Rahjital wrote:[...]Laser turrets also have 47% longer range than gun turrets (25 tiles vs the 17 tiles of gun turrets) which pretty much erases the damage advantage of gun turrets, as it means you can have up to 22 rows (!) of turrets firing even if you use 2 tiles thick walls and an additional tile of free space to prevent medium and big biters from reaching the turrets directly.
Now, this is a rather hypothetical value - I'd presume this many lasers would actually make the defence weaker than it'd be with less lasers*. The reason being, the last, let's say 3 rows, would only ever fire if a biter came very, very close. If one of the last lasers in the line fire at him, no one else will, since he's already "marked for death", yet due to travel time, he'll still be able to connect two or three attacks** - it stands to reason that, if one of the other (closer) turrets had taken the shot, he'd be dealt with more swiftly.
In any case, I think this part of the discussion be best "solved" with a testing scenario from the map editor - a small-ish fortress, lasers on one side, turrets on the other, and place spawners in front of each, until one of the sides allows for damage to be received.
To return to topic:
Marconos wrote:[...]lasers need some type of upkeep to balance them out.[...]
I agree with the general notion, but am unsure if this should be applied directly to the lasers, themselves. My point being, lasers
do consume energy, and if Schmendrick's right, it probably remains at 200kJ per shot, regardless of firing speed. That would be a whole MW per turret firing, which is not a trivial amount. Applied to enemies, this would mean:
- - Small biters needed 2 shots = 0.4MJ, or 0.1 coal
- Medium biters needed 7 shots = 1.4MJ, 0.35 coal
- Big biters needed 35 shots = 7MJ, 1.75 coal
This is already
some amount of upkeep (not saying it's enough), and frankly, the discrepancy in upkeep
cost could also be "solved" if, for example, bullet magazines where buffed from 10 to 30 rounds each (imho, it's just bullets who are overpriced, even for use by smg - they're (arguably) more expensive than piercing shells!), putting the two turrets closer together in terms of upkeep cost. There's also the idle drain of lasers - for each 85 lasers, you need one steam engine running all the time at maximum capacity, in turn consuming 459 coal/hour just to pay for doing nothing, and really, 85 turrets is not
that many (had 1.1k in my last game), but it is another way through which one can balance them out.
Of course, none of this matters once you power them through solar - it is the one-time investment of 40iron/27.5 copper that gives you 37.8coal/h in worth***, forever and for free, which imho is unbalanced, and where (again, imho) either an upkeep cost should be applied, or a cost increase be in order.
* = Of course, this depends on what metric you use to compare defences - I prefer 'averagely received wall damage/minute'.
** = every big biter "chomp" on the walls costs you 0.9 iron/0.45 copper in repair, if I recall all numbers correctly.
*** = This doesn't seem huge, but you generally need more than one panel - if you assume 500 panels (for a daily average of a meagre 21MW), you'd be at 20k iron/ 13.75k copper, but you "earn" 18.9k coal
per hour, for ever.