Walls have 1/3 health of laser turrets

[Jap2.0]

As stated in the title, walls have 350 (Okay, not exactly 1/3) health while laser turrets have 1000. Gun turrets also have 400 health. This seems counter-intuitive, since walls are supposed to take the beating while turrets deal out damage. I see a few possible solutions:

• 1. Add a tier 2 wall (possibly a reinforced wall with iron rods or steel or concrete, mentioned here.
  2. Decrease laser turret health; unfortunately, this would still leave gun turrets with a higher health. Lowering the health of turrets would make things very vulnerable before the mass- production of walls.
  3. Increase the health of walls - to give them a higher health than laser turrets would make them a bit OP, however. (See note below.)
  4. Any combination of the above.

Also: I just noticed walls have somewhat higher damage resistances than turrets. This makes them more useful, however most people will not notice this at first glance - they might not notice their relatively low health either, though.

Please let me know what you think on this issue.

[TurkleTrenox]

or weaker turrets, i dunno, just a suggestion

[Jap2.0]

Like #2, or make the ones we have a tier 2? In that case, we should probably have a tier 2 wall.

[BlakeMW]

Walls are almost literally cheap as dirt. Also among their resistances is 100% fire resist meaning they are great for funneling biters into a flamethrower turret kill zone. Finally they have more hp per tile than a laser turret, which only has 250hp per tile.

[Jap2.0]

Hmm, perhaps give the stone wall slightly lower resistances (for example, only, like, 80% fire) and then add a reinforced wall using more stone and iron rods, steel, or cement? My main problems are that: a. their health is lower than turrets, which may make them look weaker at first glance (I didn't notice this until I was looking on the wiki while writing this article, although I'm not suggesting removing or significantly decreasing them), and b. they are the only combat thing with a static strength. Everything else (turrets, bots) have damage researches and higher tiers (combat bots, gun -> laser -> flamethrower turret, or normal -> piercing ammo), even the player's armor.

Anyway, that's just my two cents.

[Qon]

Also: I just noticed walls have somewhat higher damage resistances than turrets. This makes them more useful, however most people will not notice this at first glance - they might not notice their relatively low health either, though.

So....
/thread

You also forgot about replacement cost (walls are cheaper) and entity size (2 tiles thick walls with stone walls entities takes same space as 1 laser turret thick wall). And repairing entities with resistance is cheaper and faster compared to entities with the same effective health with no resistance.

With enough firepower you don't even need walls or even repairs though...

Walls are almost literally cheap as dirt. Also among their resistances is 100% fire resist meaning they are great for funneling biters into a flamethrower turret kill zone. Finally they have more hp per tile than a laser turret, which only has 250hp per tile.

I thought that they only needed a single tile wide path to be able to go through. Meaning area is irrelevant, wall thickness is what you care about. Lasers have 500hp/tile width. I haven't used walls for a while now so I'm not sure.

Hmm, perhaps give the stone wall slightly lower resistances (for example, only, like, 80% fire) and then add a reinforced wall using more stone and iron rods, steel, or cement? My main problems are that: a. their health is lower than turrets, which may make them look weaker at first glance (I didn't notice this until I was looking on the wiki while writing this article, although I'm not suggesting removing or significantly decreasing them), and b. they are the only combat thing with a static strength. Everything else (turrets, bots) have damage researches and higher tiers (combat bots, gun -> laser -> flamethrower turret, or normal -> piercing ammo), even the player's armor.

Anyway, that's just my two cents.

Thread topic: "Walls are too weak!"
3rd post by OP: "Nerf walls!"

Also, do you think it's fun to run around and replace your stone walls with "high tech stone walls" for no reason? How will your suggestion make the game more fun?

[BlakeMW]

I thought that they only needed a single tile wide path to be able to go through. Meaning area is irrelevant, wall thickness is what you care about. Lasers have 500hp/tile width. I haven't used walls for a while now so I'm not sure.

True to an extent. Biters can fit through a 1 tile wide gap, but a swarm can't, they all mill around while going through single-file. Sometimes even a single biter seems to have trouble lining itself up properly to get through a 1 tile wide gap. In brief, even gappy walls are still rather effective at slowing an attacking and giving the turrets more time to kill them.

[Qon]

I thought that they only needed a single tile wide path to be able to go through. Meaning area is irrelevant, wall thickness is what you care about. Lasers have 500hp/tile width. I haven't used walls for a while now so I'm not sure.

True to an extent. Biters can fit through a 1 tile wide gap, but a swarm can't, they all mill around while going through single-file. Sometimes even a single biter seems to have trouble lining itself up properly to get through a 1 tile wide gap. In brief, even gappy walls are still rather effective at slowing an attacking and giving the turrets more time to kill them.

Ok, thanks. Well then I agree that hp/area is a relevant metric.

What are the resistances of walls and laser turrets? K, I'm checking the wiki:

Health: 350

Resistances:

Explosion: 10/30%
Fire: 0/100%
Physical: 3/20%
Impact: 45/60%
Laser: 0/70%

Laser Turret has no resistances.

