Flak turrets feel weak

[TechSY730]

I vote for dampening. I think it is better to stick with an existing mechanic rather than introduce an immunity to a mechanic that has had a long, proud tradition of not having anything immune to it.

[chemical_art]

What makes it proud? Or a tradition?

Just because something exists for a while, it should stay?

For reference, dampening on turrets would be something new too, iirc

[TechSY730]

What makes it proud? Or a tradition?

Just because something exists for a while, it should stay?

For reference, dampening on turrets would be something new too, iirc

Well, I'm concerned about the precedent it would set. What other short ranged stuff should get this immunity as well? Also, if they were made immune to FF damage reduction, there would be no reason other than ship caps to NOT put them under a FF.

I would be more willing to accept it if it had only partial immunity to FF damage reduction. Like for chosen units and turrets, instead of being slapped with a .25 multiplier to damage, it would only get slapped with a .75 multiplier to damage. That way, you would still have a reason to try to use it outside of a force field, but if you need to keep them safe due to their short range, you can put them under one for a bit of damage reduction, but not enough to keep them from being useless.

That also would serve as a great way to aid Orbital Mass Drivers. I would be happy if my OMDs could do 75% of their advertised attack when under a forcefield. That would actually make a difference against starships and such.

[HellishFiend]

Unless the end goal is really just to keep the turrets ALIVE rather than just ensure they are as effective as possible, I still feel that my suggestion of giving them an AOE explosion on-death is more true to their form and function (after all, there are a bunch of flak canisters inside the turret, arent there?).

Lets say the on-death explosion does as much damage as, oh, say 4 salvos from the turret, then even if they die right away, that would give them the ability to put on 5 salvos worth of hurt on a group of 2000+ laser gatlings coming in as a wave without needing to partner them with masses of grav turrets, tractors, or force fields. It also provides the added benefit of not requiring any extra opportunity cost (knowledge, cap usage of other defenses) to achieve that extra effectiveness people want from them. I personally think it would also give them a "cool" factor. =)

Needing to partner them with forcefields to keep them alive means I would have to, well, put a forcefield over or near an incoming wormhole, which is something I dont do, and still wouldnt do if that change were to be made. Especially in light of the new exo-waves, my defensive style is rather to use FFs over outgoing wormholes, and changing up the flaks to be able to fire 100% from under them isnt nearly enough to make me want to alter my FF cap usage.

Edit: You could even lower the attack priority of the AI ships against flak turrets, if they have other options, since they know they would blow up and hurt them. And wouldnt you know it, that would help keep them alive. =)

[Wanderer]

I'm not against the suicide explosion.  Explain it away as lore that the massive ammo dump in the flak cannon went Kabooms.  I'm just not sure anything else has a suicide mechanic.  It'd be a fun mechanic though, but it'd need a decent range for the kaboomage.

[Shrugging Khan]

Suicide explodo makes sense; even if the excuse is just ammo going boomers. After all, flak is just lots of explosions with even more explosions. So explosions causing damage is really just the sensible thing to have.

[keith.lamothe]

The ammo-splosion-on-death thing sounds fun and appropriate, but I don't think it would actually greatly improve the flak's case for "you should upgrade me": they'd still die really fast, and you'd still have to rebuild them.

[Mánagarmr]

I'd be willing to state that the general problem with turrets isn't the damage they do, or the range they have, but the fact that they are made from tinfoil. Midgame they simply just vaporize when waves show up. They simply can't stand any kind of focused fire, which of course hurts the short ranged turrets a lot more than say the Missile Turret.

[TechSY730]

I'd be willing to state that the general problem with turrets isn't the damage they do, or the range they have, but the fact that they are made from tinfoil. Midgame they simply just vaporize when waves show up. They simply can't stand any kind of focused fire, which of course hurts the short ranged turrets a lot more than say the Missile Turret.

Are you trying to use Mk. I turrets against Mk. III fleet ships or even very large numbers of Mk. II fleet ships?
Mk. I turrets are not supposed to satisfy you defensive needs for the whole game, just like Mk. I fleet ships aren't supposed to satisfy you offensive needs for the whole game.

Generally speaking, I think that Mk. N turret is balanced against the equivalent "average" Mk. N+1 fleet ship, scaling for ship cap ratios of course.

Now if you are saying that, say, Mk. 1 turrets are failing to do their jobs well against even small amounts of Mk. II fleet ships or a moderate amount of Mk. I fleet ships, then would be a true balance problem.

