Elemental cannon feels really bad?

[Plot]

I played the game with my friend and the one thing kept bothering me was the elemental upgrades.

Once you upgrade a cannon to an elemental one, it will gain extra damage against opposing element (fire > nature > lightning > water > fire)
We were doing pretty well so we decided to try the fire cannon at around stage 12 and instantly lost because:
1. The fire cannon can now only shoot fire round & we can't use normal round for it anymore -> basically lost a cannon 🤦‍♂️
2. We didn't have an automation to produce fire round & couldn't adapt to the manual process on the flight-> yep we definitely lost that cannon now 🤦‍♂️
3. Enemies of the same element now resist the cannon damage -> 🤦‍♂️
And to add salt to injury, we got sent back to level 1 cause checkpoint doesn't exist.

This feel more like a serious downgrade than an upgrade.... I might be missing something here, but right now I cannot think of any reasons to use elemental cannons...

[Weston]

I think the elements are great! Just adding the element boosts the damage against neutral enemies. Resistant enemies actually take "neutral" damage because the damage is boosted by the element but then decreased because of the resistance. Being able to hit even some of the enemies harder is great. The elements all have secondary effects that help kill enemies as well. The tier 2 element even adds a cannon load.

It does take some practice to use because it adds another thing to make and manage. You can practice some things by going to the dummy by the campfire.

[Mordek]

Sorry for the late reply. I was ill and could not read the discussions.

Sorry you had a bad experience with the elements. Keep Keepers is a complex game and it can take a while to understand some of the strategies and tactics.
Elements increase your damage potential, but they also come with the downside of a more complex crafting process. As a new player, this can be a little intimidating at times, but I can guarantee it is absolutely worth it.

You are absolutely right that these weapons cannot be used with "traditional" cannonballs once they have been upgraded, and the reason for this is quite simple. If we were to allow cannonballs to be loaded into an elemental weapon, we would have to show the player what type of ammunition was loaded in order to make the shooting predictable. This would result in a lot of visual clutter. We tried that and we didn't like it, nor did our community at the time.

The first time you upgrade a weapon, the new ammo will not be automated. This is by design. However, you can use your existing automation to create cannonballs, which can then be combined with elemental powder. This may take a few seconds, but it will significantly increase your damage output and reduce the amount of ammunition you need.

Enemies that resist a damage type will still take 20 damage from level 1 elemental weapons, which is exactly the same damage as a physical cannonball, so even if you hit a resistant enemy, you will still do well with elemental weapons.

[Plot]

Hey there, thanks for your response.

Originally posted by Mordek:

Enemies that resist a damage type will still take 20 damage from level 1 elemental weapons, which is exactly the same damage as a physical cannonball, so even if you hit a resistant enemy, you will still do well with elemental weapons.

I guess we didn't take this into consideration, we thought it would actually deal less damage than the physical cannon because enemies now resist it (it feel like the damage was reduced). Plus the new bottleneck to our production because an additional step was introduced, it was quite frustrating when we lost the run.

We might give it a shot next time and see how it goes. Appreciate your response & suggestion :)