Stop the multiply effect of turret damage

[Stargateur]

Okay, I think it's time we talk about this. Balance of gun turret is completely out of hand, first I already said it but they don't have enough range they should have more range than laser to reward logistic and cost of ammo. Then, okay I always know turret bonus damage was multiplicative with ammo bonus. And I was like, well who care ? but this become a problem of balance.

Except for gun turret, EVERYTHING that use physical ammo SUX. Cause dev balance bonus of ammo according to the gun turret. IMO, that a problem cause sub-machine gun feel under-power, tank sub-machine gun feel totally under-power. They nerfed a lot turret bonus damage in space age, but for vanilla they didn't nerf them.

Code: Select all

| LvL | Ammo (V) | Turret (V) | TT (V) | Ammo (S) | Turret (S) | TT (S) |
| --- | -------- | ---------- | ------ | -------- | ---------- | ------ |
| 0   | 0%       | 0%         | 0%     | 0%       | 0%         | 0%     |
| 1   | 10%      | 10%        | 21%    | 10%      | 10%        | 21%    |
| 2   | 20%      | 20%        | 44%    | 20%      | 20%        | 44%    |
| 3   | 40%      | 40%        | 96%    | 40%      | 40%        | 96%    |
| 4   | 60%      | 60%        | 156%   | 60%      | 60%        | 156%   |
| 5   | 80%      | 80%        | 224%   | 80%      | 80%        | 224%   |
| 6   | 120%     | 120%       | 384%   | 100%     | 120%       | 340%   |
| 7   | 160%     | 190%       | 654%   | 120%     | 140%       | 428%   |
| 8   | 200%     | 260%       | 980%   | 140%     | 160%       | 524%   |
| 9   | 240%     | 330%       | 1362%  | 160%     | 180%       | 628%   |
| 10  | 280%     | 400%       | 1800%  | 180%     | 200%       | 740%   |
| 11  | 320%     | 470%       | 2294%  | 200%     | 220%       | 860%   |
| 12  | 360%     | 540%       | 2844%  | 220%     | 240%       | 988%   |
| 13  | 400%     | 610%       | 3450%  | 240%     | 260%       | 1124%  |
| 14  | 440%     | 680%       | 4112%  | 260%     | 280%       | 1268%  |
| 15  | 480%     | 750%       | 4830%  | 280%     | 300%       | 1420%  |
| 16  | 520%     | 820%       | 5604%  | 300%     | 320%       | 1580%  |
| 17  | 560%     | 890%       | 6434%  | 320%     | 340%       | 1748%  |
| 18  | 600%     | 960%       | 7320%  | 340%     | 360%       | 1924%  |
| 19  | 640%     | 1030%      | 8262%  | 360%     | 380%       | 2108%  |
| 20  | 680%     | 1100%      | 9260%  | 380%     | 400%       | 2300%  |

* LvL: Level of Physical projectile damage (research)
* Ammo (V): Bullet damage bonus in vanilla
* Turret (V): Turret damage bonus in vanilla
* TT (V): Total Turret damage bonus in vanilla
* Ammo (S): Bullet damage bonus in space age
* Turret (S): Turret damage bonus in space age
* TT (S): Total Turret damage bonus in space age

You can see in space age number are lower but go up pretty fast. This is not very intuitive at all for user too. It's very hard to balance it with this multiplication effect. Vanilla a bullet of uranium at Lvl 15 do 1159.2 + 24 damage laser turret lvl 15 go 172 + 20

Anyway, not completing about turret damage but more completing that it's affect too much the balance of bullet damage themself. I wish we could have more way to balance submachine gun, turret, etc... cause currently all that use physical ammo more or less sux pass early game except gun turret.

Number could be wrong. I made a mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BalanceAmmoDamage I feel it's still too much damage but I tested only for vanilla not space age.

PS: don't get me started on flame thrower turret... that the same problem, the flame thrower of tank feel SO WEAK when the turret is completely overpower.

[Hurkyl]

As a counterpoint....

Gun Turrets are a complement to your static defenses, so it makes sense for them to scale in a way to allow them to fill that role.

But the submachine gun? You're using that instead of a different weapon. It makes much less sense for that to scale in a way to be competitive with later game weaponry.

I assume the rate of infinite researches was nerfed to push off the point where gun turrets become viable against asteroids they shouldn't be really far into the future, whereas vanilla doesn't have a reason to limit damage in such a way.

