regarding guns in the late game

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Laie
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regarding guns in the late game

Post by Laie »

I'm playing railworld (default otherwise), so no enemy expansion. My artillery placements are strictly temporary, one-time only affairs. After an area has been cleared, the walls and turrets are packed into a train, to be used again at a later time in another place.

Currently I'm using flame throwers and laser turrets.This works a treat, the only downside is that I need a power line, and an outage would likely be be catastrophic. This puts some restrictions on how and where I can build the installation. I don't think I want to create the power locally, as that would substantially increase the footprint of the installation, not to mention the constant fear of running out of steam.

But what about gun turrets? I haven't looked at them in a good long while, but now that I do... with uranium ammo they will have a tremendous damage output, much higher than lasers. I'd still need power for the inserters, but that might be doable even with solar. I'd be willing to give it a try, but that will require some effort and I'd like to ask if anyone has experience with guns against behemoths and how does it play out? For scale: my evolution currently stands at 0.98.

The possible problems I see are:
  • lower range -- not sure if that matters. Killing at range is the flamethrowers' task and they do it extremely well, mostly by creating pools of fire. The turrets' job is to pick off the (few) biters that are getting too close so that the flamethrowers will keep hosing down the more distant areas. Turrets have a lower range but will be more deadly to anything in range, so the end result should be similar enough? I guess?
  • less damage resistance is concerning, as my laser turrets occasionally get spat at. While the damage is quickly repaired and never becomes critical, I wonder if the more fragile turrets might be destroyed.
  • the hassle of unpacking and recovering ammo might be more trouble than it's worth. Then again, I'm already doing that for walls and turrets and one more type of item on the list probably won't make much of a difference.
The sole benefit of using gun turrets would be that I'm no longer dependent on mains power, hence I could in principle afford to put the placement deeper into enemy terrain. I'm not sure how often the opportunity will even present itself, though, so perhaps I'm preparing for a once-in-a-blue-moon event. Opinions are welcome.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by Laie »

Edit: douple post trimmed down.
Last edited by Laie on Sun May 30, 2021 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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jodokus31
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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by jodokus31 »

Gun turrets are very strong with green ammo. They probably alone deal enough damage to survive endgame waves.
But they are indeed quite sqishy

1. You could have the flamethrowers (without oil?) in the front line as bait for the spitters.
2. If you have oil, the flamethrowers are a lot more resource efficient. You could do all the killing with them by let enemies run against a thick wall and only protect the flamers with gun turrets, if they almost breach

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by boran_blok »

My late game outposts are strictly a gun turret/flamethrower affair. With two artillery pieces added in as well. The size is within a single roboport construction range, and I have two overlapping blueprints. The shell, which is the station, roboport and request chests. This gets built by me where I want the outpost to be. And then the full outpost, which gets stamped over and is then built by the material supplied by train. This way the outpost itself is also self sustaining, unless the roboport and material chests in the center get destroyed it will always rebuild itself as long as materials are supplied by train.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by Laie »

jodokus31 wrote:
Sun May 30, 2021 12:40 pm
Gun turrets are very strong with green ammo. They probably alone deal enough damage to survive endgame waves.
Indeed they do. I've tried in the meantime, and their stopping power is ridiculous. You're probably right that gun turrets alone could do the job without any flamethrower support, though I'm not curious enough to put the hypothesis to the test.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by astroshak »

Actually, Turrets need the extra range of the Flamethrowers. There are Spitters that out-range the Turrets, so they would stop and snipe with impunity if you were limited to a Turret’s range. Flamethrowers, however, outrange all the Spitters (but not the Worms, should some be spawned that close to your walls).

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by jodokus31 »

astroshak wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 8:58 pm
Actually, Turrets need the extra range of the Flamethrowers. There are Spitters that out-range the Turrets, so they would stop and snipe with impunity if you were limited to a Turret’s range. Flamethrowers, however, outrange all the Spitters (but not the Worms, should some be spawned that close to your walls).
Behemoth Spitters have a range of 16. Gun turrets have 18.
So theoretically, gun turret range should be enough.
Is there is a sweet spot, where spitters can spit at gun turrets, but gun turrets cant shoot back?

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by astroshak »

Checking the wiki shows your ranges as being correct; I remember seeing my turrets being out ranged (they did have ammo, which went away when the turrets did) by so spitters at one point. I thought that was a vanilla game but it could have been a modded game.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by gGeorg »

Laie wrote:
Sun May 30, 2021 12:15 pm
I don't think I want to create the power locally, as that would substantially increase the footprint of the installation, not to mention the constant fear of running out of steam.
Couple steam storages attached to turbines are surprisingly small footprint. You can feed it by a liquid wagon train. Suck steam from your nuclear plant, then transport where needed. It is fun to do and reliable. When transporting liquid, make rather 2 trains, one for light oil - LC Then for steam L CCCC , to your front base. :ugeek:
Light oil train one is enough, consumption if just fine. For steam I would use two.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by Laie »

gGeorg wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 12:47 pm
Couple steam storages attached to turbines are surprisingly small footprint.
I've watched the power consumption of my laser turrets and couldn't quite decide how much power I'd need to bring. IIRC I had peak loads on the order of 60MW+, but that were only short spikes in consumption. 40MW came up pretty often but was still peak-ish. Baseline consumption, just for having the turrets sit around was, I cannot remember, more than I could provide by solar at any rate. So it was conceivable that I might run out of steam if I allowed myself to get distracted for half an hour or so.

All these considerations went out of the window the moment I tried gun turrets. I only need to power the inserters, a few solar panels will do. And, just by the way, they are quite economical with their ammo, too. It probably depends on a lot of things, but with my artillery range and and enemy thickness (standard rail world), an artillery placement will expend about 1500-2000 shells on automatic fire. Fending of the resulting biter attacks has never required more than 500 uranium rounds and half a tank of light oil.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by quyxkh »

Try lasers to aggro the spitters, guns to kill them.

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Re: regarding guns in the late game

Post by gGeorg »

Laie wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 3:59 pm
peak loads on the order of 60MW+, but that were only short spikes in consumption. 40MW came up pretty often but was still peak-ish. Baseline consumption, just for having the turrets sit around was,
60MW can be supplyed by 10 turbines. Attach 5 steam storages and set 2 trains L CCCC to supply your outpost by steam from nuclear. For extra spikes add several batteriies like 50. You dont need to check it, automate the trains. Factorio has the best delivery-departure system I have ever seen in game. even one trick pony games focuse only for transport like Transport Fever 2 are miles behind Factorio transport system.

Limiting yourself to mechanical MG is half fun. ;)
Here is an mining outpost in normal game, bitters are expanding. Outpost is connected only by train, no electric poles.
See the footprint of the steam mini powerplant? Later on I have added solars, majority of mining operation is powered by solars, but when lasers starts then turbines cover it. As you can see for an extra fun I added the arty wagon, so it creates waves of enemyes. as you can see, 6 turbines is ok.
On the mini map you can see the outpost overview.
Image

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