Why use the shotgun over the machine gun?

[Dewutt]

it's too slow and doesn't do that much damge, but maybe its not that good against biters

[Mister Dawg]

It works great against trees!

[Horoai]

Used to be very powerful before we had uranium ammo. Unfortunately, we didn't get any uranium shotgun shells.

[Cakeeater]

the shotgun with research is great for trees in the early game

[DCYW]

shotgun causes more damage than machine gun.

[GronkJuice]

its basic, shotgun does more damage per resource than the MG. also the Nads do more damage per resource than the shotgun, Super shotgun, or the MG. and once you get lazer turrets you can just make sure you have excess power in your base, Run Large Poles where you are running to, and drop them down as your offense for 0 resources. leads to the cheapest biter killing ability ever. However now that you no longer NEED to destroy biters to win you can just slowly expand your base and make outposts for resources when needed,

PS Nades work better than shotgun on trees, also the tank is not all that expensive of a tech/prod in order to run those pesky trees over. (And the personal roboport works wonders with disasemble trees)

[Helly]

As stated above, before .16 the shotgun was extremely useful. However, now the rocket launcher has been massively buffed, and Uranium ammo is a thing, there's no need for it, or even space along your machine pistol, rocket launcher, and flamethrower (which, even with the nerf, is still good for trees and crowds of biters).

[Name Lips]

The main reason I don't like the shotgun is you need to manually aim. The machine gun auto-targets enemies near your mouse curser, but the shotgun just goes off in whatever direction your mouse is pointed whether or not it will actually hit anything. It also can cause splash damage on your structures.

[BustedHipGaming]

Originally posted by Name Lips:

The main reason I don't like the shotgun is you need to manually aim. The machine gun auto-targets enemies near your mouse curser, but the shotgun just goes off in whatever direction your mouse is pointed whether or not it will actually hit anything. It also can cause splash damage on your structures.

Splash Damange = so frustrating. Still, early anti-tree weapon shotgunnery is not bad.

[AlexMBrennan]

it's too slow and doesn't do that much damge

I take it you never tried to kill a large worm with regular SMG ammo - you might want to build a railroad to keep the player avatar supplied with ammo before you start.

[Radioactive Panda]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

it's too slow and doesn't do that much damge

I take it you never tried to kill a large worm with regular SMG ammo - you might want to build a railroad to keep the player avatar supplied with ammo before you start.

Before or after bullet dmg

[Helly]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

it's too slow and doesn't do that much damge

I take it you never tried to kill a large worm with regular SMG ammo - you might want to build a railroad to keep the player avatar supplied with ammo before you start.

Rockets.

Plus the tank makes it easy, even with piercing rounds with 3/4 upgrades. If it's not dead in seconds, ram it.

[Stormshado]

Originally posted by Hellpest:

Plus the tank makes it easy, even with piercing rounds with 3/4 upgrades. If it's not dead in seconds, ram it.

Ram it, if it's not dead, start shooting. Good way to use up repairbots too :D

[Helly]

Originally posted by Stormshado:

Originally posted by Hellpest:

Plus the tank makes it easy, even with piercing rounds with 3/4 upgrades. If it's not dead in seconds, ram it.

Ram it, if it's not dead, start shooting. Good way to use up repairbots too :D

I move my construction bots into the inventory trash slots while I'm outside my base, otherwise they just get shredded by biters.

[Timeslice]

The wiki explains it best, but TL;DR = the shotgun is the easiest and cheapest way to kill biter nests, and is essential for early game nest clearing.

The Shotgun is the earliest weapon capable of seriously assaulting Biter nests. The weapon's starting damage can pierce nest armor (12x5 vs. 2) and destroy them with moderate difficulty. Shotgun ammo represents a massive boost on resource efficiency, with 2 copper and 2 iron giving a stack of shells worth 600 raw damage. Contrast this against the pistol ammo, which costs 4 iron for 50 raw damage. These traits make the shotgun user friendly for sustained assaults against biter nests.

The shotgun is less effective in clearing out the biters themselves, because pellet spread will cause a nontrivial fraction of pellets to miss against small targets. Players can switch between the shotgun and SMG to balance power and resource-efficiency, or support themselves with covering fire from Turrets and combat bots.

[Morphic]

Originally posted by Timeslice:

The wiki explains it best, but TL;DR = the shotgun is the easiest and cheapest way to kill biter nests, and is essential for early game nest clearing.

Pretty much. Before you have access to your fancy-shmancy "tanks" or "rockets", the Shotgun is actually pretty great. The fall-off for it is significant since the Update though, which makes it underwhelming now in the long run.

However, Early-Game it is great and, if you run with an SMG too, you can get really proactive/offensive. Use SMG to wipe the swarm of Biters, then hotswap to Shotgun and blast the nest apart, then hotswap back to SMG to take out the swarm of Biters that are now about to kill you -> repeat.

All that said, I'm not surprised to see a lot of people think it sucks. Most people tend to "overlevel" by playing on Peaceful or simply staying behind Walls. So by the time they actually do start going to kill some Biters, they already have access to Rockets or even DPU Ammo lol. Though I have seen some people just spam Grenades while inside their Buggy/Car, which is pretty effective too.