Attacking biters with turrets makes all weapons pointless

[Nova]

The problem with idea 1 is: The turrets have to know at which targets they have to shoot. If the gun turrets shot at the big biters and the laser turrets at this new "laser resistent biters", nobody would win.

Maybe a possible solution: Make worms and spawners resistent to laser. Something like 50% would make them twice as strong, but ca. 66% would be better.

[n9103]

I don't really see the value in debating this.
Factorio, and almost every game ever, has a point where early game stuff becomes essentially useless.
Factorio, and almost every strategy game ever, has more than one way to do the same task.

Personally, I would say that combat shotgun makes turret creeping pointless.
I would also say distractors makes the combat shotgun and turret creeping pointless.
I also would gladly choose a little bit of risk at failing a task (with or without permadeath) than spending 10x as long grinding away at the same task.

[Electroid]

you can easily turret creep with just regular turrets as well. just need to make the initial setup a little further back.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I think this can be un-stickied, with the turret activation time coming in 0.15 this won't be as much of an 'issue'. What they really need to do is fix the handheld weapons but devs have had zero comment on that so far =/

[Mendel]

I think destroyer capsules + flamethrower is already pretty close to making turret creep less of a no brainer in late game. Maybe a minor buff to armor and these weapons and it would be ok.
I am still firmly against nerfing turrets. Better buff other stuff instead.

[Deadly-Bagel]

They released a combat revisit FFF that acknowledged the problem isn't turret creeping, it's that players are forced into using it. They've instead reworked the weapons, maybe resistances, and greatly increased passive health regen to make assaulting nests more fun and feasible in the early game.

[js1]

One interesting way to nerf turret creeping: Make worms emit EMP shockwave, which would temporarily disable nearby player structures.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Guess there's no helping those that choose to be ignorant.

[BlakeMW]

With the Tank changes in 0.15 I've been having a blast using the Tank on Deathworld, the machine gun gets a +100% damage bonus and more range, it really shreds stuff even firing only AP ammo. The improved health and resistances make it stand up to Big and Behemoth biters a lot better. In fact I haven't even bothered with the cannon shells or cannon upgrades, just using it as a mobile heavy machine gun w/ power armor support (roboport, personal laser defense) has been more than adequate for eliminating nests in big/behemoth era, including on the hardest game mode.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I haven't been using any turret creep in 0.15 as I now have other ways to attack nests that I really need to get rid of. I did creep a tiny colony of 3 spawners early in my game but after I got the tank there was no need, and even with just the car I was able to use the machinegun to kill the spawners while clearing my path with poison capsules, or I could just run the small biters over because the car has so much impact resistance now. I guess being able to use combat items from inside the vehicle gives the player ways to do combat that are better than turret creep.


I'm using gun turrets into the late game and I'm not about to switch to laser turrets even though I have all the materials to make them because I'm still using coal power and I'm not about to switch to solar. Coal seems to last pretty well when I don't overstress it. I switched my main base to mostly solar because I'm never visiting it and one of the coal patches ran out while I was away, but all my other bases should be good for many hours yet on coal, and I finally started my first uranium base. So I just don't see a need for laser turrets because I got used to using gun turrets to get the job done. I had difficulty with the medium biters now attacking over walls (I think they definitely should NOT do that!) but now I have learned to place my walls one tile away from my turrets and it's working well against swarms of big biters. I'm using basic ammo for them because it's cheaper and I've researched enough upgrades they can still tear through big biter armor easily with that.

One concern I have is that no matter how far I advance my technology, my gun turrets will always have 400 health, no resistances, and a pretty weak range. Their damage is great and will get a whole lot higher if I ever decide to give them depleted uranium ammo, but big spitters can rip them apart in too little time. They kill big spitters fast but they are killed by big spitters fast, and their range is about the same as big spitters, contrast that with the fact that they are distracted by biters, and you have a recipe for dead gun turrets even if they can stomp the invading force in only a few seconds. I'm using roboports to repair my wall and replace lost turrets but I can't load much ammo into them without it being a liability. Sometimes if I load 100 magazines in, they get destroyed after firing only 8. I still have to belt-feed them because I can't get requester chests until I start high tech science, and logistic bots don't seem to want to reload turrets.

I would like to see this change at least: Give upgrades to gun turret health and range, not forever, just enough to make them survive.

[Deadly-Bagel]

With the Tank changes in 0.15 I've been having a blast using the Tank on Deathworld, the machine gun gets a +100% damage bonus and more range, it really shreds stuff even firing only AP ammo ... In fact I haven't even bothered with the cannon shells or cannon upgrades

I've tried the Uranium cannon and explosive cannon shells, nothing to write home about. The regular shells destroy a single spawner in one shot, and the explosives do ~50% hp to 3, maybe 4 spawners. The range is only slightly better than the machine gun so what's the point. Uranium rounds are stupidly powerful, with some research (not even getting into the infinite stuff) they kill spawners in 3 bullets or something. They melt everything up to Big Biters and even they don't get very far.

