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destroying a 3500hp nest with one shot requires approximately level 10 technology (2.046m science pack!). this is obviously unreasonable

I agree with this, I am always a few steps behind with health of nests rising along with evolution (I am playing death world).
No matter if you have artillery damage increase level 0 (at the beginning) or level 6 (now for me), nests are killed in two shots, making the 6 levels I researched absolutely pointless since I keep using two artillery shells regardless.

I wonder if this could be made easier to balance by splitting physical and explosive damage upgrades for cannon shells and artillery shells (with artillery damage either a 3rd one or just removed) ?

This would be continuing the 0.17 changes to military upgrade techs.

BlueTemplar wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 3:48 pm I wonder if this could be made easier to balance by splitting physical and explosive damage upgrades for cannon shells and artillery shells (with artillery damage either a 3rd one or just removed) ?

This would be continuing the 0.17 changes to military upgrade techs.

artillery damage is meaningless as an infinite tech, the only difference between level 0 and level 100 is whether you can kill the nest and the behemoth worm with one shot. (I don't think anyone would use artillery to attack demolishers).a better approach is to allow the artillery to be able to kill the highest level nest with one shot right from the start (or increase the damage tech by two levels to achieve this). change the damage range to infinite tech.

Cerberus wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 3:02 pm I agree with this, I am always a few steps behind with health of nests rising along with evolution (I am playing death world).
No matter if you have artillery damage increase level 0 (at the beginning) or level 6 (now for me), nests are killed in two shots, making the 6 levels I researched absolutely pointless since I keep using two artillery shells regardless.

so I would never waste my science pack on artillery damage tech.

We have way more interesting targets now : even just for the static ones there are also small and regular Gleba egg rafts, which are going to have a different evolution health bonus than on Nauvis (for some time).

And yeah, why not use it to soften up dangerous enemies like Demolishers, Strafers, Stompers ?

(And this not even to mention various modded enemies and... PvP enemy structures (lol).)

How about quality

Panzerknacker wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 7:27 pm How about quality

That would actually solve it, looking at the stats, I didn't even think about that.
However, it must be noted that quality only exists in the expansion. For the base 2.0 game, this problem persists.

My only gripe for quality as a solution in Space Age would be that artillery requires interplanetary resources (calcite coming from Vulcanus where artillery was "discovered" from, which is strange as that planet has no enemy nests). And quality and interplanetary logistics is complicated (or maybe I am missing something, the game does not usually explain the new stuff fully unfortunately). For example, I am now mining the calcite on Vulcanus, regular quality, and sending it to a space platform distributing the calcite to the other planets. If I decided to add quality modules to my calcite mining drills, I have multiple different stacks of calcite. I can not configure space platforms to send rockets of calcite with mixed quality (as that is "ambiguous", says the GUI).
So that leaves me with two choices:

1) recycle the calcite with the wrong quality
Feasible because calcite is plenty. However, if I decide I want uncommon calcite to go on my rocket (I must recycle all legendary calcite then, weird ), I can not use that calcite elsewhere in my solar system then. I can easily use it to craft uncommon artillery shells, but then I would need to craft uncommon cliff explosives too, as an assembler (or chemical plant, can't remember now) set to craft regular cliff explosives will not take uncommon calcite.

2) Launch both regular and the more rare calcite to space in seperate rockets
I can not easily use my regular calcite space platform for that, otherwise it might have a full calcite rocket, but not a full uncommon calcite available on planet, making my space platform wait unneccesarily long. I could create a different space platform (again lots of resources), but then I would need one for all 4 higher quality tiers? otherwise my space platform might wait for the legendary calcite while uncommon is already loaded. Setting a maximum wait time for my platform would be arbitrary, as it might be simply the case that rocket silos are used already for sending stuff to other platforms or the rocket is not even ready yet. That's why I prefer "all requests satisfied".
Unless of course I recycle/drop higher tiers I don't need in the lava. And decide I stick with "uncommon" only as they will be more plentiful than rare, epic or legendary calcite. That could work because uncommon is enough to kill 3500 HP nests which is the max.
Writing it all out gives me the probably solution apparently
I will try to execute this plan. But it's unfortunate I needed an extra space platform for that. Ability for a space platform to set a request for "if available on planet only" would help A LOT! Then I could keep using "all requests satisfied". I would simply force regular calcite to be sent to my space platform and make the platform wait until it has that, and then uncommon/rare/... calcite would be set to "only if a full rocket is available on the planet", making "all requests satisfied" if my space platform does not get the uncommon calcite if there is not enough in the logistical network for a full rocket available on the planet, and make it wait for it if there IS enough.

