Friday Facts #422 - Tesla Turret

[vipm23]

The turret is more expensive and must be made on Fulgora so, for a while at least, you can't use it everywhere. The synergy with other turrets means that there's still a good incentive to include a few Tesla turrets to back up key locations. Artillery forts are a great early use case because it's an area you know will be attacked and you only need a few Tesla turrets to make a big difference.

By 'must be made on Fulgora', do you mean that the recipe is only available on Fulgora? You can't assemble telsa turrets on Nauvis from, say, holmium sourced from Fulgora?

[The Phoenixian]

The mention of high passive power draw makes me curious whether it's high enough to be worth working around.

Now that turret circuit connections exist, it seems like one could turn off the tesla turret and/or it's power supply until a nearby turret consumes ammo. (Or turn off a roboport/supply chest to delay repairs/mine replacement until a wave has passed, for that matter)

For an artillery fort especially, I find myself wondering whether it would be worth the trouble to turn off the fort's tesla turrets until the artillery battery has fired a shot and then leave it on for a few minutes, until everything that now wants to attack, has. That said, it looks like rocket turrets also outrange tesla turrets, if just by 6-9 tiles, so that might also be a viable control.

[Tertius]

I see three problems with this turret.

Quote from a spied out biter war council.

[Rhamphoryncus]

I'm a big fan of lightning weapons.. and this just isn't it. It's a proton-beam cannon with a electrical secondary effect, perhaps a paser turret.

Lightning should be jarring, sudden, explosive. It should strike like.. a bolt of lightning. Booming, not the sustained whine of the current particle beam.

A possible fix is to treat the particle beam as more of a guidance beam than the main weapon. Have it start a fraction of a second earlier so it has a chance to ionize the air, then fire the lightning (with its own sound effect!), then cut off the lightning just before the beam stops. Jumping should be faster too, but gameplay may take priority there.

I also recommend spending a few hours watching tesla coil music.. as research...

[Mycroft4114]

The two ideas I've seen thrown around that sound great:

1) Let this turret recharge bots. Just think of a cloud of discharged bots flying past one of these, then ZAP! The whole cloud gets a hit from the turret and zip away at full speed again. Great to have a few scattered about in high bot use areas! Faster than a roboport, but with much higher power draw.

2) Chained turrets. If one of these is firing, and others around it don't have a target, they can fire at the firing turret to boost power and increase damage or number of potential jumps.

[Gloynus]

Please forgive the impertinence, but in my opinion, this is the most unnecessary innovation. It becomes too easy to play late in the game as it is. You have to put mods that help not you, but the bugs, to feel threatened by them again. Some people want to deal with economy, and some want to fight for resources and constantly feel that the planet is really hostile and no matter how you develop, it will still remain so. "Tesla Turret" looks interesting, but without increasing the power of bugs there is no sense in it.

[Shuisman]

Love the design, love the sound, love the arc-graphics!

I'm confused why the forking is delayed? It looks very strange? It is like the 'particle'-based laser turret we had before and then got updated to be an instantaneous beam…

[bnrom]

3. So basically this is "laser turret, only better". Yes, it's harder to craft, but in the end, it occupies the same niche. I thought that was what the quality system is for: "same thing, only better".

Huh? How do they occupy the same niche?

Different range, different damage amount, different damage type, different cost per shot, a stun and push back effect, and semi-aoe? I don't see it as the same.

They explicitly mention how the tesla turret has far energy cost per shot so it's not a direct upgrade.

[bnrom]

It's interesting the turret is especially useful on Fulgora.

According to F398, Fulgora is "a lifeless place" so how is the turret "especially useful if Fulgora is your first planet?"
Are there lifeless enemies on Fulgora? E.g., robotic ones?!

Or is just that you unlock the turret there, craft it there, but only use it on other planets, and in space?

[meganothing]

Please forgive the impertinence, but in my opinion, this is the most unnecessary innovation. It becomes too easy to play late in the game as it is. You have to put mods that help not you, but the bugs, to feel threatened by them again. Some people want to deal with economy, and some want to fight for resources and constantly feel that the planet is really hostile and no matter how you develop, it will still remain so. "Tesla Turret" looks interesting, but without increasing the power of bugs there is no sense in it.

