Cannon Shell values

[Monty]

Cannon shell

Damage:
1000 physical
100 explosion
Piercing Power: 1000

Explosive cannon shell

Damage:
180 physical
300 explosion
Piercing Power: 100

Uranium cannon shell

Damage:
400 physical
200 explosion
Piercing Power: 600

Data acquired from Factorio Wiki, all shells updated to version 2.0.7
Is that something wrong for the values of the regular cannon shell?
I can't find any discussion regarding those values.

[Fel]

Not entirely updated, as you can check in the tech tree ingame, uranium cannon shell (the non-explosive one) does 2000 damage and 2200 piercing power.

Explosive shells seem a bit underwhelming in comparison now (they used to be better in most cases but this might be too big of a gap).

[Monty]

Originally posted by Fel:

Not entirely updated, as you can check in the tech tree ingame, uranium cannon shell (the non-explosive one) does 2000 damage and 2200 piercing power.

Explosive shells seem a bit underwhelming in comparison now (they used to be better in most cases but this might be too big of a gap).

Thank for your time mate, didn’t know that I can find those values in the tech tree.

[luziferius]

For explosives, you also have to factor in the explosion area effect, which deals additional damage to the target and surrounding enemies.

[Moucheron Quipet]

Regular Cannon shells have been buffed to compensate for the increased HP of biter nests. Before, they had 350 HP regardless of evolution, so a regular shell would 2-shot them (and one-shot them with some damage upgrades).

Now, by the time you have access to cannon shells, biter nests will probably have around 1000 HP or more, so dealing 300 damage to them would be pathetic. New cannon shells can still 2-shot / 1-shot them thanks to this damage buff.

Explosive shells are meant to deal with biters thanks to the explosion radius, they're not meant to shoot at nests. So they didn't really need to have more damage.

The main difference compared to before is than explosive shells were really good to deal with either biters or nests, so regular shells felt underwhelming. Now they both have a distinct role.

[Simon]

I thought I was the only one using primarily cannon shells. The extra explosive damage is useful, but not against meaningful targets I feel, and switching between standard and explosive is just not convenient during combat, so I'll take killing nests faster over killing spitters. Usually I just use the machine gun or flamethrower for spitters.

[Marosh]

Originally posted by luziferius:

For explosives, you also have to factor in the explosion area effect, which deals additional damage to the target and surrounding enemies.

At the point where the explosion shells outpaces the inconvienents of switching ammo mid-combat, you have different means for crowd-control, sadly. Combat robots keep the biters away while you circle around the nests and bombard them with normal or uranium canon shells. Thanks to the pierce and physical weapon upgrade, you oblitarate the nests and anything between. Stragglers are killed by the robots and machinegun while moving to the next biter base. Is the straggler crowed to big? Canon shells with pierce. It is also like an aoe, but in a straight line.

Suddenly you only need one weapon research which is also usable for defending your space platform with yellow ammo. Eases the ammo production needed on the platform.
There is better stuff later which outpaces physical bullets, thou.