Factorio Forums

Once an artillery shell fires at enemy bases/worms, it seems the game has decided that the shell will kill them, and they're impossible to attack with weapons (at least, destroyer drones + machine gun).

How did this happen? I was manually clearing biter bases out of the area in range of a defensive line with artillery, so it wouldn't take forever for the supply train to bring shells to slowly clear the area. I came across a spawner + some worms that wouldn't be attacked by destroyer drones. Trying the machine gun didn't work either. All this time the worms continued to attack me.

I was rather puzzled, then after a while a shell landed and killed them. Seems like the game decided at the time of launch they would be killed and therefore prevented other damage attempts on them.

Rather surprising when it happens, especially as worms can continue to attack at this time.

I can see this being tricky to fix though, but one thing that would help a lot (and would be useful too) is a clear visual marker to show where an incoming shell is targetted.

Yes - I know about the manual targetting marker. That is for manual fire only, and also vanishes around the time a shell is fired. How about an additional marker to show where an in-flight shell is going to land - for both manual and automatic firing. This would appear when the shell fires, and remain until it explodes.

It doesn't fix the 'invincible' base/worm, but would at least give an indication that a shell is incoming. Additionally, it would save wasted manual firing when you forget which enemy structures you've fired at but the marker has vanished.

This would be a result of the smart targeting mechanism, purpose of which is to not fire twice on one spawner and waste ammo. This is not right though, we will need to look into it further.

Also occurs for personal Rockets.

Its all that overkill prevention thing. determines a target is "doomed" and stops it from being targeted. Its a bit weird, but makes sense.

Well it could prevent overkill by preventing the game from automatically targeting something, yet still allow the player to point the mouse at it and shoot/grenade it/ram it with a tank. It doesn't seem right to actually disable the ability to deal damage from things like grenades/machine gun/ramming etc. Even things like personal laser defence could still fire on something like that if no other targets are in range.

Zavian wrote:Well it could prevent overkill by preventing the game from automatically targeting something, yet still allow the player to point the mouse at it and shoot/grenade it/ram it with a tank. It doesn't seem right to actually disable the ability to deal damage from things like grenades/machine gun/ramming etc. Even things like personal laser defence could still fire on something like that if no other targets are in range.

Pretty sure it doesn't effect AOE damage or ramming, just direct targeting.

I am pretty sure explosive rockets tend towards overkill. Anything they will splash is not protected, presumably because AOE damage is dependent on positioning at impact.