Plasma turret adjustment (and other Warfare 2.0 stuff?)

[Qatavin]

I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere before. It's no secret that Plasma Turrets are crazy overpowered, but there is a way to balance them better without even needing to decrease their damage. Right now their constant energy Drain is practically nothing, but if it were increased to 8MW for tier 1, increasing by 6MW each tier up to a total of 32MW, that would make their use less of an automatic thing in a unique and interesting way. 8MW is steep in the early mid-game, but not impossible to pay. At that level, you'll want to put some thought into limiting their usage to only the places where you really need them. But once you get into nuclear power, you'll have the capacity to use as many as you want, which is really satisfying. And when you consider how much damage their AOE projectiles can inflict, the price is still very much worth it, especially when dealing with the frequent attacks of Rampant.

Sniper turrets have an unrelated issue. Their extremely high damage multiplier (15 to 1 comparing Sniper 1 to Gun Turret 1, up to 25 to 2 for Sniper 3 and Gun Turret 5) makes them excessively cheap in terms of the amount of ammo they consume. Giving the three tiers of Sniper Turret an ammo_consumption_modifier of 15, 14, an 13 would solve this issue. This makes them "fair" in terms of resource cost, though they would suffer from each shot doing way more damage than it takes to kill weak early-game enemies. This would again make the player want to put some consideration into their use, instead of making them an automatic pick over Gun Turrets because of their superior range.

[Icecoldmeat]

That sounds great, i was also thinking about ways to balance the plasma and sniper turrets a bit. I think your proposition would be a elegant solution.

Also saw your MR for warfare 2.0, looks good, hope its get merged soon. I also made an effort to update it to 2.0, after i placed the MR i saw your request and your solutions are better lol.

Do you have any plans to checkout/update bobenemies? Otherwise I'll probably try to take a shot at it.

[Qatavin]

I'm targeting Ores next, then I'll probably have to spend some time wrapping up my updates to Plates. I suggest making an Issues thread when you get started on a mod to prevent redundant effort.

[Qatavin]

Tankotrons have a major issue in 2.0, with how their cannons shoot their own legs. They've always done this, but in the past it was merely annoying, occasionally blocking a shot from hitting its intended target. In 2.0, shooting a walking vehicle's legs will also damage the vehicle, so it may only take a single shot to reduce a tankotron to scrap. Which is obviously less than ideal.

I've taken a look at the attack_parameters of the tankotron's cannons, but parameters like projectile_creation_distance seem to behave in a way that makes no sense to me. projectile_creation_parameters might do it, but the api documentation doesn't do a very good job of explaining how it works. I may try to figure it out later today.

Edit: Problem solved

[Qatavin]

Power armor 5 at legendary quality has a grid size of 21x21, which is pretty preposterous. For the sake of balance with vehicle grids, armor grid sizes in general should probably be nerfed, and nerfed a bit more when the Quality mod is being used.

[KiwiHawk]

Ideas from discussion on PR #210

What do you think about slowing down sniper turrets rate of fire? Previously, this would probably have made them nearly useless. But now with the ability to set target priorities it might work.

An encouragement to mix turret types, not just spam sniper turrets. Use sniper turrets to take out the big guys and have regular turrets for everything else.

Sounds good. Also, adding a negative health_penalty to them will make them target enemies with higher health automatically. Note that vanilla gun turrets in 2.0 have a health_penalty of positive 1. As for slowing down their rate of fire, that is definitely an option we could look at. Given their long range, being able to fire too fast would let them mow down enemy groups before they even get into range of regular guns. Of course, their range also means you could just plop down more of them, so it's not a total solution. I mentioned this in #212 , but I think the other part of the equation is an ammo_consumption_modifier to make them consume ammo somewhat proportionally to their innate damage_multiplier compared to gun turrets of a similar tech tier. Like so:

Gun 1: 1xDamage -- Sniper 1: 15xDamage 15xAmmo_consumption 240fr Cooldown
Gun 3: 1.5xDamage -- Sniper 2: 20xDamage 14xAmmo_consumption 210fr Cooldown
Gun 5: 2xDamage -- Sniper 3: 25xDamage 13xAmmo_consumption 180fr Cooldown

Supposedly, ammo_consumption_modifier also allows decimal modifiers, but I'd really rather not open up that can of worms. Increasing cooldown to 240fr or 4 seconds would also be enough to let a partial line of snipers soften up an incoming attack wave without totally erasing it, based on my recent experience with Rampant.

[Qatavin]

Another thought. In Krastorio 2, tier 1 ammo has an altered recipe. Copper, iron, and coal, if memory serves. We could do something similar, like lead, copper, and coal; or lead, iron, and coal. Aside from cutting down on consumption of precious iron in the early game and making a key recipe more interesting, pushing players to set up lead production early will help when it comes time to set up yellow circuit boards, by removing one item off the long list of things that need to be done to produce them.

I would also like to make some adjustments to certain ammo items, particularly elemental shotgun shells and bullets. Some types have effects like creating poison stickers that are seriously unbalanced compared to their peers, and those with splash damage are considerably more powerful with their current stats than those that are without.

The plasma turret power drain suggestion is also still waiting for yea/nay.

[KiwiHawk]

All your suggestions sound good to me!

Two additional points about plasma turrets:

1. For how powerful they are, having plasma turrets first unlock at RGM science feels too early. Pushing this to RGMB science would leave more space for sniper turrets to shine before blue science.
2. I don't think we need 5 tiers of plasma turret! Most of the tier upgrades don't feel impactful and are probably skipped. For comparison, sniper turrets only have three tiers.