[Stargateur]

Gun Turrets are a complement to your static defenses, so it makes sense for them to scale in a way to allow them to fill that role.

Who decide that lol ? Most defense don't include them at all cause laser are just better since they just use energy. And anyway that not at all my point, I really don't care about what you use as turret my point is the rest that use physical ammo.

But the submachine gun? You're using that instead of a different weapon. It makes much less sense for that to scale in a way to be competitive with later game weaponry.

Yeah how dump of me who want to use my tank submachine gun ! I mean how dare I am ? There are also mods that use physical ammo https://mods.factorio.com/mod/kry-spidertron and it's a joke that doesn't do any damage. If you tell me "just don't use them after some point in game" I would just say that sux cause I love the sound of bullets (Specially with https://mods.factorio.com/mod/bullet-trails). Also, if my tank submachine gun is obsolete like almost as soon as I unlock it, what the point of having it ?

Anyway please focus on my points, how to balance better the game. Don't just tell me, "you must do that".

[mmmPI]

Yeah how dump of me who want to use my tank submachine gun ! I

I think the proper spelling is "dumb" , but otherwise i kinda agree with the idea that the balance is done for turret as static defense, it's normal that tank machine guns with yellow ammo feels underwhelming late game when there's spidertron with rockets available.

The proposed change sounds like a unfinished table with different numbers for the sake of it unfortunatly. There's much better analysis out there considering the balance of turrets for defense comparing different turrets, and some more specifics about the different ammos and showing the cost of the research in relation the effective damage against the different ennemies, in Nauvis Gleba and Vulcanus, also the asteroids, because otherwise it's too superficial to me. Plus you say it yourself the numbers you provide aren't balanced ...

Imo if you want to make the tank more powerful because you like using the tank submachine gun, it would feel more logical that you make a mod to increase the damage or shooting speed of the tank machine gun, rather altering the ammo for the other things too, like space platform or your usual vulcanus worm. Not saying "you must do that" , just throwing the idea in case it didn't crossed your mind since you haven't done balancing for space age yet, it may spare you some trouble.

[HunD34TH]

I don't think vanilla behavior has to changed, but adding Modifier::GunAttackModifier (https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/types/Modifier.html) would make mods be able to add the desired changes for you

[Hurkyl]

Gun Turrets are a complement to your static defenses, so it makes sense for them to scale in a way to allow them to fill that role.

Who decide that lol ? Most defense don't include them at all cause laser are just better since they just use energy.

While my personal preference is also to use laser turrets for this role, I do see more than enough people tout the strength of gun turrets, especially with uranium ammo, to think it's reasonable to just completely dismiss them in a discussion on game balance.

And anyway that not at all my point, I really don't care about what you use as turret my point is the rest that use physical ammo.

But the submachine gun? You're using that instead of a different weapon. It makes much less sense for that to scale in a way to be competitive with later game weaponry.

Yeah how dump of me who want to use my tank submachine gun ! I mean how dare I am ? There are also mods that use physical ammo https://mods.factorio.com/mod/kry-spidertron and it's a joke that doesn't do any damage. If you tell me "just don't use them after some point in game" I would just say that sux cause I love the sound of bullets (Specially with https://mods.factorio.com/mod/bullet-trails). Also, if my tank submachine gun is obsolete like almost as soon as I unlock it, what the point of having it ?

Anyway please focus on my points, how to balance better the game. Don't just tell me, "you must do that".

You can't really just say "early game weaponry sucks late game", because the response is "Yes, and?". That is fairly common way for game balance to work; after all, why play with any of the late game toys if your early game toy is just as good?

My response was supposed to be a launching off point for you giving your reasons why this is would be an exception and how/why making the submachine gun remain competitive late game would make the game better.

I infer that this is not really an issue of game balance but more so that you really enjoy the submachine gun, even to the point of installing mods to enhance the experience. I concur with the idea that what you're looking for would be more at home in a mod to further enhance your experience, rather than as a change to the vanilla game.

[Tertius]

Balance of gun turret is completely out of hand, first I already said it but they don't have enough range they should have more range than laser to reward logistic and cost of ammo.

Balance is always something where you compare something to some other thing. Your article starts with the right motivation, but you end up with "gun damage isn't balanced, see this table", and that's not helping to establish balance.

To see if some weapon or ammo is balanced well, you need a view how these are being used and how efficient they are in what they do in comparison to other weapons and their ammo. You completely lack comparison to other ammo - you just write "gun damage sux" and compare gun damage with itself.

