[MOD 0.11.6][WIP] Better Turrets - alpha 0.0.3

[psychobarge]

Zach123, do the mod loads correctly with the last version of the game ?

[Zach123]

Updated factorio to 11.10 still the same error as before, attempting to run in 11.7 or 11.8 now. Also running mod alone to remove possibilities of conflicts with other mods. Thanks for the help!
Edit: tried 11.8 same error as before, Tried a fresh install of factorio as well.

[Degraine]

All those files were consolidated into a single large sprite sheet (man, that takes me back). So the mod's actually at fault here.

I copied some lines from the base mod's demo-particles.lua file over to the mod's particles.lua, and it's loading now. How well it works ingame once you start using turrets...I don't know yet. It's all placeholder stuff according to the comments anyway. Replace your copy of BetterTurrets/prototypes/entities/particles.lua with the attached file.

[bs1110101]

This is really good, bigger turrets so you can cover a large area and not just have turrets every 2 feet is a good thing. Why stop at 100mm though? Ground based turrets got at least as big as 28cm triple turrets, mostly converted from battlecruiser guns. Something like that would have a range of about 18km, easily able to cover a large swath of land without even needing walls to slow down the biters. This sort of thing would be greatly helpful when defending things, and above all else, make the boring line of turrets right next to each other the whole way down the side of your factory a thing of the past, most importantly making defenses better looking! Anyway, here's a picture of the turret i was using as an example, though many other old ship guns ended up like this.

[LordFedora]

You would have the "problem" of discovering whether guns can target something outside or radar range then...

[bs1110101]

Outside or radar range? Yeah, that is a problem. I say spotter drones and such would be the best fix. Also full scale range might be a bit much. The bigger guns should however be able to hit things a few of map squares away, with the biggest having a range of about 10 of them. Also, i'm using 11.8 and i'm getting the same missing sprite problem, trying to fix it by just tracking down the sprites from an earlier version and pasting them in. Edit: What version would they be in exactly? Edit 2: Fixed!

[psychobarge]

Hi guys

Sorry for the lack of updates, i still want to work on this mod but i currently don't have the time to do so.

The mod is under MIT licence ( i don't know if i have mentioned it before) and if one of you wants to update it, tell me and juste do it !
I just want you to keep the spirit of the mod

I will come back on it later but i don't know when...

Thanks

[kyranzor]

I havent had much time to play Factorio (between other games lol) so my progress on testing your late-game turrets is slow. In my game I'm just about to manufacture and start using the mid-tier ammo and the medium size turret! All the research is done

[Degraine]

I've been poking at them a bit, but my style isn't to get very confrontational with the biters, but I'm at about the same level as you, have access to mid-tier ammo and the second tier turrets.

Impressions so far: I like the gatling turrets, they're very efficient. I had to place 30mm turrets a long way behind the gatling turrets so they wouldn't waste most of their ammo uselessly on small enemies. I assume I'll have to push the 100mm turrets back even further to get them to shoot mostly at the big biters that need that kind of firepower.

[Degraine]

I've had more time to play around with these now.

At first I saw the guns as being specialised to each tier of biter (spitters can be mowed down any way you like, for the most part, thanks to their dismal resistances). Starting out with miniguns for small biters, I augmented a set of four of them with a couple of 30mm autocannons once the medium biters began appearing. Autocannons were placed well behind the miniguns so that the small biters could be mopped up before harder targets came into range. That worked fairly well, up until big biters and spitters started appearing. Big biters in particular simply have too many hit points and too high a physical resistance.

Minigun damage tops out at 6 points so they only do scratch damage against a big biter's 8 damage reduction. Autocannons don't fare much better, with most of their damage being resisted. 100mm turrets do a good hunk of damage but fire slowly and have expensive ammunition. And while everything was focusing on the big biter (or biters), the medium and small ones, and any spitters that decided to join the party, were unmolested. Spitters in particular would blow up minigun turrets with monotonous regularity simply because there was so many of them.

So overall, I do enjoy the mod but I think we need a better solution to the problem of big biters, without massive unresistable laser fire to bring them down quickly.

Other minor complaints:
* Collision boxes for turrets are not congruent with their sprites. The miniguns especially feel like they ought to be 2x2.
* Ammo-specific buildings seem unnecessary to me, since normal assembly machines can handle everything else just fine. Also, no module slots to upgrade them!

[Degraine]

I'm a little hesitant about putting this up, but I'm tired of messing around with it by myself. I've done an update to 0.0.3, changed a lot of stuff around on the back end to make it more consistent with vanilla. The recipes for 7.62mm ammo have been altered somewhat, and ammo boxes for 7.62mm turrets now come in magazines of 100 but stack to 5. Compatibility has been extended to Bob's Mods, including changing the recipe for reinforced bullets based on whether you've got CheaperSteel set in Bob's MCI. Recipes in general have been monkeyed around a bit, in particular 100mm shells only cost 2 solid fuel to make now.

I've added an option to re-enable vanilla weapons (which is set by default, change it in config), if you don't like using the projectile guns BT adds. Standard gun turrets should be re-enabled as well. They still accept standard magazines, and should in theory be your early-game turret, while 7.62mm turrets are a meatier mid-game replacement with more HP and some resistances to make them more durable to sudden attacks.

There is also some support for Bob's Warfare, though I haven't tested it yet. Psychobarge had some plans to extend the production chain a bit and I'd like to follow up on that, without needing BW to expand that chain. But as it stands, BW enables an additional intermediate item (drum feed casings, which are made from gunmetal) that needs to be included along with cordite to make complete cartridges. 7.62mm turrets require ammo boxes and do not take standard magazines, which means they also cannot take advantage of the more exotic ammo types BW introduces. In a future update, I'd like to add those AoE ammo variants as new shells for the 30mm turret. Gun speed/damage research is still disabled, so I think this should be sufficient encouragement to move up the tree, if BW is installed alongside BT. Turrets will be able to take advantage of scales of economy too, meaning it will be cheaper in the long term to make the specialised ammo for BT turrets, instead of keeping the basic turret around and feeding it the same clips that go into your personal weapons.

I think that's everything I wanted to cover. I disabled the ammo production/packaging factories until I can sort out what I want to do with them (or Psychobarge returns, whichever comes first), so for now most of the BT-specific recipes are set to advanced-crafting, meaning they can only be made in an assembler. This also means you can take advantage of modules.

No numbers are set in stone, particularly the new ones I've added. These are just me making some rough guesses at balance. 30mm and 100mm turrets are definitely not up to snuff yet.