I find interplanetary logistics to be extremely difficult to wrap my head around, probably because I don't fully understand all game mechanics and possibilities yet, as info in the game is scarce and everything is new. So people might probably correct some infactual things I said or possibilities I have missed.
I first tried doing it with science packs, because I discovered higher quality science packs have double/triple/... etc value per science pack, making quality modules far superior to productivity modules for science packs. However, I only do that for science packs that can be made on Nauvis, for the interplanetary logitics simply being a problem otherwise as rockets don't accept mixed quality science packs, and my production only does 1000 per space platform trip now, which is sufficient to research everything needed to finish the game.

There probably are many more options than this, for instance : making the quality Artillery shells directly on Vulcanus.
Yes, this is wasteful in term of rockets and cargo space, but also simpler.

Why would you dump higher rarities into lava ? Put them in a box (will take a while to fill) and keep them for special uses ?

BlueTemplar wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 1:11 am There probably are many more options than this, for instance : making the quality Artillery shells directly on Vulcanus.
Yes, this is wasteful in term of rockets and cargo space, but also simpler.

I thought about that, but only 10 shells per rocket is very little. Easy to design but very wasteful indeed.

BlueTemplar wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 1:11 am Why would you dump higher rarities into lava ? Put them in a box (will take a while to fill) and keep them for special uses ?

It is indeed best to put them in a box, but once the box is full production of artillery shells will halt so you are dumping them in lavga after anyway.

I guess it would depend, I could see a situation with a lot of production going on where you waste rarities only two tiers upwards (so if from normal : rare) - but I would rather try to recycle them first.
(Which I guess is the same as dumping them in the lava for the bottom ones...)

maxwell_xu wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 1:01 pm destroying a 3500hp nest with one shot requires approximately level 10 technology (2.046m science pack!). this is obviously unreasonable

Is it obvious? You can just build twice as many turrets and shells in the meantime. Then when you finally reach that one-shot level, it feels awesome, like getting mech armor or other big milestones.

Tinyboss wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 3:10 pm

maxwell_xu wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 1:01 pm destroying a 3500hp nest with one shot requires approximately level 10 technology (2.046m science pack!). this is obviously unreasonable

Is it obvious? You can just build twice as many turrets and shells in the meantime. Then when you finally reach that one-shot level, it feels awesome, like getting mech armor or other big milestones.

I don't think it's very fulfilling. actually, I would never waste science packs on this

maxwell_xu wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 4:21 pm I don't think it's very fulfilling. actually, I would never waste science packs on this

I quoted the wrong statement from you, sorry! I agree level 10 is pretty far out for that. I meant to respond to your later statement (if I understand you correctly) that it should one-shot nests as soon as you research it. That doesn't feel right to me.

maxwell_xu wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 4:21 pm

Tinyboss wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 3:10 pm

maxwell_xu wrote: Mon Nov 18, 2024 1:01 pm destroying a 3500hp nest with one shot requires approximately level 10 technology (2.046m science pack!). this is obviously unreasonable

Is it obvious? You can just build twice as many turrets and shells in the meantime. Then when you finally reach that one-shot level, it feels awesome, like getting mech armor or other big milestones.

I don't think it's very fulfilling. actually, I would never waste science packs on this

At some Point Science Packs are not something you "spend" or "waste" something too, but something you need to get rid of or your Giga-Factory will be blocked. The Factory must grow. Also is it really 2M Science Packs or is it 2M Science? With all the research productivity from modules and Biolabs it could be less than 1M.
And don't forget, that the new goal is no longer 1k Science/min but 1M Science/min. So, once you have achieved a true Megabase, you can easily spend those 2 minutes on researching that.. and if you're only at at a 100k Science/min base... well.. you have to produce a few minutes of research...
Some of those inifinite researches are very end game. Don't judge them from a early or midgame perspective.

Why would it be blocked, especially in vanilla SA ?

* cough cough * https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ArtilleryShellResearch

I much prefer this tech physical damage, I will maybe update this mod to optionally depend on space age and just delete the space age infinity search for artillery damage. I would prefer artillery damage be link to physical damage tech for ... physical damage and explosive tech for... explosive damage but that not possible. Anyway physical damage tech was not very used late game cause people often user laser so I think my solution is better.

The space age artillery damage +10% for infinite tech that scale up exponentially is PATHETIC.