What am I missing about laser turrets?

[Antarata]

They draw collosal amounts of power to fire and don't do nearly as much damage as gun turrets (ap) with as many upgrades researched. I tried to raid a huge biter nest with 7 laser turrets, and I caused a brownout after a little while, losign all 7 turrets. I did it again with 6 gun turrets and plently of ap ammo, and I DECIMATED the entire nest.

Is there some hidden benefit of laser turrets that makes them worthwhile? Other than the bigger range and not needing to be fed ammo, of course.

[FlameWar]

Building defensive empalcements otu of a couple flamer tourets for the ehavy lifting, plus laser turrets on the side to clean up strays is a lto less resoruce hungry than gun turrets. like, a LOOOOOOOOOT.

I switched to Laser turrets (and later laser+flamer) on the bas ein my biggest game so far, after the gun turrets ate more than 5 million magazines of various ammo to defend the base.
That's a lot of plates to spend on ammo, for no real gain, comapred to laser turrets which are a good chunck more expensive to build (even if you add the turret, plus energy production/storage, plus extra turrets to defend the area for said production/storage), but don't have constant drain.
I'd say the laser turrets run cheaper after around 10 hours in palce, max 15 if your defense lines are in quieter areas. From that point onwards the turret will get cheaper and cheaper compared to a gun turret with every hour.

[Antarata]

Will you be fine with flamers and laser turrets against enormous hordes of behemoth biters?

[Samael]

Цитата допису Antarata:

Will you be fine with flamers and laser turrets against enormous hordes of behemoth biters?

I only have lasers and the bitters never got to my walls. At upgrade 8 for the lasers speed and dmg they shoot 10 lasers a second and do 80dmg each. So 800 dmg a second for each turret. You put them in a line all around your base and that's it. ;)

[Jupiter3927]

Flamethrower turrets leave a fire on the ground wherever they hit.
That flame deals damage as long as the biter is touching it.
This makes them excellent for taking out large groups of biters, especially groups with spitters.

Adding laser turrets for the biters that get through is the best way to cover the flamethrower blind spot.
Another row of flamethrowers would work too since your front row (and any stone walls) is completely fire proof.

Flamethrower turrets also barely touch their ammo so they can withstand prolonged attacks easily.
They have 1000 health too so their not getting destroyed.

[Antarata]

I don;t want them to get hit, because then I have to fix them.

[Jupiter3927]

Your bots can fix them.
Your turrets are tanking so your bots can fix them risk free.
Repair packs are super cheap.

[Alty]

Time to bust this nonsense. To solve the power issue all you need to do is build Accumulators and it will be solved and you will not have brown outs. Now this is vs a Behemoth Biter and using a gun turret with max research without space research and if you are still using it at this point then I don't know what to tell you. Also this is with max shooting speed.

Normal - 11 damage but after armor it does 0 with 0 DPS
Piercing - 17.6 damage but after armor 3.84 with 96 DPS
Uranium - 28.8 damage but after armor 13.92 with 348 DPS
Laser - 66 damage but after armor 47 with 451.2 DPS

Even with the better damage you also don't have to reload lasers and also they have a much bigger range then gun turrets. In the start gun turrets are better because you are not rolling in power but still need protection but once you start advancing into making better power then you need to switch lasers for the late game.

[Joman]

You can store hot steam in your power plants and add more generators. They kick in, when you need them und use up stored steam. The steam refills until the next allien attack comes.

[AlexMBrennan]

To solve the power issue all you need to do is build Accumulators and it will be solved and you will not have brown outs

The detail you failed to mention is that you need to build 26 accumulators for each laser turret you expect to be engaged in combat for every 12s of combat you expect.

E.g. 50 turrets (= 32 tiles of border) and 30s waves means you need a whopping 3250 accumulators... but if you have that many resources lying around you might just as well plop down another nuclear reactor.

[FlameWar]

Цитата допису AlexMBrennan:

To solve the power issue all you need to do is build Accumulators and it will be solved and you will not have brown outs

The detail you failed to mention is that you need to build 26 accumulators for each laser turret you expect to be engaged in combat for every 12s of combat you expect.

E.g. 50 turrets (= 32 tiles of border) and 30s waves means you need a whopping 3250 accumulators... but if you have that many resources lying around you might just as well plop down another nuclear reactor.

Actually it's somewhat more complicated and simpler at the same time.

A laser turret eats 800 kJ of energy per shot, so the actuall power/sec of a laser turret rises as you research firing speed.
An acumulator can store 5 MJ, or 6.25 shots for a laser turret, which is indeed not all that great.
But accumulators are crap for energy storage anyway, unless you are using solar.
If you are using coal or nuclear, you will want to just build some extra steam engines/turbines and storage tanks.