Every weapon and each ammo has its intended use case. There are alternative weapons, but actually you don't have much choice. It's not the design to be able to freely use all weapons/ammo against all enemies equally. Usually you have a primary intended use and a backup use if the player cannot/doesn't want to use the primary.

You need to see which weapons, which ammo and which enemies are available in which game stage. To encourage change, there should be the need to use different weapons across the different enemies and tactical situations, and all in all the difficulty for whatever combat situation should be "well balanced".

So you need to make tables in which combat situation which weapon is a candidate for use, and how good or bad one weapon and ammo is for this situation.

It's very complex to measure balance, because it's difficult to get numbers for comparison. For example, a measure could be dps (damage per second). A weapon/ammo with more dps is the better weapon/ammo. But is the higher cost for a better ammo justified? That depends on the game stage (early/mid/late game) and the location (planet or space platform). Also dps is dependent on enemy type due to resistances. May be a better measure is "how many hits do I need to kill that enemy?". Or "how many ammo of this kind do I need to kill that enemy?" Or if it comes to resources: "how much ore do I need to produce ammo to kill one enemy?"

Just a table with scaled ammo damage bonus isn't telling anything. While the game progresses the enemies get stronger, so that will even out any damage bonus. And you need to switch weapons while the game progresses. There are 3 stages for encounters with some specific enemy: 1st stage is "wow, there's a new enemy. What do I need to kill it?" 2nd stage: "it's becoming stronger. What do I need to upgrade to still kill it?" 3rd stage is domination: "What do I need to finally defeat this kind of enemy once and for all?" The 3rd stage (domination) is required to be able to move on to the next challenge. The flamethrower turret is a weapon for this for example, and it's well balanced for this role, despite its huge damage that seems unbalanced first.

You need to sort the enemies by the game stage where they appear, and sort the weapons/ammo the same, and see how good or bad the weapons/ammo are against the adversaries appearing the same time.

And if it comes to personal weapons, there is player preference. For example, I'm unable to use some weapons efficiently because I'm unable to aim correctly with the given combat mechanics. I'm unable to hit anything with the shotgun. I'm unable to hit anyhing with the tank (or if I do, I'm unable to drive away and not lose the tank, because I'm unable to properly steer the tank. I usually hit too many nests or a cliff or a tree, than I'm stuck and the tank is destroyed). I'm also somehow unable to use thrown weapons - either I kill myself or cannot aim or the weapon is exhausted and I only realize this when I'm dead. This limits my weapon choice. But other players are different.

In my opinion, and from my personal play style, damage done by using the submachine gun using yellow ammo can be boosted early game to improve my personal game experience. That's where I have the most and frustrating issues. However, I cannot put this opinion into numbers. How this can be improved with a change of game parameters and if any improvement is reasonable I cannot tell. May be better armor would be the better balancing instead of boosting damage, as far as I remember the frustrating moments go away with modular armor with energy shields.
Everything else later is ok. It's just a choice of the proper weapon and proper research.

[computeraddict]

Yeah how dump of me who want to use my tank submachine gun !

Use its cannon? The tank's MG is very much meant for mediums and below. And maybe stray large spitters.

Also, if my tank submachine gun is obsolete like almost as soon as I unlock it, what the point of having it ?

How late are you unlocking it? In a normal settings map I'm almost always unlocking it well before the biters have fielded their first large biter.

[coffee-factorio]

Okay, I think it's time we talk about this. Balance of gun turret is completely out of hand, first I already said it but they don't have enough range they should have more range than laser to reward logistic and cost of ammo. Then, okay I always know turret bonus damage was multiplicative with ammo bonus. And I was like, well who care ? but this become a problem of balance.

Except for gun turret, EVERYTHING that use physical ammo SUX. Cause dev balance bonus of ammo according to the gun turret. IMO, that a problem cause sub-machine gun feel under-power, tank sub-machine gun feel totally under-power. They nerfed a lot turret bonus damage in space age, but for vanilla they didn't nerf them.

Frankly the entire weapon system is neurotic.

Because you have a 1.5x rate of fire attached to the vehicle, which I can use like a turret and I see that effect. In theory I should be arguing you're wrong Star.
In practice; it's the fact that all the other weapon systems don't perform at the level of the gun turret that's problematic. You can very safely skip, flamethrowers, flamethrower turrets, defenders... basically if it doesn't kill an asteroid you can skip it, if it does kill an asteroid you can use it to kill an asteroid and use a combination of gun turrets, tank cannon and as a last resort, landmines, to do it's job instead.

