Factorio Forums

Improve shotgun

I made a mod: shotgun rebalance, and i think some of my ideas deserve to be promoted to vanilla Factorio after having played around with them.

1. Promoting the shotgun to default unlock.
2. Move piercing shotgun shells from Military 4 to Military 2.
3. Half shotgun movement penalty duration.
4. Add piercing_damage to piercing shotgun shells.

Result:

The first two items doesn't improve the shotguns better per se, it only makes them more available. Which helps in promoting shotguns as a viable alternative instead of niche choice.
Halving the shotgun penalty duration is meant to better enable hit-and-run strategies. Which is interesting for shotguns as their DPS is equal to the submachine gun, but much more bursty.
Adding piercing to shotgun pellets allow them to shoot through enemies, which makes shotguns better at crowd control.

Motivation

I believe shotguns are lackluster for a number of reasons. While shotguns excel at damage per cost, they lack in every other area compared to their natural counterpart the submachine gun.
The damage per cost realistically only matters before automation of iron plates, after which it becomes almost impossible to outdo your production with merely your character shooting.
The submachine gun also has the advantage that your factory incidentally makes ammo for it, if you either produce Military science or ammunition for defensive gun turrets.
The DPS of the shotgun and the submachine gun are more or less equal. However that depends on you hitting each pellet with the shotgun, which is much easier with the auto-aim of the submachine gun. It is also worth to note that the flat part of damage reduction from resistance, affects shotguns much harsher.

Shotguns also falls short compared to submachine guns as they much shorter range and are much harder to aim.

Further changes

While my mod does some things not mentioned here that are worth to consider, i want to highlight some new changes.

• Consolidate shotgun shells and firearm magazine: The difference between them is negatable and un-interesting. While having the option of reloading your shotgun from your other defenses would help make the shotgun more attractive.
• Add uranium shotgun shells: This is somewhat obvious, but having shotgun utility fall of a cliff after uranium ammo is dumb.
• Remove friendly fire damage from shotguns: As trying to reduce damage to your own buildings in the middle of a fire fight is interesting but tiresome, and it doesn't apply to the submachine gun.

I don't use the shotgun ever... because it damages my base. A rebalance might make it actually useful.

less is more, I would remove pistol and shotgun from game

Stargateur wrote: Thu May 08, 2025 12:11 am less is more, I would remove pistol and shotgun from game

I would leave that up to Wube. However both are used in mods, so removing them might require slightly more analysis.

As general feedback from me: I don't use the shotgun. Against biters, worms and nests, it's like shooting with blanks. No matter the ammo and the research. No visible impact except when I accidentally shoot while walking inside my factory. And I'm usually not able to get the direction right or I'm just a bit too far away to make any impact. It's too unwieldly.
With pistol and later the submachine gun, I'm spending much more ammo I guess, but I'm able to kill stuff in the end.

If there is a rebalance, I would say it's more important that the aiming will be improved: automated and not dependent on current player direction and with an indicator if the enemy currently hovered with the mouse is in range or not.

I find this a bit interesting because I do use the shotgun myself. Actually, I swear by it. But never on its own, and always in combination with turrets. I consider turret creep the tactic of setting up a base of fire, and if I don't have a base of fire then I'm not doing good combat engineering.

What sells it to me is the fact I have an ammo stream for personal rounds and an ammo stream for turrets while I'm engaging small and the first medium enemies. And the 12 pellets that come out are the equivalent of doing a mag dump in a second, you get ten mag dumps per shotgun magazine. I close to a distance where accuracy isn't a problem or use turrets as a means to achieve accurate fire - I defend them with the shotgun while they use yellow ammo more efficiently than I ever could. If I'm defending... well technically I should leave the turrets there anyways.

I've never actually in great seriousness used the automatic shotgun or piercing rounds because my priority is to operate at a tempo where I'm ahead of biter evolution. This isn't "No Spoon" fast but, a tank just out competes infantry weapons until you get damage upgrades in.

Theis wrote: Tue Apr 29, 2025 12:59 pm

1. Promoting the shotgun to default unlock.
2. Move piercing shotgun shells from Military 4 to Military 2.
3. Half shotgun movement penalty duration.
4. Add piercing_damage to piercing shotgun shells.

• Consolidate shotgun shells and firearm magazine: The difference between them is negatable and un-interesting. While having the option of reloading your shotgun from your other defenses would help make the shotgun more attractive.
• Add uranium shotgun shells: This is somewhat obvious, but having shotgun utility fall of a cliff after uranium ammo is dumb.
• Remove friendly fire damage from shotguns: As trying to reduce damage to your own buildings in the middle of a fire fight is interesting but tiresome, and it doesn't apply to the submachine gun.

I wanted to post some more on this because; okay, I do use this already. Tangent on tactics aside:

I'd honestly be negative of all these changes. IMO they take something that is effective beyond that to broken. The SMG also works well. It should. I don't want to go into it because, like compared to 10 rounds in a second on an smg the shotgun does 12. You either read that and decide to figure it out or you don't; it isn't a great loss - you're not losing using the SMG; this game isn't about infantry combat.

1. Promoting the shotgun to default unlock.
2. Move piercing shotgun shells from Military 4 to Military 2.
3. Half shotgun movement penalty duration.
4. Add piercing_damage to piercing shotgun shells.

of these 4 things I can't really speak to the third one because I don't really use the shotgun. The first one shouldn't happen because it makes the shotgun compete with the pistol not the SMG. The second and fourth ones seem perfectly reasonable although doing both makes the shotgun OP.