Artillery Auto-fire Toggle / Option for disabling artillery auto target / turn off the artillery (train)

[Squelch]

+9.1

[ssilk]

I think that it can’t be turned off is part of game. At first kind of surprise, later you can install something to fire shells not so frequently. Not everybody will like it, so I searched for mods, but found only this one:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Artillery_Manual_Only

[andreinafactory]

I created that mod. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

At some point they added a flag for artillery that sets if it auto fires or not. It must not have been that long ago because I was surprised when I couldn't find an existing mod for it.

It works great for relatively expensive artillery like the ones added by the nuclear and naplm mods.

[netmand]

I think that it can’t be turned off is part of game.

Normally I could accept this as a problem to solve except; The artillery wagon is the best way to transport artillery shells since it carries 100 shells. If I'm needing to pre-load an area (i.e. building up a stockpile of ammunition before engaging targets in certain areas), the artillery wagon cannot be used, limiting transport from 100 down to 40 using the cargo wagon.

Disabling auto-fire (at least for the artillery wagon) is something I'd like to see in vanilla as well.

[Amarula]

That's because they're triggered by the use imperial system units

Ooh now I am dreaming of a mod: type something like "give em a foot and they'll take a mile" into chat, and *Boom* biter zergling rush

[Oktokolo]

At some point they added a flag for artillery that sets if it auto fires or not. It must not have been that long ago because I was surprised when I couldn't find an existing mod for it.

Too bad that disable_automatic_firing is on the prototype and not on the entity.
Would it be possible to have a custom GUI on the artillery wagon/turret wich swaps the entity instantly with one wich has disable_automatic_firing toggled?
That way, toggling autofire mode would be pretty natural without having to mine and convert the entity manually.

[Squelch]

The whole automatic targeting and firing might have seemed like a good gameplay idea that players need to consider at one time, but in practice, it seems to be more of an artificial encumbrance. Artillery shells do not stack, so take up valuable inventory slots individually when transporting them to remote firing positions. That is something that the player has to work around, but as @netmand points out, it then becomes tempting to use the 100 unit capability of the artillery wagon for transport as opposed to the 40 unit cargo wagon capability.

I find that I put off actually using artillery until such a time that my offensive and defensive capabilities are overwhelming. That might have been the original intention but is then hampered by controlling how the static artillery is loaded, and the relative positions of artillery wagons and their loading. It's all very messy.

My personal take of this is to enable circuit control of artillery. For static artillery, a simple enable/disable toggle control, and for trains, the control is passed at stations via "send to train".

This isn't real life of course, but artillery is never arbitrarily fired, and has to go through a number of orders based on checks and decisions before such damaging power is unleashed. I strongly feel that the decision to fire should be in the players hands, and for them to deal with whatever consequences a poor decision may bring.

Too bad that disable_automatic_firing is on the prototype and not on the entity.
Would it be possible to have a custom GUI on the artillery wagon/turret wich swaps the entity instantly with one wich has disable_automatic_firing toggled?
That way, toggling autofire mode would be pretty natural without having to mine and convert the entity manually.

I suspect that doing that operation on an artillery wagon would change the whole train's ID leading to other unintended consequences.

[ptx0]

and why not integrate Artillery Combinator into vanilla so we can circuit control our defenses? everything else is able to be automated, except turrets.

[Oktokolo]

The whole automatic targeting and firing might have seemed like a good gameplay idea that players need to consider at one time, but in practice, it seems to be more of an artificial encumbrance.

Automatic fire is a nice feature to have. I even like it being the default. But artillery has a huge range compared to all other weapons. So before i start not caring about shells anymore or whenever i am expanding my factory, i would like to disable auto-fire temporarily until i am fine with the artillery firing shells inefficiently (it in average only hits a third of the buildings per shell than when i paint the targets myself) or drawing biters to the (then well prepared) new outpust.

Artillery shells do not stack, so take up valuable inventory slots individually when transporting them to remote firing positions. That is something that the player has to work around, but as @netmand points out, it then becomes tempting to use the 100 unit capability of the artillery wagon for transport as opposed to the 40 unit cargo wagon capability.

That is easy to fix and therefore in my singleplayer games, artillery shells have a stack size of 50.

I find that I put off actually using artillery until such a time that my offensive and defensive capabilities are overwhelming. That might have been the original intention but is then hampered by controlling how the static artillery is loaded, and the relative positions of artillery wagons and their loading. It's all very messy.