A single storage tank can store 750MJ in boiler produced energy (steam for the steam engine, at 165 °C, or 2.425 GJ of Nuclear produced steam at 500 °C.
Then you will need some steam engines/turbines ofc.

At 900 kw a piece, 8 Steam engines will produce 7.2 MW, or exactly enought for 9 laser shots per second, which is not that effective yet compared to accumulators, but that setup of 1 tank and 8 engines will last you for 104 seconds of continuously firing 9 laser shots per second.

At 5.2 MW a piece, 2 steam turbines will produce 10.4 MW, enought for 13 shots per second. Which is pretty space and resource ffective compared to accumulators. A Single tank of 500 °C steam can supply 2 turbines for 233 second sof continuous operation at full power, and replaces 485 accumulators in total storage (not in output, but scaling extra turbines doesn't take up much space, and tanks are really dirt cheap for their storage).

Now nuclear reactors, heat exchangers and turbiens are fairly expensive to build. But your only coninuous costs will be a few fuel cells, and if you build reactors in a a 2 wide line as long as you need, they will be very, very fuel effective.



For comparison:
A gun turret at the last non-infinite damage research steap will deal 40.8 damage to a behemoth biter per shot with depleeted uranium rounds, and take 74 shots to take it down. That means 7.4 magazine per behemoth biter, which translates to 37.5 Copper plates, 30 Iron plates, 7,5 Steel (or another 37.5 iron plates, for a total of 67.5 Iron plates), and 7.5 U-238.

so oyu would need a total of 97,5 Plates of iron and copper, and 7.5 Uranium for a single behemoth biter. YOu can build and run a LOT of reactors, storage tanks and steam turbiens with the costs of defeating a coupel larger waves.


Edit: Oh, and of course producing all those plates, and ammo, and supply them to the turrets also needs a lto of miners, smelters, belt and/or trains, inserters and/or bots.
All of which also eat fuel and/or energy in fairly large quantities in sum.

[Alty]

Цитата допису AlexMBrennan:

To solve the power issue all you need to do is build Accumulators and it will be solved and you will not have brown outs

The detail you failed to mention is that you need to build 26 accumulators for each laser turret you expect to be engaged in combat for every 12s of combat you expect.

E.g. 50 turrets (= 32 tiles of border) and 30s waves means you need a whopping 3250 accumulators... but if you have that many resources lying around you might just as well plop down another nuclear reactor.

If you're building just enough power just to barely keep your factory running then it's just your bad factory design. As a rule of thumb I always tend to keep my power near 50% usage and if it get's to 80% I will take the time to add more steam engines and/or solor panels. Once Nuclear power is an option then power will never be an issue for me ever again.

Also you are over exaggerating how long you will be attacked at a time. All waves last for about 5 to 10 seconds max especially for laser turrets as the damage is really powerful.

[BOYCOTT]

if you have issues with power that last longer than the next 10 buildings you place just uninstall, you suck.

that said, if it isn't obvious overproduction of power is just as easy to automate as other things in the game are, you really just plan to rush solar and accumulator research from the start and it should never become an issue, just being honest with you.

i will literally never play this game without at some point fairly early on producing an effectively infinite backlog of solar panels as well as accumulators, trust me you can ALWAYS add more.

personally any and every time i can take power usage over a solid item input to keep a machine or object running i'll gladly take it, i can then devote more planning to the rest of the base and have one less task to upkeep and get distracted with.

edit: fun note, i think the most power i've ever had in reserves was over 10GWh on longest interested save.

[Coffee Daemon]

If we're talking vanilla you should never have an issue with too many biters at once. They only ever attack with relatively small forces. 8-10 at a time seems normal. A single line of laser turrets deals with that easily. Rampant makes that more challenging :D

Best advice I ever heard. "Why have a wall when you can have another row of turrets?"

[BOYCOTT]

Цитата допису Coffee Daemon:

If we're talking vanilla you should never have an issue with too many biters at once. They only ever attack with relatively small forces. 8-10 at a time seems normal. A single line of laser turrets deals with that easily. Rampant makes that more challenging :D

Best advice I ever heard. "Why have a wall when you can have another row of turrets?"

people play vanilla still? weird....

also, you disabled biters spawning the next smaller size when they die, didn't you?

i do never play with biters attack first setting though, they're a means to an ends for me, i will need the alien drops for science and other stuff eventually anyway but i don't like them to be a 50/50 focus of the game split between building and protection, at least not typically and with many mods.

[akai]

Цитата допису Too-DAMN-Much:

i will need the alien drops for science and other stuff eventually anyway

When was the last time you updated the game? Vanilla Factorio Aliens has no longer dropped anything anymore for quite some time.