Behemoth biters:

Damage: 90
Damage Type: Physical

Resistance has two aspects:

Percentile resistance

Percentile resistance is applied first and will just reduce the damage by the specified percent. If the percentage is 100%, the entity is immune to the damage. As an example, an entity having 25% resistance to 100 bullet damage would take 75 damage instead.

Decrease, or "flat" resistance

Decrease resistance decreases the damage by specified number as long as the result damage wouldn't be less than zero. If the result damage would be less than 0, the extra resistance is used as denominator in the fraction of damage that is going to be dealt.

Code: Select all

90*0.8 - 3 = 69
69/90 = 0.7666... (23.33% resulting damage reduction)
90/69 ~= 1.304 (30% more effective health and heals)
350 * 1.304 ~= 457

So against behemoth biters (even better against lesser biters) stone walls have effectivly 457 health/tile and 30.4% faster repair time! (Spitters have acid damage type so resistance is not a factor against those). That's about twice as good as laser turrets. Better than lasers during sustained fire while being repaired but slightly worse against a burst of damage by spitters. But they are cheap to replace if you somehow manage to lose one.

Edit:

Decrease < Damage:
Result damage = (Damage - Decrease) * (1 - Percentage)
Decrease >= Damage:
Result damage = 1 / (2 + Decrease - Damage) * (1 - Percentage)

This formula (decrease < damage is the relevant one) applies flat resistance before percentile, opposite of what the previous section of the wiki article describes...
The numbers would not change significantly regardless of resistance order though so it might not be worth recalculating anything with this other formula that might be the incorrect one. Doesn't change the fact that OP should have posted in "Gameplay Help" instead if he needs help building a good defence or wants to know when to use stone walls.

[Jap2.0]

Ah, thanks for calculating that. Their effective health is even higher against smaller tiers of biters (due to the flat resistance). I found it interesting (as you stated) that walls have no acid resistance, so if you build a wall without turrets, spitters will do 100% damage to it. Then again, building walls without turrets is a very rare (and often pre-spitter) occurrence.

I just went and looked at walls in-game, and there is absolutely no indicator of their resistances - in the crafting menu, tooltip, or infobox. I think this can be very misleading - which was not the main point of my original post, but you guys did a pretty good job of tearing my arguments to bits (although I think two more spaced out tiers could be nice (see above), but that would probably go in ideas and suggestions) and that's the main issue with the current system I have left. As I did, new players will probably look at the health of a wall and think, "that seems low". They might notice the fire resistance, which would make sense, but they wouldn't know about the resistance to biters. Perhaps this should be added somewhere?

Just another quick note before I post this: I know that enough turrets will prevent your walls from being damaged and I do not have problems with my defenses, that was not the point of this discussion.

[Qon]

I just went and looked at walls in-game, and there is absolutely no indicator of their resistances - in the crafting menu, tooltip, or infobox. [...] As I did, new players will probably look at the health of a wall and think, "that seems low". They might notice the fire resistance, which would make sense, but they wouldn't know about the resistance to biters. Perhaps this should be added somewhere?

Also: I just noticed walls have somewhat higher damage resistances than turrets. This makes them more useful, however most people will not notice this at first glance - they might not notice their relatively low health either, though.

How did you notice the resistances then?
Does tooltip / infobox not refer to the info shown when hovering your cursor over a wall entity placed on the ground?
All resistances is to types of damage, not sources of damage. There's no biter resistance, because biters deal physical damage with their attacks. I don't know if the biter stats are visible when hovering your cursor on them though. While I don't disagree that it it could be more clear how damage works in game, it wasn't that confusing to me since I have experience with how damage works in other games. Also I'm not sure how they would make it more clear in a concise and fitting manner except adding biter damage/resistance values and types on their tooltip if not already shown.

[Jap2.0]

Yes, I know. I was looking at the wiki for the health of some things while I was posting this and noticed it then. Later I checked it wasn't stated in any infoboxes or tooltips. I also know how damage resistance works, but thanks for the explanation anyway .

[Jap2.0]

Just noticed what you asked about how it would make the game more fun, and I really think it would just fit in better. Perhaps wall strength could be a research, but that seems OP. I'll ask you this question in response: How does replacing gun turrets with laser turrets more fun? Slow with fast or fast with express transport belts? Small power poles with medium power poles?

Also: I think many people would use stone walls for early game defense and "reinforced walls" or whatever they would be called for later on if, say, they have a defended train track blueprint or were walling in a large area (or moving walls) - you wouldn't have to replace them immediately.

[Qon]

Just noticed what you asked about how it would make the game more fun, and I really think it would just fit in better. Perhaps wall strength could be a research, but that seems OP. I'll ask you this question in response: How does replacing gun turrets with laser turrets more fun? Slow with fast or fast with express transport belts? Small power poles with medium power poles?

Also: I think many people would use stone walls for early game defense and "reinforced walls" or whatever they would be called for later on if, say, they have a defended train track blueprint or were walling in a large area (or moving walls) - you wouldn't have to replace them immediately.

