Shotgun is embarrassingly bad right now

[bobingabout]

Gating it behind oil kills it.
If you have oil, you have a tank. You have a flamethrower. It's over at that point.

Pretty much this. The shotgun was the meanest weapon in an old tech tree that only had SMG and shotguns. The shotgun has to compete with many stronger weapons now. Its current tech location is simply too deep to ever pay off.

old tree still had a flamethrower, it was just shit.
The flamethrower overhaul that added flame turrets changed the flamethrower from. "I'm telling you that I'm burning down your village" to "I'm actually and quite literally burning down your village".


My weapon of choice right now is the Assault rifle. it fires harder and slower than the SMG, able to penetrate heavier biter armor for more ammo efficiency. It's a weapon in my mod.
There's also the sniper rifle, but, that overkills most of the time, then you have to wait too long before you can fire again.... the range is useful, but not really needed for general use.

[bobucles]

Even with max pre-space research a combat shotgun deals higher dps than a submachine gun

That's not true after armor comes into play. Pre space shotgun ammo pellets for (8 * combat 1.2 * science 2.2 =>) 21 damage. Biters have 4/8/12 armor as they grow to behemoths. The 8 armor alone represents a loss of nearly 40% of the shotgun's damage output, and 12 armor cuts off more than half.

The SMG hits for (8 * 2.2 research =>) 17.6 damage, placing it in an even weaker position than the shotgun. However the damage output is flat out doubled in a tank, which not only gives a great boost to 35 damage but gives the wonderful protection of a tank.

I could run the full math, but the truth is it doesn't matter if the shotgun hits harder or not. Being in a tank is a vastly superior option to being on foot and suffering the slowdown of using the shotgun. Mobility and superior defense wins. In a tight resource scenario it isn't even worth upgrading shotgun damage because that takes away from research that can go into bullets, turrets or superior tech.

[quyxkh]

Even with max pre-space research a combat shotgun deals higher dps than a submachine gun

That's not true after armor comes into play. [...]Being in a tank is a vastly superior option

I think you might have missed

I've found shotguns helpful for early-ish big-camp assaults when my main ride's a car and it's a bit too easy for that to get swarmed and destroyed.

I do major nest-wiping expeditions as early and as far out as I can manage. I think biters are best regarded as fleas: kill them all, it can only get worse. Biter evo should be almost all spawner kills until it just doesn't matter any more. Leave maxed-out gun turrets scattered around the outlands, no need to get any better than spotty, just enough to eventually distract and kill most of the expansion groups. A few leakers aren't trouble, turret warnings are cheap radar.

And I think you're wrong on the math. Pre-space piercing rounds do (8+12.8)×15/s, piercing shells do 16×(8+12.8)×3.2/s, armor changes the number but not the result. Early ammo gets left behind right after burner inserters, AE2 and Mil 4 are very high priority research.

Uranium rounds change that dramatically of course, but if I've got uranium rounds I've also got or will soon have arty which moots this whole discussion, maxed-out gun turrets protecting arty are king of the late game. Biters enraged by arty fire are too stupid to pull up and deal with the gun turrets before they get kilt.

Drop ~sixty launches' worth of research into the gun turrets+bullets combo, each turret does ~550×15/s ~ 8250 dps.

Drop the same research into laser turrets, each does ~130×6.6/s = 858 dps.


and: try it. Your first two blue researches are AE2 and Mil 3/4, this is _very_ early, load up a car with a couple hundred turrets and the rest is AP ammo, you'll be coming back empty. Get modular armor, 5 batteries, a shield, 15 solar, nightvision all for use as needed, a combat shotgun, a few stacks of piercing shells. Dedicate slot 1 to turrets, 2 to ammo, 3 to repairs. Leave a loaded turret behind in every camp you wipe plus maybe some in really empty areas, you're not ten hours in here.

With the shotgun you'll two-hit your way through anything worth getting out of the car for, this expedition will be enough to clear about a 1kby1k area, by the time you get back you'll have done a lot of blue research and be ready for the expand and exploit part with a nice map to plan with..

[bobucles]

piercing shells do 16×(8+12.8)×3.2/s

Combat shotty multiplies another 1.2x damage in. It's very handy.

I find that by the time I can fill turrets with a full 200 stack of ammo (don't ever ever ever do this, you'll lose the turret and 190 stacks of ammo. place 4x50 or 8x25 turrets instead) I can also build laser turrets. I don't even use a hand gun at that point any more.

