Improve shotgun
I made a mod: shotgun rebalance, and i think some of my ideas deserve to be promoted to vanilla Factorio after having played around with them.- Promoting the shotgun to default unlock.
- Move piercing shotgun shells from Military 4 to Military 2.
- Half shotgun movement penalty duration.
- Add piercing_damage to piercing shotgun shells.
Result:
The first two items doesn't improve the shotguns better per se, it only makes them more available. Which helps in promoting shotguns as a viable alternative instead of niche choice.Halving the shotgun penalty duration is meant to better enable hit-and-run strategies. Which is interesting for shotguns as their DPS is equal to the submachine gun, but much more bursty.
Adding piercing to shotgun pellets allow them to shoot through enemies, which makes shotguns better at crowd control.
Motivation
I believe shotguns are lackluster for a number of reasons. While shotguns excel at damage per cost, they lack in every other area compared to their natural counterpart the submachine gun.The damage per cost realistically only matters before automation of iron plates, after which it becomes almost impossible to outdo your production with merely your character shooting.
The submachine gun also has the advantage that your factory incidentally makes ammo for it, if you either produce Military science or ammunition for defensive gun turrets.
The DPS of the shotgun and the submachine gun are more or less equal. However that depends on you hitting each pellet with the shotgun, which is much easier with the auto-aim of the submachine gun. It is also worth to note that the flat part of damage reduction from resistance, affects shotguns much harsher.
Shotguns also falls short compared to submachine guns as they much shorter range and are much harder to aim.
Further changes
While my mod does some things not mentioned here that are worth to consider, i want to highlight some new changes.- Consolidate shotgun shells and firearm magazine: The difference between them is negatable and un-interesting. While having the option of reloading your shotgun from your other defenses would help make the shotgun more attractive.
- Add uranium shotgun shells: This is somewhat obvious, but having shotgun utility fall of a cliff after uranium ammo is dumb.
- Remove friendly fire damage from shotguns: As trying to reduce damage to your own buildings in the middle of a fire fight is interesting but tiresome, and it doesn't apply to the submachine gun.