It is the original intention and they indeed crippled stationary artillery turrets with the absurd shell stack size.

Too bad that disable_automatic_firing is on the prototype and not on the entity.
Would it be possible to have a custom GUI on the artillery wagon/turret wich swaps the entity instantly with one wich has disable_automatic_firing toggled?
That way, toggling autofire mode would be pretty natural without having to mine and convert the entity manually.

I suspect that doing that operation on an artillery wagon would change the whole train's ID leading to other unintended consequences.

That may very well be the case. But making the wagon manual-fire only would actually be a good thing as it would make turrets the clearly better option for static defenses (because they can auto-aim). Trains are already more flexible so they are currently what almost everyone uses exclusively for offense and defense.

and why not integrate Artillery Combinator into vanilla so we can circuit control our defenses? everything else is able to be automated, except turrets.

If turrets where not already fully automated, this thread would not exist. The problem is, that automation of the long-range artillery is not controlable by the player (except by not loading the gun or not bringing it into firing range of any target).
That said, even though i see no use case for sircuit controlled turrets, having circuit connectivity on more buildings is alwas better. Maybe it is of use with modded turrets or in special scenarios.

[Squelch]

Automatic fire is a nice feature to have. I even like it being the default. But artillery has a huge range compared to all other weapons. So before i start not caring about shells anymore or whenever i am expanding my factory, i would like to disable auto-fire temporarily until i am fine with the artillery firing shells inefficiently (it in average only hits a third of the buildings per shell than when i paint the targets myself) or drawing biters to the (then well prepared) new outpust.
...

All perfectly valid points. I must clarify that I meant a circuit control to disable the default autofiring. Reading back I used the term "toggle", and that is incorrect.

When artillery was first introduced my first thought was yay! especially for trains, but after using them for a while, I felt a bit meh about it. I believe that is down to the perception that the feature is not fully fleshed out and beset with issues like the subject this topic raises. The balance feels off to me, and results in a binary decision of exactly when to employ. Too early and we are ineffectual and swamped by retaliatory rushes. There then seems to be little graduated success until we are vastly overpowered. Sun Tsu would have it that way of course but to me, that's a pyrrhic victory

It is what it is, and I would welcome a method of disabling the turrets- if only temporarily. Otherwise, I'll simply continue to leave them unloaded until very late game, or place them just out of auto range and manually paint targets as I do now.

[Oktokolo]

I rescanned the mod portal for artillery targeting player-control enhancements:
- Artillery Switch (Player GUI switch for artillery wagons, 0.17 only but MIT license and trivial to update)
- Smart Artillery Wagons (circuit-control for artillery wagons)
- Artillery Manual-Only Fire (recipe for manual targeting artillery wagon and turret)
- Artillery Combinator (paint targets by coordinates via circuit)

There seems to be no entity-GUI mod (there is one using a global player gui though). But otherwise the topic of this thread seems to be fully covered by mods now.
I will probably at some time in the future rip everything i want (expect the actual entity GUI) from the listed mods into my own wich will disable auto-targeting on wagons completely and make turrets switchable by entity GUI.

[Nemo4809]

Artillery shells do not stack, so take up valuable inventory slots individually when transporting them to remote firing positions. That is something that the player has to work around, but as @netmand points out, it then becomes tempting to use the 100 unit capability of the artillery wagon for transport as opposed to the 40 unit cargo wagon capability.

I find that I put off actually using artillery until such a time that my offensive and defensive capabilities are overwhelming. That might have been the original intention but is then hampered by controlling how the static artillery is loaded, and the relative positions of artillery wagons and their loading. It's all very messy.

Don’t know about developer intent but I primarily use artillery to keep biter nests away from my base - and pollution cloud. They are active at all times and are resupplied via logistic bots.

I don’t have any remote outposts after biters wrecked one of my trains mid-transit. I expand my base to encompass any resource I need to tap.

[Squelch]

Don’t know about developer intent but I primarily use artillery to keep biter nests away from my base - and pollution cloud. They are active at all times and are resupplied via logistic bots.

I don’t have any remote outposts after biters wrecked one of my trains mid-transit. I expand my base to encompass any resource I need to tap.