I don't think the shotgun is weak. Rather the game balance changed around shotguns, and it simply got outclassed by all the superior combat flavors.

[Frightning]

piercing shells do 16×(8+12.8)×3.2/s

Combat shotty multiplies another 1.2x damage in. It's very handy.

I find that by the time I can fill turrets with a full 200 stack of ammo (don't ever ever ever do this, you'll lose the turret and 190 stacks of ammo. place 4x50 or 8x25 turrets instead) I can also build laser turrets. I don't even use a hand gun at that point any more.

I don't think the shotgun is weak. Rather the game balance changed around shotguns, and it simply got outclassed by all the superior combat flavors.

Advent of Uranium ammo, and buffs to firearm and piercing mag really made the shotgun lose its niche compared to other weapons in the game. At the same time, because of how much metal the shotgun (especially Combat Shotgun) can put into the air, you have to be careful about buffing the per-pellet damage because it can rapid get to the point where Combat Shotgun once again becomes DPS king by a longshot. I ran numbers for this earlier in the thread, basically the problem is that the shotgun's raw DPS is actually pretty competitive, but because it achieves that with a high volume of fire (counting pellets separately), that means it performs poorly against armor (read: higher tier biters and worms; biters also rush you and hence are usually what the Shotguns will be shooting at in practical scenarios) when compared to the SMG for similar DPS levels. At the same time, if its raw DPS is TOO much better, then with enough research it will start to outpace the SMG handedly again. So it's maybe not so easy to fix (I'm wondering if lowering pellet counts a bit may be worthwhile to give more room for buffing it's effective DPS against armored targets a bit without making raw DPS get out of hand).

[Ranakastrasz]

And that is why I went and mostly removed linear armor from my revamp mod. Percentage based resistances for most things make it a lot easier to make minor changes without drastic differences.

[thereaverofdarkness]

So it's maybe not so easy to fix (I'm wondering if lowering pellet counts a bit may be worthwhile to give more room for buffing it's effective DPS against armored targets a bit without making raw DPS get out of hand).

I would go the other direction and increase the number of pellets. That way you can buff its DPS solidly above the submachinegun without it stepping on the submachinegun's toes. It needs that higher net DPS to make up for its spread fire. It has two penalties over the submachinegun, one which you noted:
1.) It can't shoot over the biters to hit the spitters/spawners behind them.
But you missed:
2.) It can't pump all of its damage into the biters until they are already upon you, at longer range, pellets are missed or they hit enemies around them first.
The shotgun's net DPS is absolutely pathetic when compared to any area damage source, such as explosive rockets, poison capsules, the flamethrower, even the pitiful grenade. Given it's only effective when used against several enemies (so you're not missing half of the pellets or more), it makes no sense that it's particularly INeffective against more enemies.

All of you who talk about ways you use the shotgun and like it, I can't help but think you're just used to it and haven't tried the other weapons after they got buffed. And quyxkh: you're not even using the shotgun. You're using gun turrets, and the shotgun is merely the thing you have equipped in the weapon slot.

[bobucles]

More pellets increase the value of biter armor. It will cause the swing between weak shotguns and strong shotguns to be stronger than ever before. That might be an okay thing. I don't think that more shotgun damage will fix the core weakness of shotguns. The biggest issue is that the shotgun is foot soldier only.

Shotguns are only valuable at very narrow points of the game. There's marginal utility for pushing a nest in the super early game, when resources are scarce. There's one viable spot in the whole 3 minutes of research between unlocking the combat shotgun and unlocking the tank. There's another narrow spot between getting max normal shotgun research and blowing it away with uranium ammo. Outside of those windows, what are you even doing? May as well not get the shotgun in the first place. It's almost as useful as iron chests in terms of utility.

Even if bullets are not efficient, bullets make your base work. There is a mandatory reason to get bullets and no particularly strong reason to get the shotgun.

[Frightning]

So it's maybe not so easy to fix (I'm wondering if lowering pellet counts a bit may be worthwhile to give more room for buffing it's effective DPS against armored targets a bit without making raw DPS get out of hand).

I would go the other direction and increase the number of pellets. That way you can buff its DPS solidly above the submachinegun without it stepping on the submachinegun's toes. It needs that higher net DPS to make up for its spread fire. It has two penalties over the submachinegun, one which you noted:
1.) It can't shoot over the biters to hit the spitters/spawners behind them.
But you missed:
2.) It can't pump all of its damage into the biters until they are already upon you, at longer range, pellets are missed or they hit enemies around them first.
The shotgun's net DPS is absolutely pathetic when compared to any area damage source, such as explosive rockets, poison capsules, the flamethrower, even the pitiful grenade. Given it's only effective when used against several enemies (so you're not missing half of the pellets or more), it makes no sense that it's particularly INeffective against more enemies.