Well you don't have to replace gun turrets with laser turrets. Some don't. My numbers from memory on combat are not exact here and come from before the combat rebalance in 0.15.
Even with piercing bullets the gun turrets have much higher (like 2 times) more dps/turret than laser turrets. Laser turrets have longer range though which means more turrets can attack at once so dps/turret is only one among several factor you need to qonsider. And gun turrets with uranium bullets are much stronger still.

IF you want to add flamethrower turrets you basically HAVE TO upgrade your walls to 100% flame resistance, otherwise your flame turrets will do more damage to your walls than the natives.

Changing from gun turrets to lasers simplifies your logistics, and the change is meaningful. The change from gun turrets to lasers is done for a gameplay reason. Upgrading walls to fire resistant walls is simply a compatability upgrade just for the sake of adding more tiers. If the reasoning for adding upgrades is "other things have upgrades" then you don't have a reason. Why do other things have upgrades? Depends on the upgrade. In case of lasers vs gun turrets, you usually choose lasers for easy logistics and building. But you might pick gun turrets because you want the firepower or because your energy network isn't built to handle the massive energy spikes that lasers produce. These considerations make the choice interesting. The choice depends on what base you want to build to support it. If you want to deal with ammo supply to outposts with a big train network then that's something some people find fun.

Belt and power pole upgrades are structly superior. It's fairly annoying to upgrade those. You don't have to upgrade though. And express belts are significantly more expensive, which makes sense in a way as it would be weird to build a megabase with belts that cost 0.72 iron ore each (productivity since it's megabase). As it is a logistics and production game, having tiers of things related to those subjects can be necessary for balance. Chemical plants and refineries don't have any upgrades since they are intruduced a bit into the game. Basic belts exist to be balanced even when you first start out. Their throughput is limited even for a moderate amount of assembly machine 1's which makes throughput considerations for your logistics a concept you have to learn in the early game also.

Stone walls on the other hand are not too strong in late game and not too powerful in early game, right? So introducing tiers for the sake of forcing you to upgrade is really backwards. Having tiers brings some positives and some negatives. Replacing entities is boring and so that's one of the negatives. "Other things have this weak gameplay design aspect, so walls should have that drawback too" is NOT a good balance suggestion. We tolerate having tiers for other things because they are motivated enough by the positives to outweigh the negatives.

[Jap2.0]

Hmm, I guess that's right.

My main problem now (which perhaps I should post elsewhere) is that there is no in-game info about wall resistances. This is even part of the reason I thought this needed to be balanced. Should I open that as a thread in ideas/suggestions?

[Qon]

Hmm, I guess that's right.

My main problem now (which perhaps I should post elsewhere) is that there is no in-game info about wall resistances. This is even part of the reason I thought this needed to be balanced. Should I open that as a thread in ideas/suggestions?

Sounds like a good idea to me. The biter damage quantity and type and their health and resistances is also info that I'm not sure where to find in game.

[Jap2.0]

I was just about to post this in ideas & suggestions when I came across several things:

• 1. A developer stated they were removed because they were cluttering up too much screen space. The community wanted them to be re-added, but nothing was done.
  2. It was suggested along with a heap of other suggestions (the rule is 1 suggestion per topic, but I didn't report it because it had been around for 2 months already, so there was no reason to remove it now) and pretty much ignored .
  3. Similar to above.

So, in summary, the developers removed them because they thought they had little use and were cluttering up the screen. I didn't post it as a suggestion because it had been posted before, and the devs didn't seem to be considering adding them back.

[bobingabout]

It does seem a little odd that a laser turret has 1000 health when the gun turret only has 400.

okay, the laser turret is more expensive, but it is essentially made of the same material, and is the same size, so why the huge disparity in health?

[Mooncat]

It does seem a little odd that a laser turret has 1000 health when the gun turret only has 400.

okay, the laser turret is more expensive, but it is essentially made of the same material, and is the same size, so why the huge disparity in health?

Maybe it is because gun turret is made from iron plates, while laser turret is made from steel plates.

[cpy]

There are walls in the game? LOL didn't know about that. Mod for life.

We need some anti spitter border fence that turrets can shoot through instead.

[Qon]

I was just about to post this in ideas & suggestions when I came across several things:

• 1. A developer stated they were removed because they were cluttering up too much screen space. The community wanted them to be re-added, but nothing was done.
  2. It was suggested along with a heap of other suggestions (the rule is 1 suggestion per topic, but I didn't report it because it had been around for 2 months already, so there was no reason to remove it now) and pretty much ignored .
  3. Similar to above.

So, in summary, the developers removed them because they thought they had little use and were cluttering up the screen. I didn't post it as a suggestion because it had been posted before, and the devs didn't seem to be considering adding them back.

Mods can now bring resistances back! Who said devs don't listen? q:
A mod will pop up soon probably, especially if someone asks for it. If it gets popular enough the devs might add the info back by default...

Modding

• Added optional "hide_resistances" to entity prototype to control whether resistances should be hidden in description for friendly forces. Default is true.