I always wonder if these posts are ingenious social hack attempts to get Wube to reveal the new enemies.

[BattleFluffy]

That looks sweet. The electrical arcing effects are really cool, but it also looks like there is a "laser" running down the center of the beam, which kind of spoils the electrical effect a bit. It looks like a laser that just happens to have electrical arcs floating around the beam. Does it look wrong without that?

[MunchyButtons]

Fingers crossed for tesla tank/car/new vehicle like a hovercraft maybe hopefully?

[Rebmes]

Got pretty excited the moment I saw the title in the e-mail. Made an audible sound. Waited all day to get a chance to read it.

I love it, looks awesome, very excited, and very glad stuff like this got to stay in the game even though it's not "strictly necessary".

You already know factories of all sizes will be constructed

[motmontheinternet]

Yet another "new" thing I've already seen and experienced in the completely free Space Exploration mod

No you haven't, you in fact have not defended a base with this turret ever.

[dasiro]

Is the beam always procedurally generated on the fly when a turret shoots? All that logic for every single beam?

it seems extremely overcomplicated both in design and generation for something that could be animated generically but now probably took up weeks of dev-time and way too much cpu-power for what it actually does

[Fen1kz]

Official request for FFF on how Earendel draws these beautiful line arts. Is it photoshopped pencil/pen or digital? What is the software, how does he start, are there multiple layers, how shading is done?

Pleeease.

I was sure it's pencil and pen, but then I saw arts with proton beams and now I'm confused.

[Sean Mirrsen]

"Particle accelerator that causes lightning to jump to target", that's normally called an Electrolaser, I believe. Still a neat weapon to have.

[Shimohi]

Man, I kinda hope for more PvE/Towerdefense challenges now, also a higher tier wall would be cool.

[mmmPI]

Is the beam always procedurally generated on the fly when a turret shoots? All that logic for every single beam?

it seems extremely overcomplicated both in design and generation for something that could be animated generically but now probably took up weeks of dev-time and way too much cpu-power for what it actually does

Hey part of the logic is also for which biters to target, this compared to previous mods will be optimized from inside the game. Then it is used for turrets and guns, from what we know now, but it could be used for ennemies or in mods later. The rendering itself doesn't need to run as much as the targeting logic, since non-visible turrets are expected to fight, but not necessarily render their actions if no-one is looking.

I don't know what is "generically", but if you consider sprite images, one still have to resize and orientate them everytime, if you add a few smart offset and masks to make them look always different it's not going to be order of magnitude more expensive to run it seem to me. Like a complicated recipe with cheap ingredients is still cheap at the end.Also I think it's even more complicated than devs explained, because then there is the glowing effect, visible at night and the edge cases, like when the turret is destroyed when it's firing and the beam is interrupted. That sure took some dev time but i assume that time was spent for the features to not consume that much cpu ^^, maybe only gpu that seem to me logical if other people's task is optimization, it would be contradictory that the shiny stuff is allowed to ruin the efforts in others parts. I read this FFF thinking it's not like "hey there's this new effect in the engine we use to make our game so we added it because it's fashionable hopefully it gets updated to a more optimized version before October". To me like craftmanship vs outsourcing generic spare part quality type of deal. Except not presented in a judgmental way with a bad example put aside to look bette, very classy devs

[CPU_BlackHeart]

Oh my goodness, this looks amazing! The military aspect is one of my favorite parts of this game. Having to build a perimeter and defend your base from constant assaults with 400%/400% or the ever challenging 800%/800% Rampant Hell World runs, this turret will certainly help a lot with making life easier in these situations.

Really hoping there are a good two-to-four new enemy types to make the military research more abundant. This game has the perfect system which allows for all sorts of playstyles, people who just want to build massive factories and not worry about attacks can simply turn biters off, and then those of us who prefer to build walls and guns can sack half of our iron and power into destroying them only for them to come back stronger and stronger. I love it!