All of you who talk about ways you use the shotgun and like it, I can't help but think you're just used to it and haven't tried the other weapons after they got buffed. And quyxkh: you're not even using the shotgun. You're using gun turrets, and the shotgun is merely the thing you have equipped in the weapon slot.

Bob's response hit the nail on the head regarding this, the problem w/ increasing pellet count is that it exacerbates that quickness of the useless-efficient transition (I vividly recall, back in the 0.12 days, how utterly useless the SMG w/ basic mags was for attacking spawners because of the spawners -2/0% armor v. base dmg of 2 at the time for basic mags. If you had enough techs, or used the shotty which has base of 4, that would change quickly, same phenomenon happened w/ shotgun and medium biters back then, -4/0% armor v. base dmg of 4=shotgun was basically useless against medium biters, until you had a lot of upgrades, then, even with basic shells, it was usable, similar situation happens with piercing mags in SMG but those had base of 5 back then, so it was more forgiving). Try running the numbers for effective dps against flat armor for Shtogun shells v uranium ammo, you'll see how rapidly effective dps falls off a cliff as flat armor starts to get upwards of 50% raw damage per projectile (it's asymptotic scaling, which is even more aggressive than exponential).

[thereaverofdarkness]

No, I solved all of that with my proposed values.

Military 1: unlock submachinegun and shotgun, also let's buff shells from 12 to 15 pellets.
Submachinegun: 50 DPS, direct shot, burns through ammo rapidly
Shotgun: 75 DPS, collision shot, spreads, ammo-efficient

Military 2: unlock piercing ammo and combat shotgun
Submachinegun: 80 DPS, direct shot, better armor piercing vs. larger biters and worms
Shotgun: 180 DPS, collision shot, spreads, weak against physical resist, but high DPS = good against spawners and spitters

Military 4: unlock piercing shells and explosive magazines (explosive damage type, no radius), also remove gun turret damage research entirely
- piercing shells increased from 16 to 20 pellets, explosive magazine does 16 explosion damage and costs 1 explosive (plus other mats) to make
Submachinegun: 160 DPS, direct shot, explosion damage type is particularly good vs. big biters, and particularly bad vs. big worms, also gives type choices
Shotgun: 384 DPS, collision shot, spreads, very high DPS and doing okay against physical resist now
Gun Turret: new ammo type makes up for losing damage research, prevents gun turrets from becoming stronger than player submachinegun

Uranium Ammo: unlock uranium magazine and uranium shells (20x12)
Submachinegun: 240 DPS, direct shot, excellent physical resist penetration, burns through U-238 quickly
Shotgun: 576 DPS, collision shot, spreads, more efficient use of U-238 and good physical penetration
- shot spreads more than previous shells, both to enable better crowd control and prevent stepping on toes of uranium magazine
Gun Turret: uranium ammo turret heavily nerfed to put it in line with other turrets at the same research level
- there should be a research to increase gun turret range and health, so it can compete with other turrets in the late game

With my numbers:

At the start of the game, the shotgun is great for assaulting spawners if that's what you want to do. The submachinegun is superior for defending your base.

With piercing ammo and small biters, either weapon works great.
With piercing ammo and medium biters, the shotgun actually does more damage per hit (6) than the submachinegun (5), and so is still better for assaulting spawners, though damage research helps decrease the gap. Submachinegun is still mostly better for base defense because it doesn't damage your own structures.

Up to this point, most players probably aren't super interested in the shotgun because they aren't going after spawners. But if they were, the shotgun would have been ideal.


Soon the player will unlock the car, flamethrower, tank, and now they have better things for assaulting spawners. This is usually the point when a player will begin doing assault runs, or they will opt for turret creep. But the shotgun and submachinegun will come back into style later.

Military 3, no upgrades to either. It's probably just as well, the player isn't going to be using these weapons much at this point. The one concern is that gun turrets are beginning to fall behind when big biters come out. With plenty of bullet damage research they can get over this hurdle, but laser and flame turrets are also a solution. Gun turrets will also make a return, or if you're dedicated to them they never have to quit working in the first place.