Where I disagree with you is the idea that the balance needs to be in making the gun turret weaker to make a lot of poor weapon systems and implementations look better. Specifically on vehicles, I disagree with you, I think the 1.5 boost to rate of fire on those systems functions as it should. But that means that gun are balanced against guns. My problem is I don't see anything else in Space Age as balanced against the enemy mix.

There's also some really subtle things going on when you test this stuff. When you use the tank flamethrower, it doesn't make pools of fire so most of its damage effect doesn't actually exist. The range nine "vehicle flamethrower" does. Don't know if that's consistent between games or not.

But there's a reason why you only see people showing up with 100 turrets to kill demolishers and skipping even tanks with uranium AP shells for the same purpose.
Since SA features more combat, it's making issues you'd normally only run into playing with Rampant Arsenal feel apparent.

[Stargateur]

I can understand your points about "it's a early weapon it should be weak end game" but honestly end game come very fast for me. Maybe beginner have time to feel tank powerful but I build too fast to be able to use it before enemy get too strong.

But you made some valid point. I still think this multiply effect suck, it's make so hard to balance game. I mean you end up putting 10000 flat resistance on asteroid cause you know damage of gun turret skyrocket with tech exponentially...

I think dev should rethink how combat work. As a big fan of RTS game, it's pain me to see factorio have almost zero strategy with enemy. I wish we have different enemy with difference weakness that are counter with different weapon. For now in vanilla, gun turret have incredible DPS but need tons of ammo. Laser pretty much do better unless you really need dps, and flame turret have so much damage is comic cause they also have % in fire tech damage...

How to balance the game when you have damage that go exponentially ? You make enemy hp grow exponentially ? Honestly I think it's bad design. Also, flame turret have so much damage late game that one tick of friendly fire pretty much destroy ANYTHING, your laser turret get on fire, BYE, your spidertron get burned, even if it run away of fire, it's GONE if not repaired constantly. How that balanced ?

Damm, that remind me wow damage that got so high patch after patch that actually need to reduce it cause it's was causing problem with calculation and lag and player complain numbers was too high for reading and human are not good to imagine giant number.

Flat damage reduction become irrelevant with current balance of the game.

[coffee-factorio]

I can understand your points about "it's a early weapon it should be weak end game" but honestly end game come very fast for me. Maybe beginner have time to feel tank powerful but I build too fast to be able to use it before enemy get too strong.

I can't argue with that. The same thing happens to me.

In theory I have the numbers to say "Functioning as intended." And I'm in the position to state that I think the concept works for this game, with an appropriate level off where I just win. I prefer it, to going off and having to choose between being a soldier and being an engineer.

I think the balance is intended to be less like an RTS and more like a tower defense, where you have a rank of things that just work. Think "They Are Billions".

The problem is that I have to say this: it's 1000-2000 upgrades, or 15 minutes on an early game science line, to make a flamethrower have the same "level" as a gun turret. Even if gun is the solution, in real life there's families of guns to explore and that's a kind of joy. 5.56mm != 20mm. That concept feels underdeveloped, although Rampant at least made stab at it.

So if I weren't playing this game and just looking at numbers. I mean, in practice am I not wasting 15 minutes of your time to say try it out? When there's something that just solves the problem. Particularly in Space Age. Should you say, build an oil refinery on Gleba just for the flamethrower turrets.

[sarge945]

I'll chime in here since I have been thinking about the combat balance of the game a lot lately (and have been working on a mod to address some of it). This problem is one of many. This is probably going to sound a bit reductionist, opinionated, and like I am trying to redefine the game completely, but honestly combat is the weakest part of Factorio and could really do with an overhaul.

To be honest though, I feel like what really matters for game balance (in all games, not just factorio), is that The quality/payout of an item must meet the investment required.

Since Turrets and the SMG are basically available from the get-go, it makes sense that they are pretty weak. Turrets scale a lot better, but they also come at an opportunity cost since they take up (limited) defensive space around your base, so they have to compete with the other turrets, plus they are inherently more difficult to supply than the others (laser turrets are easy, you just plug them in, and flame turrets are very easy to pipe fuel too and keep a steady supply).

I am totally fine with the SMG being intentionally replaced as part of the gameplay design, since it's available almost immediately, and is cheap (both in terms of it's actual production, and in terms of ammunition).

