/ the biters, more with shooting speed upgrades. Thing is, you can swap to SMG/Flamethrower, deal w/ biters, swap back to RL and most of the dmg is still there on the worm (worm hp regen is slow), so you can totally do it (even if a bit more slowly/expensively than otherwise with equipped weapons only. Also, gun turrets set up out of range of worms can protect you while you deal w/ worms (takes some finesse to get the positioning optimized).

[Frightning]

The superiority in raw damage/sec of shotgun shells would imply that cost should be to equal or greater than (or at the very least similar to) cost regular magazines (ditto piercing stuff), but that is not what we see, not even close. Also the firing times also suggest that number of shots per resources and per stack for shotgun shells are too high, relative to regular magazines (again ditto piercing stuff) which coincides with previous point, and naturally recommends my proposed solution (fixes two ways in which shotgun shells are outliers at once).

And this is where I disagree. Why do we compare the raw resource cost of a factory component used in multiple machines (vehicles also have SMG slots!) with a higher tech personal use item? Where do you factor in the research cost of upgrading the shotgun in addition to the SMG/lasers for base defense? How do you assign a proper cost to the risk of death, which should technically equal "chance of death while using weapon" x "all resources produced since last save point before death"? Again, how can solar powered laser turrets ever be balanced if they have no upkeep cost at all by your metric?
And how do you determine the correct direction of a change even if we accept an imbalance as proven? Why not advocate a stronger bullet hose instead? Nowhere do you show that the current SMG stats are closer to a "desirable" balance state than the current shotgun.

The answer to your first question is this: DPS of vehicle machine gun is the same as SMG but it isn't affected by shooting speed upgrades (so it is comparatively worse later on), turret has 100% damage bonus, and separate extra line of damage upgrades so it is much more efficient (but still much worse than shotgun shells in all cases).

Let me put these numbers in perspective:

Reg mag from SMG v shotgun shells from shotguns:
10 damage/plate v 120 damage/plate, for a 12-to-1 ratio in favor of shotgun, for combat shotgun, that becomes a 14.4-to-1 ratio.
Piercing mag from SMG v piercing shells from shotguns:
5 damage/plate v 80 damage/plate, for a 16-to-1 ratio in favor of piercing shells, for combat shotty that becomes a 19.2-to-1 ratio.

Even the worst possible case for piercing shells v piercing bullets, unupgraded shotgun versus fully upgraded turret, we still have:
80 damage/plate v 48.4 damage/plate in favor of the shotgun; that's almost 2-to-1 with no upgrades versus 2 full sets of 6 damage upgrades for the turret. w/ Combat shotty that 80 is replaced by 96, so it's almost exactly 2-to-1.

Clearly, the damage/cost on shotgun is absurdly good compared to bullets, I'm not even suggesting that it should be the same as bullets, just not vastly different as it is now.

Answer to 2nd question is based on the above: even without upgrades the shotgun is still FAR more cost efficient than bullets even when have been upgraded, so the additional research costs is if anything, a luxury. Or a why to keep the shotgun on top of the effective DPS war (as without upgrades it can, eventually fall behind there; but even then, not that badly comparatively).

The answer to risk is simple: whatever has lower effective DPS is generally riskier, and guess what: that's the SMG, not the shotty, and definitely not the combat shotty.

As for laser turret balance: They are balanced by the energy cost of their shots, which requires power infrastructure (instead of paying for damage, you pay a much larger flat investment and get unlimited damage potential at a rate cap based on the costs expended on infrastructure, the same balance model is work w/ steam versus solar, but imo is better implemented there than w/ turrets. Laser turrets imo are OP compared to gun turrets, mainly because of their stellar 25 range and much larger hp pool (1000 v 400). The issues w/ laser turrets are thus magnified by the issues w/ how effective turret creep is (also, imo, OP, at least compared to equippable weapons for offensive action; which imo is endemic of the design issues of the current military systems in the game, which is a design problem more so than balance problem; truthfully it's both). Shotgun ammo costs being outliers is an obvious (even in comparatively minor) issue that is also really easy to fix from a development standpoint, hence why I considered it worth posting about. The bigger issues w/ military design in this game will require a much more comprehensive approach to be properly addressed. This is a small fry compared to those problems, but is also very easy to address (imo, no reason not to effect this minor fix while continuing work on the much deeper problems, as this issue would be the biggest problem if the larger issues were fixed; i.e. fixing this isn't wasted effort, and the development effort versus return in improvement of the game is quite favorable).