Military 4, you can start assaulting spawners on foot again with anything but the flamethrower.
- Submachinegun shines in being able to shoot past the biters to hit the spawners and worms. You can hotswap between it and the flamethrower to mow down the wall of biters. This works well with great armor so you can stay alive, maybe a stack of fish too. You can also toss grenades over the biters; cluster grenades actually kill spawners, worms, and big biters really well. Just be careful they don't kill you!
- Shotgun can now cause good damage to the big biters. Submachinegun does too, but its DPS is too low to be worth shooting them during a spawner assault. You can use shotgun in tandem with combat robots and poison capsules to mow down all the biters and spitters as they spawn, allowing you to focus heavy fire on the spawners and worms.

So at this point both work, but I'd say the shotgun would work better on smaller spawner clusters, being able to keep up with the spawns and generally keep you from taking damage so you're less reliant on good defenses. The submachinegun/flamethrower method is a lot trickier and involves mixing in other weapons, needs a lot of defense, but can be effective against substantially larger spawner clusters. If they get too big, you should probably just use the tank. Of course, tank is probably superior to either on-foot option in terms of sheer power, but some players may prefer the improved mobility on foot especially with exoskeletons. If you can kite the enemies well at first, and keep the threats dead, you can make the exoskeletons pay off and not need shields much. Good when your equipment space is limited.
- This is probably also the best time to be using combat robots, and they will work best in tandem with submachinegun, shotgun, and flamethrower. They are killed easily by explosives. They are probably killed easily by shells, but it shouldn't be too hard to keep them out of your line of fire. Then again I haven't tried it. If they die too easily to shotguns, I would advise giving them a few points of physical resist, since they should work better with shotgun/submachinegun than anything else.
- Gun turrets start to make their comeback here, with the new ammo they can kill big biters easily again. Also worth mentioning: if you have to kill a big worm, shotgun will kill it several times as fast as submachinegun if you can get into close range with it.


But with uranium ammo and high level power armor and equipment, you might start to feel like the tank's defenses get a bit inferior to your own. You can still use it, certainly with the higher-end fuels you can make it kite more easily. It gets more range with uranium tank shells. The uranium ammo in the submachinegun can kill spawners almost as fast as you can drive past them. But you still have to agonize over rocks because those will get your tank killed. With high-tier armor and equipment, combat on foot can simply be less stressful even if you don't kill spawners quite as fast. Or some people might find it actually easier.
- Shotgun with uranium shells can kill anything you point it at. Submachinegun with uranium ammo can kill anything you point it at. Why use either? You'd use the shotgun for more total DPS, excellent when there's a ton of biters coming at you, trying to block your path. I'd say shotgun is the premium weapon in this case. It'll work on large spawner clusters as long as you watch your health and don't bite off more than you can chew.
- Why use submachinegun? Familiarity. Players who reached this point of the game preferring base defense, and rarely doing assaults, will have been using the submachinegun all along. Shotgun may be better, but submachinegun is good enough. As there isn't a need to switch, many players won't. Submachineguns will be adequate for smaller spawner clusters, and tanks/flamethrowers/cluster grenades/rocket launchers can fill in for anything larger.

[quyxkh]

There's one viable spot in the whole 3 minutes of research between unlocking the combat shotgun and unlocking the tank. There's another narrow spot between getting max normal shotgun research and blowing it away with uranium ammo. Outside of those windows, what are you even doing?

Once the mk2 armor hits the tank's day is done, I'll haul out my shotgun tyvm. (Looks adoringly at his Power Armor Mk2, which he's named "Twinkletoes": Who's the best tank? You are! Yes, you!).

[BlakeMW]

Once the mk2 armor hits the tank's day is done, I'll haul out my shotgun tyvm. (Looks adoringly at his Power Armor Mk2, which he's named "Twinkletoes": Who's the best tank? You are! Yes, you!).

No it's not.

Once Nukes enter the picture the Tank's day is done, along with basically every other offensive option.

But until then there is scope for the Tank. The Tank offers about as much durability as a heavily shielded Power Armor II setup if you're careful in how you use it (don't use the tank as a battering ram at Big+ evolution level, being bitten is much less painful than the collision damage) and brings a couple of very powerful weapon systems to the table, the Tank weapons deal much more DPS than handheld weapons except flamethrower. But the most useful thing is loading up with Personal Laser Defense equipment, which still fires from within the tank. This gives you a lot of durability and a lot of firepower and speed on par with 2x exos. The buffs to both tank and PLD over the versions has made Tank much more competitive in the late game. Being on foot can give you more speed and agility but it's definitely the lower firepower option, unless you're using the personal flamethrower against units (and note that every kind of capsule is just as effective when deployed from the Tank as when deployed on foot, except Poison which is more effective from Tank since you can park in stacked poison clouds and let everything trying to bite you perish, Poison isn't good against Behemoth Biters but makes short work of anything weaker).

