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I looked at the wiki and on the forums and I can't find an official reason why. It makes no sense to me

- gameplay: it creates a situation, where, technically, it is more optimal to use the artillery manually instead of automatically, which is the exact opposite of the rest of factorio. Theoretically, one can use the extra manual distance for chunk discovery but I've never seen that be used or meaningfully used it myself. At a point in the game, where you have artillery, resources are already basically infinite anyway, so it shouldn't be the case of "i just need to scan chunks to find uranium" or something

- balancing: artillery & its ammo are already expensive and already basically solve the biter problem. The extra manual distance changes nothing for balancing.

- lore / immersion: if anything it would make more sense for automatic to have bigger range than manual. what's going to be more accurate, a human fat fingering a spot on a map, or a technical radar lock in?

My question is then so why? It seems to me that everyone likes this and I can't figure out why. It makes me very frustrated in situations where I end up clearing out a nest with artillery manually just to realise "why did i do this manually, I could've built a closer artillery and avoid this churn"

Because I decided it sounded like fun when I implemented artillery at the engine level. It seems most people agreed with that decision.

meowxiik wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2026 5:31 pm - lore / immersion: if anything it would make more sense for automatic to have bigger range than manual. what's going to be more accurate, a human fat fingering a spot on a map, or a technical radar lock in?

Real-world Artillery systems employ a forward deployed observer for targeting and corrections when firing over-the-horizon. Automatic target selection and elimination is the realm of science fiction current drone-based AI systems.

Rseding91 wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2026 5:45 pm Because I decided it sounded like fun when I implemented artillery at the engine level. It seems most people agreed with that decision.

Fair enough!

If the manual range was the same size as the automatic range, then manual targeting would be basically useless, right? Anything that you could manually target would just get shelled out automatically if you left it to its own devices.

meowxiik wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2026 5:31 pm - lore / immersion: if anything it would make more sense for automatic to have bigger range than manual. what's going to be more accurate, a human fat fingering a spot on a map, or a technical radar lock in?

I would see it as a matter not of accuracy so much as of target selection. Is that blip on the radar something worth shooting at? Automatic targeting is conservative in its selections because it is 'dumb'; manual targeting doesn't have to be because it has additional contextual cues.

Manual targeting having bigger range is intuitively the right thing. Usually, you build artillery to continuously keep an area clean of nests in automatic mode.

However when you expand, you explore into biter-infested area, often not even uncovered. You use artillery in manual mode to 1) get a preview of the area you will conquer and 2) to clear biter nests in the immediate vicinity of your expansion. You expand, build new artillery, and now this new artillery will clear the rest of the area in automatic mode. This way you don't need any melee combat, just fight the angered incoming biter groups.

to annoy people like me, thus, from gameplay pov that pretty smart, that allow the player to toy with artillery, but I always wanted this to be configurable ingame. Like I can with signal tell a turret to target only very close nest and one other target very far one.