Flamethrower turret

[Xemozu]

It seems to me the power of the flamethrower turret trivializes every other defensive tool in vanilla. It will instawipe anything even without upgrades. Is there any chance it's nerfed, even by raising it's fluid usage?

[sarge945]

I feel like they should make it require "napalm" instead of any random fluid, and creating napalm would require 20 units of crude oil and 1 unit of coal to produce.

So it's essentially 20 times less efficient.

Being ultra powerful is generally fine, my issue is that it barely costs any resources.

Gun turrets obviously churn through expensive ammo AND need a whole logistics setup to keep them refilled.
Laser turrets eat up gigawatts of power and can very quickly slow your entire base to a crawl.
But Flame turrets? No real drawbacks. Hooking up crude is super easy, no logistics required (just a pipe), ammo is cheap and plentiful, and generally they just work forever without ever needing to worry about them. With the above change, Flame Turrets would come with their own significant resource cost and downside that is separate from the other turrets.

Unfortunately, I don't think anything is ever going to be done about it. This topic has been discussed to death numerous times before, and nothing has ever been done to reign them in. I think "solving" the biter problem by building a flamethrower wall and never having to worry about them again is working as intended, even if I think it results in bad gameplay. Biters are already controversial enough that a lot of people downright disable them, so this would also potentially make a lot of people unhappy.

Some mods fix flamethrowers being a brainless instant-win by adding in fireproof variants of biters (like the Armoured Biters mod), and frankly I think the best way to solve this is to give certain biters different colored carapaces that represent different resistances (including near-immunity to fire) as a way to force players to diversify their defenses. The whole resistances system is somewhat underbaked. Explosive resistance would also help to make Tank circle-strafing less of an instant-win against nests as well. But now that we're in 2.1 and past the "feature" stage, I doubt we will see any big changes like this.

[angramania]

It seems to me the power of the flamethrower turret trivializes every other defensive tool in vanilla. It will instawipe anything even without upgrades. Is there any chance it's nerfed, even by raising it's fluid usage?

It seems to me that you just do not have enough experience. Try extreme deathworlds, try big Gleba base, try some combat oriented scenarios/mods. As sarge945 have said, this topic was already discussed many times. FT are fine, not OP, there is no need to change anything.

[mmmPI]

It seems to me the power of the flamethrower turret trivializes every other defensive tool in vanilla. It will instawipe anything even without upgrades. Is there any chance it's nerfed, even by raising it's fluid usage?

Wait till you have big worms just outside of range and you will find flamethrower needing assistance from artillery.

In vanilla FT are very strong , but Space Age adds the Tesla turrets , which are also very strong , so even when considering only vanilla balance, i don't want or expect a nerf. Though if there was one, increasing its fluid usage would be my favourite option compared to reducing damage or range or anything really.

[worph]

Anecdotally I have only ever used these extensively while I was aiming for the "Keeping your hands clean" achievement (don't destroy nests before having been to Vulcanus and brought artillery back).
99% of the time I am perfectly content with just using normal turrets or laser turrets once i get my hands on them. Because I hate having to bring logistics to my defenses. Granted, the logistic requirements for a flamethrower turret are less compared to normal normal turrets, but more compared to laser turrets.
Also since flamethrowers are not used in space, but all other turrets are (except tesla), there really still are enough incentives to use the rest of the arsenal even if it were the only viable turret on Nauvis. Which for me it definitely is not.
I think they are perfectly fine the way they are, but I always felt that they used SURPRINSINGLY little fuel/ammo. No matter how little your starting oilwell's are dripfeeding your base, the flamethrowers seemed to always have enough juice.
I could see how increasing the fuel requirement might make them more interesting, but also if you play deathworld and you only have one oil field, you will simply lose once it cant keep up, despite speed modules. So care should be taken when increasing the fuel consumption.

[NOiZE]

I feel like they should make it require "napalm" instead of any random fluid, and creating napalm would require 20 units of crude oil and 1 unit of coal to produce.

Shameless self-promotion: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/flamethrower-overhaul
(I will update for 2.1 soonish)

[sarge945]

I feel like they should make it require "napalm" instead of any random fluid, and creating napalm would require 20 units of crude oil and 1 unit of coal to produce.

Shameless self-promotion: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/flamethrower-overhaul
(I will update for 2.1 soonish)

Looks good, but honestly it's too complex for my needs (but probably perfect for others)

I might throw together a quick "napalm" mod that is basically just a 10x fuel cost for flamethrowers, since I believe they are simply too cheap but don't mind anything else about them.