Now once you get nukes, that and the flamethrower are all you need. A nuke to make lots of stuff go away, the flamethrower to clean up stragglers. Because you don't need to engage in any real combat you can use an exos loadout with little defense. Even the flamethrower is kind of optional because you can just nuke and scoot.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I agree. Once you get used to combat with the tank, it remains useful into the end game. I'd still like vehicle equipment grids to go into the base game so I can put shields on my tank, and have my armor equipment disabled while in the vehicle so I don't have to keep pulling my roboports out. (I never remember that!) But for now, instead of shields you can use personal laser defenses. Either way, you just need to look out for rocks. I find cluster grenades are excellent paired with the tank. Explosive shells drop groups of spawners quickly but cluster grenades can actually do it even faster though they have much lower range. Where they really shine is killing off the swarm of enemies chasing you. Apparently cluster grenades are powerful enough to easily kill big biters yet they don't do much damage to your tank. Your explosive shells, on the other hand, will obliterate your tank quickly if used at point blank range.


I think the shotgun can find use at military 4 but before uranium ammo, though primarily only if you prefer walking and not because it's particularly optimal. Even at this point, the tank is overall stronger, for reasons stated above.

[bobucles]

Once the mk2 armor hits the tank's day is done,

I take it you've never loaded up on 20 laser defenses and went on a tank ride?

[quyxkh]

I confess the 20PLD loadout didn't suck the batteries dry nearly as bad as I'd expected, I take it back about "done". For clearing, I don't run with PLDs at all, switching shields and exos and reactors in and out to match the need, smaller camps are basically battery-recharge stations. The bread-n-butter tactic for the big camps is drop a couple turrets and punch a lane into the spawner mass with the shotgun to lance the bug boil, they chase me back onto the turrets. Once the herd's thin enough to make circle-strafing with the shotgun manageable, that generally happens fast, you can just f'in romp around the camp with the shotgun, taking down spawners and worm-or-three clumps along the way, staying ahead of the bugs with slowdown capsules or nades ife needed.

The goal is to keep your batteries up and clean out the spawners as fast as possible, focus on those, ignore the huge mass of bugs following you and dance around the ones ahead of you until it's time to lead them to their deaths or if you're not in it for the long haul just nade/smg them right there. Don't worry about misses, a cleanup pass for the onesie-twosies with the smg at the end does it. 3 exo 9 shield 1 reactor 10 batteries nightvision is a decent baseline when the big bugs are dominant, I carry 6 15 4 10.

But once uranium comes up now the next thing's arty and the biter game's pretty much over. The belt optimization makes a single monster-yellobelt-distribution loop work great. Extend it one arty-range square at a time, one lane magazines one lane arty shells, you don't even need to string power, just run down the road your bots are building, use underneathies for cliffs and one-square landfill to cross lakes. Solar's enough for the inserters and nades help the gun turrets deal with the initial mass assaults while the territory clears, after that they can take care of themselves.


edit: lol, this is what forums are for. I just realized you can get synergy with the arty, follow the initial arty barrages around and just lay waste to the area.

[Frightning]

I confess the 20PLD loadout didn't suck the batteries dry nearly as bad as I'd expected, I take it back about "done". For clearing, I don't run with PLDs at all, switching shields and exos and reactors in and out to match the need, smaller camps are basically battery-recharge stations. The bread-n-butter tactic for the big camps is drop a couple turrets and punch a lane into the spawner mass with the shotgun to lance the bug boil, they chase me back onto the turrets. Once the herd's thin enough to make circle-strafing with the shotgun manageable, that generally happens fast, you can just f'in romp around the camp with the shotgun, taking down spawners and worm-or-three clumps along the way, staying ahead of the bugs with slowdown capsules or nades ife needed.

The goal is to keep your batteries up and clean out the spawners as fast as possible, focus on those, ignore the huge mass of bugs following you and dance around the ones ahead of you until it's time to lead them to their deaths or if you're not in it for the long haul just nade/smg them right there. Don't worry about misses, a cleanup pass for the onesie-twosies with the smg at the end does it. 3 exo 9 shield 1 reactor 10 batteries nightvision is a decent baseline when the big bugs are dominant, I carry 6 15 4 10.

