Cannon shells kinda meh

[Escadin]

Is it just me or do cannon shells (uranium or otherwise) not have nearly enough effective range to combete with just plain gun ammo (uranium or otherwise)? I mean their research is expensive as hell so you'd expect them to be strong. Yet, I can clear nest much fasters and easier by just sticking to the gun. Further more, you have to compensate for possible friendly fire and I feel like the cannon offers nothing of value in return.

What do other people think?

[The Eriksonn]

Explosive Shells one hit Alien bases and can take out a horde of small/medium biters following you so i Think they are good(when combined with regular ammo)

[SirSmuggler]

The shells are usefull when there are to many biters between you and the bases you want to hit. Explosive shells will detonate on inpackt with any biter and so will not reach the bases. The piercing shells will go through a bunch of biters and still hit the base behind them.
That's how/when I use them any way.

[Escadin]

Doesn't sound like you guys have seen fully upgraded uranium ammo. It instantly melts through anything except behemoth biters without any firing delay. If area damage is what you need you're better off with the flamethrower, grenades or poison globes because those are much cheaper to produce and research.

Well, can they pierce behemoth biters?

[Hannu]

Devs have given new effective weapons without balancing old ones. Tank with shells and also combat bots are quite useless now. You can use them, but typically only reason is to build something complex because of complexity is fun. It is more practical to research few things more and build Power armor I with Fusion reactor.
I do not know if situation is different if you choose very difficult settings but normally resources near starter base are enough to build some yellow science and Power armor I and there is no need for massive biter clearing operations. But cannon shells and especially combat bots are expensive too. I hope that they make overall balancing of all weapons and hopefully give more useful properties to expensive combat bots.

[Escadin]

I think the overall balance isn't that bad. Destroyer bots and distraction bots always have a place because you can use them in addition to everything else (unlike like different weapons, can only fire one weapon at a time). They also provide cover for your construction bots so you can repair on the battlefield. There is no competition here.

However, the balance between competing weapons is still kinda off imo. At least everything scales into late game since their last balance pass which was a huge success. Yet, the game could stand a final balance patch where every competing piece of hardware (so weapons and turrets) get their own niche among their kind.
Admittedly, it's understandable if people actually want to differentiate between gun and laser turrets by what resource you have to feed them so perhaps they could stay the way they are. But flame thrower turret, rocket launcher, shotgun, tank cannon etc. could use more differentiation to make them interesting choices. Small tweaks to fire rate, range and damage area size could already accomplish a lot here.

Again, unless there is something I have missed all this time?

[BlakeMW]

A lot of weapons are only good if you're into conspicuous consumption and don't care about cost-effectiveness. The ammo upgrades are cheap and good and make all three kinds of ammo really good especially when combined with other multipliers (tank MG or turret). The tank cannon upgrades are hella expensive, sure they make the tank cannon good, but for that kind of cost you can just research nukes and nuke the biters to your heart's content.

Defenders can be okay because you don't need to invest in any special upgrades and they get both bullet upgrades - problem is they go obsolete really badly. Destroyers are kind of expensive and their upgrades aren't that good and I don't think they end up as cost-effective as nukes. Poison Capsules are excellent in conjunction with Tank, though they lose out a bit once Behemoths evolve - still not to be underestimated even then. Of the handheld weapons there is a lot to be said for the flamethrower, even with the 0.15 nerf it has the advantage of the "touch of death", the barest spurt of burning liquid will kill a Behemoth Biter (I think you need lvl3 upgrade to guarantee this) so you can spend most the time running at full speed - so much better than any other handheld weapon. For a foot build un-upgraded nukes for nest elimination and a modestly upgraded flamethrower for cleanup is very solid.

In the end the cost-effectiveness champions are:

Tank MG + Poison Capsule (mid game)
Flamethrower + Nuke (end game)

[Frightning]

I have been meaning to make a post about combat in post 0.15 world, but, as I haven't finished going down the tech tree in my first 0.15 game yet, I don't have all the data I want to construct my opinions from. That said, I have already noted that Cannon shells seem functionally inferior to Explosive cannon shells in that the latter are just more effective than the former in every situation I've encountered in practice...and the Tank MG imo does not need the 100% bonus damage that it now has, even Gun turrets had that removed thanks to ammo damage changes and the addition of Uranium ammo, so I see absolutely 0 reason that the Tank MG should have that (heck, Gun turrets having their own line of damage research also feels unnecessary and imbalanced, especially when what Gun turret's really need is an upgrade path into something sturdier so that they don't get alpha'd so easily by Big/Behemoth spitters in the late game).