[Photoloss]

The answer to your first question is this: DPS of vehicle machine gun is the same as SMG but it isn't affected by shooting speed upgrades (so it is comparatively worse later on), turret has 100% damage bonus, and separate extra line of damage upgrades so it is much more efficient (but still much worse than shotgun shells in all cases).

Vehicles not benefitting from upgrades is a bug in my opinion and should be changed. Turrets have these perks but you can still research regular bullet upgrades to improve them alongside your personal firearm, then go for the specific upgrades later when the cost of tech isn't as significant anymore.

Reg mag from SMG v shotgun shells from shotguns:
10 damage/plate v 120 damage/plate, for a 12-to-1 ratio in favor of shotgun, for combat shotgun, that becomes a 14.4-to-1 ratio.
Piercing mag from SMG v piercing shells from shotguns:
5 damage/plate v 80 damage/plate, for a 16-to-1 ratio in favor of piercing shells, for combat shotty that becomes a 19.2-to-1 ratio.

Even the worst possible case for piercing shells v piercing bullets, unupgraded shotgun versus fully upgraded turret, we still have:
80 damage/plate v 48.4 damage/plate in favor of the shotgun; that's almost 2-to-1 with no upgrades versus 2 full sets of 6 damage upgrades for the turret. w/ Combat shotty that 80 is replaced by 96, so it's almost exactly 2-to-1.

Clearly, the damage/cost on shotgun is absurdly good compared to bullets, I'm not even suggesting that it should be the same as bullets, just not vastly different as it is now.

You seem to be assuming all shotgun pellets hit, in which case the SMG has a massive range advantage (or the shotgun has a massive auxilliary cost in the power armour required to survive in melee/against a trailing swarm of biters)

Answer to 2nd question is based on the above: even without upgrades the shotgun is still FAR more cost efficient than bullets even when have been upgraded, so the additional research costs is if anything, a luxury. Or a why to keep the shotgun on top of the effective DPS war (as without upgrades it can, eventually fall behind there; but even then, not that badly comparatively).

As I said shotgun has to be top in order to even be viable, though the exact amount is up for debate. You still aren't explaining why SMG balance is the correct target as opposed to buffing it closer to shotgun levels.

The answer to risk is simple: whatever has lower effective DPS is generally riskier, and guess what: that's the SMG, not the shotty, and definitely not the combat shotty.

That's not a valid simplification for combat in Factorio as avoiding health damage is much more important than eking out a bit of extra damage. Killing things before they hit you is a good way of achieving that, but so is a range advantage or greater mobility. Or simply regenerating more health than you lose in which case more dps is merely a convenience. I agree the SMG is vastly outclassed in the lategame right now, but this might be intentional. Think of the combat shotgun as the "intended" SMG upgrade rather than a seperate weapon type. Then compare to the flamethrower which has massive advantages due to its lingering AoE and hit-and-run capacity, but is riskier and less practical for sustained fire.

As for laser turret balance: They are balanced by the energy cost of their shots, which requires power infrastructure (instead of paying for damage, you pay a much larger flat investment and get unlimited damage potential at a rate cap based on the costs expended on infrastructure, the same balance model is work w/ steam versus solar, but imo is better implemented there than w/ turrets. Laser turrets imo are OP compared to gun turrets, mainly because of their stellar 25 range and much larger hp pool (1000 v 400). The issues w/ laser turrets are thus magnified by the issues w/ how effective turret creep is (also, imo, OP, at least compared to equippable weapons for offensive action; which imo is endemic of the design issues of the current military systems in the game, which is a design problem more so than balance problem; truthfully it's both). Shotgun ammo costs being outliers is an obvious (even in comparatively minor) issue that is also really easy to fix from a development standpoint, hence why I considered it worth posting about. The bigger issues w/ military design in this game will require a much more comprehensive approach to be properly addressed. This is a small fry compared to those problems, but is also very easy to address (imo, no reason not to effect this minor fix while continuing work on the much deeper problems, as this issue would be the biggest problem if the larger issues were fixed; i.e. fixing this isn't wasted effort, and the development effort versus return in improvement of the game is quite favorable).