I believe you have just discovered why transporting munitions by train is advantageous versus bots - Drone stuck in loop. When the base is alongside a lake, and resources on the other side need exploiting, and the main base artillery does not have the range to protect it, a train supplying the remote base with its own separate logistics network is my preferred method of working.

[Nemo4809]

Don’t know about developer intent but I primarily use artillery to keep biter nests away from my base - and pollution cloud. They are active at all times and are resupplied via logistic bots.

I don’t have any remote outposts after biters wrecked one of my trains mid-transit. I expand my base to encompass any resource I need to tap.

I believe you have just discovered why transporting munitions by train is advantageous versus bots - Drone stuck in loop. When the base is alongside a lake, and resources on the other side need exploiting, and the main base artillery does not have the range to protect it, a train supplying the remote base with its own separate logistics network is my preferred method of working.

As I said, biters killed my train. I just enclose everything I need to tap as part of my base.

With biter expansion on, unprotected train routes just aren’t viable. Even rain9441 enclosed his whole base with walls+turrets due to biter losses in his vanilla 5Kspm base.

As for delivering ammo, I have a buffer chest so they never go over water. Not sure what that drone was doing. It wasn’t carrying anything.

[Rafiz]

I've made mod to disable artillery auto-fire completely.
It requires restart to flip it on/off though.

So there's still potential for mod that allows that to be flipped on/off without game reload.

I think devs might not want to add such toggle in vanilla game, as it would add new element to UI and vast majority of players wouldn't ever use it, so it's "unjustified UI element" in a way. But it would be cool if there was simple way to achieve it via mod/command, or even there could be option in circuit network - that would be hidden from regular UI, while enabling it in vanilla game.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/disable_a ... _artillery

[Pi-C]

I've made mod to disable artillery auto-fire completely.
It requires restart to flip it on/off though.

So there's still potential for mod that allows that to be flipped on/off without game reload.

TLDR: It may be possible to swap artillery turrets at runtime, but it's not easy to get it right and it would be even harder for artillery wagons. Requiring restarts is not only way easier, it's also safer because all entities will automatically get the changed property when the game is loaded.


You can't change the properties of a prototype at runtime anymore, so you'd have to work around that. I'd make a copy of the vanilla artillery turret, changing just the value of disable_automatic_firing. The setting must be moved from "startup" to "runtime-global" (map setting because it must be the same for all players). In control.lua, store the setting's value in your global table. Listen to defines.events.on_runtime_mod_setting_changed, and when the value of your setting is different from the value you've stored, look for all artillery turrets on all surfaces and exchange them with the other kind. Also listen to defines.events.on_built_entity etc. and make sure the correct entity is placed.

Exchanging turrets should happen in a way that players don't see the difference: you'd have to make sure to copy the ammo inventory, health, kills, etc. If you have a big map with many artillery turrets, that's a lot of work to do on one tick, so you probably should spread the load over several ticks. On the other hand, map settings won't be changed too often, so you could get away with doing everything at once.

Turrets are static, so they are relatively easy to deal with. However, I wouldn't touch the artillery wagons at runtime -- that's bound to get you in serious trouble. Swapping wagons would mean that you delete the old wagon and replace it with the new one. I'm not sure if that would even be possible when the wagon is part of a moving train, but changing a train's configuration means that the train will get a new ID, which may affect other mods.

[ssilk]

I have merged this thread. Look for the headings to read it in context!

There is a mod
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/disable_a ... _artillery
See viewtopic.php?p=575239#p575239

There are similar subjects:
viewtopic.php?p=480653#p480653

[AndreyKl]

The idea would be to have a toggle option (on by default) in the inventory gui for allowing an artillery gun to fire automatically.

It should be an automatic-range slider instead, to limit automatic range and compensate for range-upgraging tech. Ideally a logic controlled slider.

You can research artillery range upgrades and it can 'cripple' artillery a bit. It's one thing when you use artillery to cover your main base - more range is often better, or when you want a ranged support. But when you progress far enough to need to cover each of your far away mining bases with personal artillery, suddenly it's a disadvantage. Bitters still can start a base right next to mining outpost and Behemoth Worms outrange defenses, so I needed to set artillery to reach newly spawned nests automatically, yet I did not want to provoke every nest in a huge area. I ended up building dedicated military outposts to wipe huge areas and handle the retaliation, but I think I would have been better off not researching range upgrades.

[ickputzdirwech]

[ick] Moved to implemented.