A number of people have talked about the different turret types, and I can see how it's important to compare them against each other for balance reasons. What I feel is the more fundamental issue here is the lack of turret variety. We're busy comparing the numbers, but the reality is that as long as each turret type fulfills a role, it doesn't matter how powerful they are individually, as they are all useful. This has been balanced relatively well for asteroids, which encourage a wide variety of different turret builds to handle the different sizes of asteroids, but for biters, the strategy is extremely rote and boring - just build flame turrets.

In fact, I would argue that arguing numerical values or "balance" between the turrets is essentially pointless. As long as flamers are super cheap to resupply, cover a wide area, and are generally killing machines, it doesn't matter if Gun Turrets are balanced or not - the resupply annoyance of them will always be a large opportunity cost compared to running some pipes.

This is also, by the way, why I personally believe logistic bots are completely overpowered (a very controversial opinion, I know), and the common counterarguments don't make sense to me either. "they are less throughput efficient than belts", "they use a lot of power", etc. These seem like bad arguments to me because the fundamental ability to transport anything to anywhere around the factory without needing to build essential infrastructure to do so (other than roboports) essentially negates all of the drawbacks of using bots, and short of making them borderline useless, they are ALWAYS going to be worth it because of this major reduction of opportunity cost compared to using belts. It's so bad that I intentionally disabled the Tier 2 research completely and therefore limited bots to only resupplying the player and vehicles at all. I felt like this sort of nuclear option was required to make bots actually fair because the opportunity cost of belts is too high.

The reason I mentioned bots is because it's exactly the same situation for gun turrets. Even if gun turrets were objectively better than every other turret type in the game, as long as flame turrets can kill everything with easy setup, they will still be superior.

[computeraddict]

I think this thread is kind of missing the point of enemies in Factorio. They aren't really meant to be an existential threat that can keep up with you. This is clearly evidenced by the existence of artillery and nukes, for which no amount of biter evolution can match. Even the Demolishers and big Stompers from the expansion are cut down like so much wheat before a scythe with the introduction of rail guns.

Enemies in Factorio are a logistics problem. If you perform logistics well enough you can obliterate anything and everything. And I think that's the perfect end state for a factory and logistics game.

[Nemoricus]

I’ve never used a flamethrower turret. Doesn’t seem to have caused me any problems.

[Stargateur]

I think this thread is kind of missing the point of enemies in Factorio. They aren't really meant to be an existential threat that can keep up with you. This is clearly evidenced by the existence of artillery and nukes, for which no amount of biter evolution can match. Even the Demolishers and big Stompers from the expansion are cut down like so much wheat before a scythe with the introduction of rail guns.

Enemies in Factorio are a logistics problem. If you perform logistics well enough you can obliterate anything and everything. And I think that's the perfect end state for a factory and logistics game.

how tech that allow stupid damage amount is a logistic problem solving ?

[coffee-factorio]

I think this thread is kind of missing the point of enemies in Factorio. They aren't really meant to be an existential threat that can keep up with you. This is clearly evidenced by the existence of artillery and nukes, for which no amount of biter evolution can match. Even the Demolishers and big Stompers from the expansion are cut down like so much wheat before a scythe with the introduction of rail guns.

Enemies in Factorio are a logistics problem. If you perform logistics well enough you can obliterate anything and everything. And I think that's the perfect end state for a factory and logistics game.

No, it's not missed computer. But where star is right is "this one system can be used everywhere, and doesn't have situational penalties applied to it, and has a supply line that is includes effectively infinite sources of raw materials". So the only standouts other systems have are "it deals tremendous damage" instead of "it justified the time to animate it, because it changes the logistics of the situation against the targets it's meant to engage with, from day one".

In base game, artillery has a place because of the lack of infinite supply lines and there wasn't a clear winner between that and say, spidertrons hauling around nukes.

In Space Age there was a tremendous energy to make weapons that where completely situational which just ignores that there's a good winning strategy that already covers that case, and so everything else ends up looking like solutions in search of problems rather than ideas worth investing in.

I might disagree with the idea that the damage table needs to be corrected but the idea needs to be talked about because: "Wait... that wheat before the scythe talk ignores the fact only the railgun does enough damage to a big demolisher for it to be seriously considered. And even then, with the right damage upgrades on the minigun I do 60,000 dps with 50 miniguns and standard magazines... there's an existing solution for medium worms that functions, and I need gun turrets for asteroids."