So you openly state turret creep is stronger than personal weapons, yet you advocate nerfing the dedicated personal weapon tech rather than boosting its non-turret competitor, great idea!
And why are you bringing up the investment cost of power infrastructure but dismiss the cost of researching and upgrading the shotgun? Once everything is built you can simply move the turrets and have them fire indefinitely at no additional cost.
Factorio is still (at least partially) a sandbox game, so if a major combat redesign is on the horizon anyway why do you want to ruin the fun in the meantime? Nerfing the shotgun doesn't add any depth to combat, it only makes things more tedious. If you don't like the current balance set up your shotgun shell production to store 90%+ of its output in chests and blow those up regularly, should be a fun build to implement properly.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Also, rockets have quite a bit of travel time, easy to get 2-3 rockets in the air before the first one lands, and then biters take time to run you down (if not pre-aggro'd due to proximity; which does not happen if they are passive, but does if they are aggressive), so you can get 4-5 rockets out before really needing to switch to another weapon to deal w/ the biters, more with shooting speed upgrades. Thing is, you can swap to SMG/Flamethrower, deal w/ biters, swap back to RL and most of the dmg is still there on the worm (worm hp regen is slow), so you can totally do it (even if a bit more slowly/expensively than otherwise with equipped weapons only. Also, gun turrets set up out of range of worms can protect you while you deal w/ worms (takes some finesse to get the positioning optimized).

Easy to get 2-3 rockets in the air when you've maxxed out rocket shooting speed. Base attack speed is 1 per second and I'm pretty sure the travel time is less than that. Heavy armour can take a few hits from medium worms so if you have the flamethrower just run in, put a spot of fire on it and it will die in a few seconds. Faster, cheaper, easier. Lots of medium worms? There shouldn't be any reason you NEED to take out a big base at this stage of the game. Go build a tank instead.

Now, let me get this straight. Combat shotgun is too powerful, nerf it. Until then the best way to take out a base is laser towers, nerf them. Gun turret creep is now the best way, better nerf them too! What are you trying to achieve with this? Do you have some slow, roundabout method of dealing with nests and you want to force everyone else to use it? If we wanted to, we would. The problem isn't that it's too easy to turret creep, the problem is there aren't any realistic alternatives. With some healthy changes to personal militarisation turret creeping won't be necessary so will be widely unused.

[Frightning]

I think you guys are missing the point: I'm not even suggesting a fix for the underlying combat imbalances here (that deserves its own thread). The only thing I am discussing is the cost of shotgun ammo, versus how many shots and thus how much damage you get for making it. I'm not even messing with actual combat effectiveness at all. My only point of contention is that shotgun ammo is ludicrously cheaper than other ammo types for the damage it can bring, and that there is no reason for that to be so. I have offered plenty of evidence in support of those claims, and plenty of the 'counter evidence' offered is tantamount to non-sequiturs (there have been a few good counter arguments, like missing due to pellet spread=lower practical damage/shell, but you'd have to be landing only a single pellet to end up approximately on par w/ the SMG's ammo costs, which is fewer hits than typically happens in practice). I'm not even suggesting that they should be identically costed, just not so extreme in cost difference (and most other weapons are, if anything, more expensive than bullets per damage, so it's not like bullets are the imbalanced costing ammo types between bullets and shells, hence why I used it as a comparison).

[Deadly-Bagel]

I didn't miss the point, you're the one who got sidetracked defending rockets lol.

So back to my original statement, I think this solution is too simple and doesn't really achieve anything. Yes, it's cost effective, so what? There's no reason to have your main weapon as anything else so you've not really got anything to compare it to. It's more cost effective than an Armour Piercing Magazine? Well no it's not really because the APM is used in turrets which have further boosts to damage and firing speed, and must be loaded all over your factory and outposts (assuming you're using gun turrets) so not only are you getting better DPS and damage per clip compared to the SMG (not sure how it compares to the shotgun but pretty sure it's nearly as good or better) you can't really draw a relationship between the costs because they have entirely different purposes.