Turret Questions

[RasaNova]

1. Is there a way to manipulate jobs (or is there a mod) so people will do regular tasks and then jump on a turret when enemies are close?

2. Will turrets mounted on rooftops behind walls shoot OVER walls? If so, does actual line of sight apply?

3. Why is it that sometimes a section of wall will have turret mounting points (the blue dot in build mode) but sometimes they don't?

4. When assigning somebody a turret job, I can't always get them to stay on the one I want them to use. How do they decide which one to operate?

5. I've had turret gunners nearly starve to death because they won't leave to get food. Is this a glitch, or am I missing something?

6. I sometimes get 2 gunners trying to man the same turret, and have to manually pull one off and force him on another. Is double-teaming a turret actually a thing? (faster loading time or something?) Or just a glitch.

7. Does height, distance, or lighting have an effect on damage or accuracy?

Thanks!

[RasaNova]

Now that I've been needing expanded defenses, #5 has been a major nuisance. Seems I need to manually put food in their inventory, or use skeletons to man turrets.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by RasaNova:

Now that I've been needing expanded defenses, #5 has been a major nuisance. Seems I need to manually put food in their inventory, or use skeletons to man turrets.

That's a bug they know about.

You can put food in a backpack and neighboring gunners should also grab from it if they're in the same Squad. I "think" if you put a Food Barrel within looting distance, they might be able to reach that as well.

Just a thought - Try Assigning them to a chair somewhere. Doesn't really matter where, just so long as it isn't going to be occupied by anyone and nobody else is assigned to it. The idea being to sort of "jolt" their single-minded behavior by giving them an option that might, maybe, come into play to interrupt that bad behavior? Dunno. Will try it myself when I can. It may be that the Turret Behavior never ends, ever, and just keeps being high-priority no matter what else is happening.

[Funsocks]

1. Put the turret gunner job at the bottom of any list. As far as I know, they will perform any other task until such a point that the base is attacked, at which point they will make turret gunner a priority, and then they will return to their previous task. All of my Farmers, for example, have Turret Operator and Haul Water at the very bottom of their list. If there's nothing to harvest, they'll haul water. If the place gets attacked, they'll help.

2. As far as I know, yes, but they don't get increased range for their height, so you have to consider the turret as though it were sitting on the ground in the same location, particularly when using very tall buildings like watchtowers. The projectiles don't follow any sort of physics nor have a traceable arc of trajectory. They have a flat range that doesn't consider height and fire in a straight line along line of sight, with a deviation based off skill. It's worth noting that this is an angle, so it gets worse as the range gets longer. You still need to have line of sight and the AI will take cover under your walls to avoid the attacks, so in my experience, it's mostly not worth the effort. I have a watchtower immediately inside my walls, about a small shack gap between the stairs and the tower, and the people on top can only hit enemies when they begin to climb the stairs to the gate. They can't hit anyone who hugs the inside of the wall until they emerge at the opening of the gate.

3. "Long" sections of wall have a mounting point at each end reliably. Short sections seem to depend on the exact nature of the short section. For example, if there's a short next to a gate, it won't have a mounting point. If you drag your mouse slowly as you're building you'll see it automatically selecting "parts" to make up the distance you specified, and sometimes those parts don't have a mounting point because they're filler. The most reliable way is to make sure you have long, straight sections of wall so that it draws a lot of the full length double section parts, especially around your gate. There are also Spotlight mounting points on walls that can confuse me when I'm building.

4. The moment you assign it, they seem to just pick whatever is closest and unoccupied. I just assign them the role and then give them a manual move order to operate the turret without holding shift. They'll get on that turret you clicked and then perform the job. They might move to another turret if they can see an enemy on the turret they're operating but can't shoot them because of range or line of sight.

5. Already answered. Fill their inventories with food and check on 'em every once and a while. With a full pack of foodcubes, they will be fine for like a week. If you give all your turret gunners Trader's backpacks and stack food in the packs, they'll be fine forever and your fighting parties can just come up to the wall and either take him into the party momentarily or just get him to drop down some food via the trade functions (You may need to trade with a fellow party member and then select him depending on the height of the wall). Personally, I just put Animal Feeders on the wall :^)

6. Sounds like a glitch. My turret gunners seem to know when a turret is "occupied", so that's quite strange. Never had this issue. Perhaps try to repair the navmesh with ctrl+shift+f11. They might be stuck pathing after they recalculate.

7. Height adds a percentage to damage. Click on the turret and on the left info panel it has information on the last shot that turret fired, including how far above the target was and how much the damage was increased as a result. Counter intuitively, turret range is NOT increased by height. If you build a watchtower, the range of the turrets is the same as if you build the turret on the ground in the same place. The range is a circle that ignores all heights and I guess calculates on a 2d plane and not a bubble or based off an actual trajectory modified by a physics engine, which can be hard to wrap your head around at times. No other statistics are affected by height.

Light SEEMS to be relevant to archery and turreteering. There is an upgrade later on in the Mounted Turrets line that adds Spotlights to the front of your turrets; "For night time raids". The problem is that it doesn't apply to the character's skill in the same way as, say, laboring. It applies as a darkness "bonus" on the enemy, like when you're using stealth, so you can't just hover over the info panel and tell exactly what penalty is being applied to your archers. Just to be safe, I put spotlights on all my turrets and line all of my killsboxes, buildings with turrets and work areas with search lights. It's brighter at night in my compound than during the day :')

[RasaNova]

Good info, thanks!

I'll try that with putting food storage nearby, and also experiment with other jobs before turrets, which might solve both #1 and #5. But yeah worst case I'll just manually load them up with food.

The doubling up on turrets seems to happen fairly regularly. It might be that I'm assigning more jobs than I have turrets, so they're getting confused.