[keith.lamothe]

I'd be willing to state that the general problem with turrets isn't the damage they do, or the range they have, but the fact that they are made from tinfoil. Midgame they simply just vaporize when waves show up. They simply can't stand any kind of focused fire, which of course hurts the short ranged turrets a lot more than say the Missile Turret.

Turret cap-hp is comparable to that of fleet ships.  Laser turrets actually have almost the same as Armor Ships or Shield Bearers, the two highest cap-hp bonus types.  Basic turret is roughly equivalent to fighter, mlrs and lightning both about 33% more than that.  Sniper and Flak have about 25% yet more than that.  Missile turret is squishy, but has looooooong range.

They do have 2x-3x the firepower of average fleet ships, though.

[orzelek]

I haven't played from quite some time... but turrets were always paper thin.
With all new things like exos and waves later numbering much more than caps of ships ... turret type that can survive well is missile turret (esp with anti missile near it). We simply have no super turrets (beam ones are a start of what could happen there I guess) - that class never arrived. So when game gets into mid/high end phase turrets feel fragile - I did not have full caps of turrets at once place tho (it's better then probably - some will survive). I had few points to defend so my turret caps were split in 3-4 groups. Reading that 10/10 game AR's it seems you can fight with 1-2 choke points so it can be doable but thats not in your average map

Also I did not use lightning/flak ones - need to be near enemies for these makes the cost to much for the value.

[Hearteater]

I was pondering turret health based on this thread and decided to see what it would look like if turret health was scaled by the range of the turret.  I figured Missile Turrets seem to have a reasonable health given their vulnerability, so let's use 50k health at 30k range as the baseline, and scale it such that at half that range you get twice the health.  After modifying for cap size you can see the resulting multiplier in the Mult column below.  I selected a custom multiplier for Sniper Turrets to preserve sanity.  The Scaled column gives the resulting per-unit health after the multiplier.

This results in a 52% increase in overall health of a capped turret ball, so I then Adjusted it back towards the same total health as before, resulting in the values you see in the Adjusted column.  This should provide a more satisfactory lifespan for closer turrets.  I also did the same, but excluded the HBC since it requires a tech unlock.  The only value that changes is the last, so the Without column is the Adjusted values for the calculation with the HBC excluded.  Note that all final health values were rounded to multiplies of 5000 because they just look prettier that way.

Turret	Health	Armor	Range	Cap	Mult	Scaled	Adjusted	Without
Basic	75,000	300	10,500	196	2.86	145,000	100,000	105,000
Flak	250,000	750	4,000	98	15.00	750,000	495,000	535,000
Heavy Beam*	250,000	800	14,000	12	35.00	1,750,000	1,150,000	n/a
Laser	150,000	300	12,000	196	2.50	125,000	85,000	90,000
Lightning	200,000	800	8,000	98	7.50	375,000	250,000	270,000
Missile	50,000	150	30,000	196	1.00	50,000	35,000	40,000
MLRS	100,000	450	15,000	196	2.00	100,000	70,000	75,000
Sniper**	100,000	1000	999,999,000	235	0.50	50,000	20,000	20,000

* I'm doing an offensive analysis of turrets and HBC are really underperforming.  Given their cap, I don't know that starship level health is all that far off for them.  Even at 250k I've had them die depressingly fast in my current game.

**  Why do Sniper Turrets have 1000 armor?  That just seems odd given they are so rarely placed such that they even get hit.  Might be an artifact of when their resource cost was insane.

TL;DR: The last two columns are suggested health values for turrets that would require the same amount of total damage to destroy as now, but the health would be redistributed to closer turrets so they live longer.

[TechSY730]

Wow, I didn't realize HBCs only had .25M health. Given their cost and low ship cap, it seems like they should have more.

[orzelek]

From what I remember HBC's had even less hp at some point. I think that they were buffed once.. but when you start doing per cap calculations they sure look poor.
There was an idea to have turrets armor upped a bit but I think it got discarded.

[PokerChen]

 Before we make some changes, can we also obtain lists on target priorities? I'd think that, as it stands, the AI should target turrets first as they are doing the most damage per HP -> this means that even if fleet ships are present and the turrets buffed, we'd be losing more turrets than other ships.

 What might happen is that the AI always chooses to take out basic and laser turrets first, if they are placed within range of arriving ships. Teleporting ships can then easily take out all the snipers and missiles before moving on. These cases give cause some more balancing (having both range-scales and a flat basline?) or thought on the player.