Factorio Forums

Playing with the new artillery wagon / targeting remote (which is awesome, by the way) and it occurred to me that it would be consistent if we could increase/decrease the target area similar to how we do with concrete, brick, and landfill. I.e. in effect laying down a field (or pattern) of fire or painting an area for indiscriminate shelling.

The utility is probably obvious, but these main ones occur to me:

• Expediting base destruction; i.e. don't have to target every single worm individually, while maintaining current balance.
• Hitting attack waves with artillery; i.e. far easier (though not guaranteed) to catch a fast moving targets when shelling an area.
• Forest removal.
• It'd be seriously cool to see a dozen or so shells land near-simultaneously.

Second this. Especially like OP's idea above for using keypad plus/minus like concrete areas for a bigger/smaller target area. Wanting a larger area having more targets and less clicking. Maybe/alternatively hold shift or control key and then drag left mouse to spam targets down without all the repeat clicking.

What would be the advantage of this over simply having them hit all biter stuff in a certain radius from the target (which would be big enough to cover an entire biter colony)?

The differences that I see:

• It would preserve the ability to do precise strikes; e.g. fire a single (targeted) artillery shell.
• It would allow for targeting non enemies (e.g. leading biter attack waves, trees, whatever, not just spawners/worms).
• It preserves balance; e.g. precision targeting each worm/spawner would be much more efficient than shelling a grid, but shelling a grid would be fewer clicks.
• The player remains in control and targeting remains distinct from just increasing the automatic attack range.