Weapon Systems are a dud

[coffee-factorio]

So my feeling is the weapons where tooled for a multiplayer scenario where a group of people are willing to intervene every few hours when the problems show up. In single player, a lot of the stuff I'm hearing about places that are negative I feel comes from the fact that your time is being eaten up because you can't establish a hold on a planet worth anything.

And so here's the general feeling:

1) Up to getting off Nauvis the balance sort of works because you can suspend disbelief for artillery requiring a super-steel to function at the level of building a gun unit of significant size. Tungsten isn't necessarily tungsten.

2) On Fulgora it isn't a problem.

3) On Vulcanis you can make artillery and split a medium worm in half with a 24 gun artillery line. 240 rounds will do it because I did it in 120. The tesla turret you get from Fulgora will work for small ones with unit loss. That's acceptable. It's probably a few minutes of tedious gun setup and brining in train cars of ammo/you lose electric turrets. At the same time a DU ammo equipped tank can just solve small worms but it's a similar effort investment even though the outcome is very, very fast.

4) And then artillery is finite and has to be lifted off Vulcanis. So nope in the mid game, I got better things to do like complaining on Gleba. And then I have an asteriod crushing ship and a rocket turret to get to Aquilo, so nope, there just aren't enemies there but the cold. And then in the late game, since it's finite that means that my 100 + spm science line that takes 40 more hours to build can be stopped by running out of ammo for expansions. So nope on Nauvis. Nope on Gleba. And Vulcanis has rocks, coal is now a manufactured item so it can do all the base science and one of the planetary ones.

As for a research lab that does 2x research, held is held and if I can't hold the land what's the point of making the thing. The same thing goes for biter egg fueled recipes, but that's slightly more naunced since Nauvis is holdable. The power of the railgun means you notice that before you notice that a flamethrower and a shock tower is competitive, but each one of those systems has a relatively short range so for holding swamps on Gleba it is rather questionable to use them, even though that seems like their intended niche.

5) I could build legendary rocket turrets in 40 hours to hold Nauvis.
Or I could just double my science line to 200 SPM. I have infinite resources.

It isn't that Vulcanis is too strong. It's that everything strong enough is locked behind legendary quality. So that makes quality look like an adequacy module. And then that puts time pressure to learn systems that doesn't need to be there. There's several other systems where, the tank isn't too strong. It's just that nothing else was made strong enough to tangle with devourer worms like it can. So when you find something that's adequate in the first place it looks overpowered in comparison.

As far as fixes:

Make artillery steel bodied, so there isn't a shipping problem that breaks all sense. I mean, think about what is actually being implied by a shell with 5 times the explosive filler that somehow barely does as much damage the much smaller gun on the tank at introduction, even when it is loaded with a tungsten round. It just is insane that no one looked at that and said "you can kill a behemoth biter by weight of the shell alone and the fact it's screaming down at terminal velocity". And then, this shell which requires tungsten but the rail gun round which puts for friction and stress on its ammo doesn't? Did your concept designer just have a sick day then?

Once you make artillery steel bodied, recognize it's a blast fragmentation weapon for controlling spawners. So if it clears a swamp, and someone can build something interesting indefinitely, they can show that off indefinitely.

At the same time, it won't solve a big stomper without player intervention. But it does force a manageable amount of enemies to pathfind to a point. So turret building is still a player ritual, because if that gun system made of tungsten goes down you have to go to vulcanis to get more. And by making it explosive a medium devourer resists it. And it's a little harder to just say that Vulcanis is your playpen forever.

If a devourer needs to be killed by artillery, give it a tungsten AP shell that functions like DU ammo does, because in real life tungsten was substituted for depleted uranium due to environmental concerns. Appropriate balance is suggested by the fact that 24 guns can kill a medium if they're fed standard ammo with about 1 upgrade of each kind - from hitting the research all setting. That's my test setup in the editor. That and a pulse reader attached to blue arms so, that 120 is 120.

And that's the main thing about it. The idea that you have to force adequacy with quality by killing range on guns. Because there is a non-railgun combo that I know will work on big stomper. But since it's all range 30 and I can't condition behaviors, there's no reason to use it. It works for the first 40 hours with turrets. But then it just means you start looking for excuses to not use guns at all. When you have multi-surface planets the limits that are on artillery right now are tedium for the sake of tedium.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a medium devourer on 12 million coal that I need to kill. If I can find one, chilling on nothing or just sulfuric acid I'm going to keep it as a pet; I'm quite fond of the Wigglies. As for what this does to rocket turrets - I mean if there's no reason to put up a rocket turret till it's legendary then it'd be one thing but a rocket turret can chunck big asteriods. It's part of a rock picker system. If I can't condition an attack, then that's all it is anyways.

And I swear if people had time to stop and think about Gleba you wouldn't have so much complaints about it. That's the one reason to leave. You just don't have time for that slow stuff because you can't hold it.