But once uranium comes up now the next thing's arty and the biter game's pretty much over. The belt optimization makes a single monster-yellobelt-distribution loop work great. Extend it one arty-range square at a time, one lane magazines one lane arty shells, you don't even need to string power, just run down the road your bots are building, use underneathies for cliffs and one-square landfill to cross lakes. Solar's enough for the inserters and nades help the gun turrets deal with the initial mass assaults while the territory clears, after that they can take care of themselves.

edit: lol, this is what forums are for. I just realized you can get synergy with the arty, follow the initial arty barrages around and just lay waste to the area.

Have you ever tried 4xreactors+9xshield MK2s? I found it more or less made me invincible back in 0.14 days...I imagine that hasn't really changed.

[quyxkh]

Have you ever tried 4xreactors+9xshield MK2s? I found it more or less made me invincible back in 0.14 days...I imagine that hasn't really changed.

I haven't, I want the exos for speed, 2 reac 8 shield 3 exo vision port (to lay the arty + supply belt, haven't needed to take it out) 2 batt is working for me with plenty of headroom at minimum research and evo .9027 so far, don't need nades or slowdowns any more.

(edit: tactics and turret-drop mechanics got me to 4 exo 6 shield 2 reac 2 batt vision port, that's beast mode, even mps red ammo is good with the blue shells with that, until the behemoths start showing up, then it turns into a slog without green ammo).

The blueprint now has a zine-filter inserter on a chest. AP shells carry horrendous damage per stack against spawners so I'm not half through the ten stacks I started with at evo .75, one hit does 16×1.2×(8-2+9.6)*.85 ~ 255 damage per shot which matches my two-hit experience, after one launch, 40% boost on that would be ~ 357 so a gut shot should one-hit a spawner if it's good enough...... yup.

arty blueprint

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arty pic

[4xel]

I don't have any problem with shotgun being "weak". How often are shotguns used in regular wrarfare, compared to SMG, rocket launchers, tanks or even flamethrowers?

Maybe someone already mentionned this, but shotgun are incredibly more ressource effective than regular ammo, at least vs low resistance (eg vs nest, which you can hit with all your pellets). Along with inferior DPS and the relatively low crafting time of shells, it perfectly fits the theme of an artisanal weapon that you won't use often but enables more playstyles.

[bobingabout]

I don't have any problem with shotgun being "weak". How often are shotguns used in regular wrarfare, compared to SMG, rocket launchers, tanks or even flamethrowers?

Maybe someone already mentionned this, but shotgun are incredibly more ressource effective than regular ammo, at least vs low resistance (eg vs nest, which you can hit with all your pellets). Along with inferior DPS and the relatively low crafting time of shells, it perfectly fits the theme of an artisanal weapon that you won't use often but enables more playstyles.

That's the thing, before everything else was buffed, Shotgun was your go to weapon, everyone used it by default.

[BlakeMW]

Maybe someone already mentionned this, but shotgun are incredibly more ressource effective than regular ammo, at least vs low resistance (eg vs nest, which you can hit with all your pellets). Along with inferior DPS and the relatively low crafting time of shells, it perfectly fits the theme of an artisanal weapon that you won't use often but enables more playstyles.

The shotgun is okay before upgrades come into effect, it's okay for blasting away those early 1 or 2 spawner nests, the shotgun becomes seriously problematic vs larger nests and those with worms.

Once you start needing to look into upgrades to keep weapons effective the shotgun loses it's cost-effectiveness advantage, for example Shotgun damage 2 costs 1000 ore which could buy 250 regular ammo (enough to kill ~25 spawners), which when shot out of the car machine gun deals higher dps at outside of worm range. This is greatly exacerbated if you actually get bullet upgrades to make your gun turrets better because the car machine gun benefits as a side effect and would have around triple the dps of the shogun. The upgrades proceed to get a lot more expensive, if you research all the military science shotgun upgrades you've spent around 18000 ore in total, enough to buy 2000 piercing magazines which is a lot of killing, each of the blue science upgrades then costs about as much again and the high tech upgrades - required to keep the shotgun relevant against stronger enemies - are off the charts.

So the basic shotgun can save a few plates if used to clean out the nearby 1 or 2 spawner nests, but it quickly becomes a bad investment compared with alternatives. One suggestion I made is that if the shotgun is to remain a bottom-tier weapon the upgrades could be made a lot cheaper, no more than half the price of bullet upgrades, the high-tier upgrades would still be bad deals, but at least it'd be cheaper to keep the shotgun relevant as you tech up.