I'd rather see a usable difference, like say increasing cannon range to 3x of the machine gun. It's not as OP as it sounds, once the biters start rushing you they will form a barrier making it difficult for the shells to get through. The explosive shells still need a bigger AoE too.

[BlakeMW]

Yeah I've used all the uranium armaments now.

The Uranium magazine is rather good, but it's not that much better than AP Ammo (especially with upgrades) because a major limitation in how quickly the tank Machine Gun can kill stuff is in how quickly it can rotate to acquire the target, AP ammo will already knock down spawners and worms about as quickly as the machine gun can track. Uranium ammo is useful for saving inventory space or shooting Behemoths to death, or if you don't want to invest much in bullet upgrades.

The Uranium shells were disappointing. Once you get the basic shells to the point where they 1-shot spawners and big biters there's not that much more for the uranium shells to go. The explosive shell could use a bigger explosion, and in another thread in balancing I've suggested that armor piercing shells should deal both the piercing damage and the physical/exploding damage when they hit a big target like a Behemoth Biter, at the moment they either deal the piercing damage if the piercing damage alone is enough to kill the target, or if the piercing damage isn't enough to kill the target then only the physical/exploding damage is dealt. This makes the best way to use the piercing rounds firing through one target for (nearly) 600 damage then hitting a second target for the full damage but that's impractical and doesn't work against clusters of biters because a big one will absorb the shell and the piercing damage is lost. Of the shells, the exploding shell definitely seems the more useful one altough I'm not really convinced by either of them. Altough similarly to the Ammo, the uranium shells don't need upgrades as much as the basic shells - this is a poor argument because the cost of the uranium munition tech is so high compared with enough damage upgrades to 1-shot spawners, but it still counts for something as the cannon upgrades are extremely expensive at higher tiers.

[thereaverofdarkness]

The exploding shells can one-shot spawners without upgrades, but they don't pierce very well so after two damage upgrades, the AP shells become better for hitting spawners, but the exploding shells are still great for taking out a swarm of big biters that are chasing you. They don't have a very big explosion radius but they deal very high damage.

I haven't used uranium shells yet but I suspect they will be useless. If they had much higher damage, like the uranium gun ammo, then they would be useful for taking out behemoths. Imagine being able to use a single explosive uranium shell to take out a small cluster of behemoth spitters, or a single AP uranium shell to take out a line of 2-3 behemoth biters chasing you. With several damage upgrades that ideally should be possible, but they'll need something like 1500 base damage for it to happen.

I don't think the shells deal any piercing damage. I think the piercing value just means if the target has less hit points than the piercing value, the shot keeps going to the next target. I believe the amount of piercing left in the shot ticks away gradually as it goes through biters, so it'll only make it through maybe 3-4 medium biters.

edit: I underestimated how fast the cannon damage upgrades scale up. I think if the DU cannon shell were 600/300 damage instead of 400/200 (triple, just like how the DU magazine is triple the damage of the AP magazine), then it would be very possible to knock out behemoths in a single hit with a few cannon shell damage upgrades.

It's the DU Explosive Cannon Shell which needs a buff the most. It gets very little explosive increase which makes sense since uranium really only adds density and thus penetrating power to ammo, but the piercing increase given to the explosive shell is very small, thus making it not significantly different from the previous version. I would give it less total bonus physical/piercing power than the regular cannon shell, but a higher percentage over what it already had.

[BlakeMW]

I don't think the shells deal any piercing damage. I think the piercing value just means if the target has less hit points than the piercing value, the shot keeps going to the next target. I believe the amount of piercing left in the shot ticks away gradually as it goes through biters, so it'll only make it through maybe 3-4 medium biters.

Yeah there's no piercing damage type, but the shell is allowed to do up to 300 damage outright killing targets, but whatever is leftover of that damage is discarded if it hits a target it can't outright kill.

It's made more confusing by the fact the shell deals 200 physical and 100 explosion damage, but is allowed to kill two targets with 300 hp each. If you treat the piercing damage as something that doesn't exist that means the shell deals the explosion damage twice. And the maximum damage which can be inflicted during a pierce is reduced by physical and explosion resists, so the shell is indeed dealing physical and explosive damage to each target it pierces, that technically means it is exploding on each target it pierces as well as the final one it hits. (altough shells don't deal the AoE explosion damage on pierce so they deal the explosive damage without exploding)

[Aeternus]

You are confusing damage types (which get tested against the various resistances) with area of effect. Explosion is a damage type, not an area of effect. Granted, most weapons that do Explosive damage do have an AOE, but this isn't neccesarily the case as far as the damage calculations are concerned. You could set the shell to do 200 poison and 100 laser damage and it'd still hit multiple targets, if it has an area of effect. What it hits with does not depend on how it hits.

