Shotgun Shells

[coffee-factorio]

So I was having a read of the change log for 2.1.

And I started to have a really hard laugh. Because the balance on the shotgun is ridiculous to try and overcome something that is in the environment.

Listen, if I can damage entities, I can break other peoples entities. There's no amount of high risk, high reward which is going to make it rewarding to deploy something which can get you yelled at. A shotgun is a bit different than a flamethrower because you really don't have time to get out of the way of it and are a lot more likely to use it around turrets.

It's already at the point where I can demonstrate that I would survive fights in 2.0 on my own that I wouldn't, it was already in a fine place for single player use. You really, really don't need to make it more lethal. In 2.0 a single shot is like doing a full mag dump of piercing ammo without paying for it. It's optimized as a risky tool for close quarters assaults already.

Piercing rounds being moved up is fine. Combat shotgun is tricky because it's a bit like uranium ammo: By the time you get it, if you're really paying attention you realize you have cars and tanks. So it is kind of a personal defense weapon for a mechanized infantry rather than assault tool due to the structure of the game.

I feel like this is being balanced to give a weapon a lifetime that it doesn't normally have. But won't necessarily get, because it is a because of factors related to meta-games and the structure of the game itself.

[Stargateur]

First, I'm not sure I understand what you said, you are very unclear. Even the title missing the information.

I don't get it, I think I read everywhere to buff shotgun, people specially want the slow to be removed. They now finally buff it, and you want to nerf it ? Honestly, I want to try it out, because except in early game, to destroy one or two bitter nest I never use it. If it's overpower now... so what ? Honestly, I don't care at all. Well okay maybe it's affect pvp... who play pvp ??? If one day I would do pvp on factorio I would probably use a mod for that to balance thing out anyway...

[coffee-factorio]

It's unlikely that any amount of buffing will improve a weapon where on standard settings, you can clear up to the rocket launch by making about 30 magazines.

It's more likely that you'll increase damage to the point where it registers as a mistake or makes other high risk rewards options like the flamethrower less useful.

Pardon me, if I recall correctly. You dislike the idea of stacking on damage multipliers to a system that you consider to be extremely overpowered.
viewtopic.php?t=130297

Should I have a weapon system where, if your opinion held? I should simply be able to walk up to a biters of say size 2-3 and kill it without deploying turrets?

[Stargateur]

I need to try out myself before. But, I care about automatic defense, thing like personal gun are way less important in my eye, my time is better spend on factory than chasing bugs. Generally, personal gun sux, flamethrower of tank for example is pathetic. My last memory of shotgun is <the slow make is less good than machine gun> (and friendly fire) so the up is well welcome, thus, I agree it's look like a very strong buff.

[coffee-factorio]

That was largely true two years ago. And the thing about friendly fire won't go away.

I double checked to make sure I wasn't exaggerating. And like... time on video is 60 seconds.

vs_3_nests.png (2.24 MiB) Viewed 905 times

And the expectation on my side is that the personal gun kind of sucks. And something like a turret or car should be brought in to change the scenario. Early on you don't have the upgrades, so I shouldn't be playing like an action hero. Maybe one of the changes was merited. All 3 seems a bit excessive.

[burninghey]

I appreciate the change. Never used shotgun before, now it's fun to raid the aliens.

[beltnoob12]

The shotgun is dead and no one uses it, if they never actually add a shotgun chain gun turret then at least the item will get some use in this new version other than clearing forests early game.

hopefully too we can place shotguns and rocket launchers... maybe even distractors and other drones into tanks and car turrets as an alternative option to submachine gun?

[coffee-factorio]

I appreciate the change. Never used shotgun before, now it's fun to raid the aliens.

Yeah. It's a hard one for me, because from my perspective you're dealing with inertia from 1.x and just the nature of the gun itself. So my feeling is that the meta-game aspects of "the smg just works/the shotgun breaks stuff" is going to drive more changes than are strictly merited.

I might be wrong, but what I don't like is the idea of enough changes happening to get people to use the shotgun, then it gets nerfed once someone does some math for what it does. In 2.0.x each trigger pull is like firing a magazine of piercing ammo and on nests you can make every round connect. Don't get me wrong, 3 strong buffs are nice and I'll happily use it. I was already. But I don't want someone messing with the stat table just because I had a few weeks more practice than other people.

And yeah, the lock in is so strong because in 1.x the thing was a poor experience.

[burninghey]

After some research done will likely never use submachine gun again

[worph]

I posted another thread about the handheld flamethrower being utterly underpowered, especially after the shotgun buff.
One thing that might not only bring the shotgun more in-line and make the flamethrower more competitive might be this:

Damage Falloff

Give the shotgun significant damage falloff, like quadratic over distance. It would encourage going toe-to-toe even more, but max-range sniping of worms with a shotgun would not be viable anymore. And it would help give other tools more space.