That said, any update on discouraging turret creep/turret rush? My own suggestion would be to give spawners and worms a stacking area effect (given the enemies look and behave like Zerg, I'd call it "Creepy Goo") around them that reduces the fire rate of turrets. The bigger the base, the nastier the penalty. That encourages the player to do hit and runs, possibly supported by turrets at the fringe. The player can then remove the Creepy Goo by "mining" it, possibly converting it into something useful or just discarding it. It should also disappear over time.

[BlakeMW]

You are confusing damage types (which get tested against the various resistances) with area of effect. Explosion is a damage type, not an area of effect. Granted, most weapons that do Explosive damage do have an AOE, but this isn't neccesarily the case as far as the damage calculations are concerned. You could set the shell to do 200 poison and 100 laser damage and it'd still hit multiple targets, if it has an area of effect. What it hits with does not depend on how it hits.

No I'm not. I'm confusing game code for real world . One would reasonably expect that explosion damage would come from something exploding and things can only explode once. Right? Makes no sense? Just crazy talk then I guess.

[Mendel]

Now that I can mass produce nukes, I fail to see any reason why I should turret creep anymore

[Deadly-Bagel]

That said, any update on discouraging turret creep/turret rush? My own suggestion...

Before trying to answer a question, how about defining what the question actually is? What is the problem you are trying to solve?

[thereaverofdarkness]

No I'm not. I'm confusing game code for real world . One would reasonably expect that explosion damage would come from something exploding and things can only explode once. Right? Makes no sense? Just crazy talk then I guess.

I think it would be cool if the shell would deal physical damage only to the targets it pierced, and unload all explosion damage on the final target. That would reduce how much pierce is used up by each target in a line, and it would mean that the final hit always hits pretty hard. Then again, I think that's basically how it already works. Even if it doesn't follow the rules I mentioned, the net result seems to be about the same.

That said, any update on discouraging turret creep/turret rush? My own suggestion would be to give spawners and worms a stacking area effect (given the enemies look and behave like Zerg, I'd call it "Creepy Goo") around them that reduces the fire rate of turrets. The bigger the base, the nastier the penalty. That encourages the player to do hit and runs, possibly supported by turrets at the fringe. The player can then remove the Creepy Goo by "mining" it, possibly converting it into something useful or just discarding it. It should also disappear over time.

I had an idea for expanding on the biters' complexity:

They could have colonies which are spaced reasonably apart from each other and start small but can grow over time as the biters begin to need more structures per colony. They could have multiple different structure types that have different purposes, and they would actively build these within their colony space. They would have to manage resources, so when they want to go on the offensive against you, they must gather resources to do it--perhaps leeching food from patches of ground flora. Instead of lots of tiny colonies, they would have a smaller number of them but could end up with sprawling colony expansion for instance to gather more food. I was thinking there should be root-like vines that grow along the ground from their structures, enabling transfer of food between them. They would only be able to place structures on a vine, and the player could not place structures on a vine. If the player places a structure within vine range, ie. between vines, then a vine may choose to grow underneath the structure and uproot it (maybe throws it on the ground as an inventory item) but that and any other growth costs food.

This sort of a colony would set up a kind of neutral zone between your bases and enemy colonies: they cannot expand their structures to within your turret range, but if their structures are immediately outside your turret range, their ground vines may reach out almost to your base. This could make it obvious to the player when a biter colony is too close for comfort, and also could pose a threat if the defensive wall comes down as it means the biters can rapidly expand right over the previous neutral zone.

[Delwack]

In the mid-game, tanks are typically easier and more cost-effective, in the late game nukes have mostly obsoleted turret creeping.

Also, uranium ammo has made even handheld guns relevant again (and this combined with buildings have fire resistance means that while the flamethrower is still great against units, it now falls to physical damage or explosive damage to take out buildings).

It's still an option (and a fine one in my opinion), just I don't feel it's a problem now that we are no longer reliant on it due to how under-powered weapons were. Thus the original premise: that all weapons are 'pointless' is not true anymore. The tank is extremely useful mid and even early-late game, nukes are now the weapon of choice for large-scale clearing projects,

Turret creeping can still be used, if you want to bother trying to maintain power and dealing with bot supply and/or roboport logistics on your frontline, but it's advantage is no longer extremely clear cut. I like where combat stands today; turret creeping is an option to fall back on if you want, but by no means necessary, or even the most efficient way of cleaning up anymore.