We need robotic turret ammo in loot or trader rewards

[Ray Garraty]

Seems a little bit unfair that there's no robotic turret ammo in loot or trader's quest rewards.

AP turret ammo does not seem so cheap considering its consumption during horde nights.

At higher gamestages you could easily burn through ~5000 rounds per night, which requires 12500-15000 lead + 12500-15000 iron + crafting time...

[theFlu]

Yeh, feeding it with scrap iron was a little too easy, but at the moment it's the only weapon that basically requires mining.

 

EDIT: Ok, feeding an M60 for spray and pray might also require mining, but if you're just throwing ammo away, it's on you..

Edited July 21, 2023 by theFlu (see edit history)

[Ray Garraty]

32 minutes ago, theFlu said:

just throwing ammo away

The distance between my turrets and the killing corridor entrance is 7 blocks, and there's no human factor of shaking hands, so I guess my turrets accuracy is very high, no ammo waste 🙂

Edited July 21, 2023 by Ray Garraty (see edit history)

[theFlu]

4 minutes ago, Ray Garraty said:

so I guess my turrets accuracy is very high, no ammo waste 🙂

Ye, that edit of mine was entirely about throwing 7.62 away by reckless use of an M60; but the turrets are indeed pretty accurate in close range. At the limit of their range - when they open fire - they seem to miss about half the shots, but a couple meters in they're quite solid.

[Ray Garraty]

Using AP rounds if they are fast enough, sometimes they can shoot down Demolisher before it goes off.

With usual (non-AP) rounds, however, they will definitely set it off(

Edited July 21, 2023 by Ray Garraty (see edit history)

[Kazgrel]

Requiring lead for the ammo pretty much gutted it for our crew.  Couple that with the mountains of 9mm, 7.62, magnum and shotgun shells we had from clearing infestation quests, there wasn't much of a point in a junk turret.

 

Course I won't be surprised if the "fix" is they nerf the ammo from those quests...

[hiemfire]

33 minutes ago, Kazgrel said:

shotgun shells

Can these be broken down into lead shot, which can be scrapped to lead, or do they return only gunpowder when scrapped like the other firearm ammunition?

 

15 hours ago, theFlu said:

Yeh, feeding it with scrap iron was a little too easy

Ate into what was being salvaged for steel production by a fair bit when burning through larger tier 4s and tier 5s. Wasn't uncommon for me to have to craft more during a clear to keep the things topped up after they ate through a stack or two of ammo.

 

14 hours ago, Ray Garraty said:

so I guess my turrets accuracy is very high, no ammo waste

check the health of the blocks, if any, passed where the zombies walk through and get shot at by the turrets. any misses or full pass throughs, when using ap, will do damage to those blocks. they also have a real bad tendency to shoot multiple times while swinging to aim at a detected enemy.

[Riamus]

The lead cost pretty much made me stop using them.  Not worth it.  I used them on my horde base just because they were there and cheap.  They weren't ever intended to do much and I never refilled them once they were out of ammo.  But I still used them.  Now, I don't see any reason to use them.  I wasn't using them before because of any need.  So now that they cost so much to use, I'll just ignore them.

[theFlu]

9 hours ago, hiemfire said:

Ate into what was being salvaged for steel production by a fair bit when burning through larger tier 4s and tier 5s.

It did go thru quite some iron, but you could largely feed it with what you got on the run, grabbing some good sources of iron en route and from the POIs. With the basic version eating lead, you don't really get enough to replenish. In my one short playthru with them I never had enough to feed it without mining. There might be a playstyle difference, but I can't come up with good sources of lead to feed it from.

[hiemfire]

8 hours ago, theFlu said:

It did go thru quite some iron, but you could largely feed it with what you got on the run, grabbing some good sources of iron en route and from the POIs.

At the cost of time mining/salvaging/crafting as you go and using a basic material needed for other things. Brass/paper, coal, nitrate and lead at the time were really only tapped into by ammunition (explosives is ammunition), farm plots (nitrate at least, though those are a craft once and you're done) and 2 or so drink recipes. Iron was used by nearly everything you'd craft in one shape or form.

8 hours ago, theFlu said:

With the basic version eating lead, you don't really get enough to replenish. In my one short playthru with them I never had enough to feed it without mining.

All 3 turret ammunition types require lead now instead of just the "Shot" type of ammunition. Not that I've seen any one using the "Shot" type ammunition for turrets, range is/was 2 and didn't hit anything but the surrounding environment when I tested it. Turret ammunition also either doesn't show up in, or is extremely rare to find, in loot or for purchase. The other ammunition types are allot more common to find.

 

8 hours ago, theFlu said:

In my one short playthru with them I never had enough to feed it without mining. There might be a playstyle difference, but I can't come up with good sources of lead to feed it from.

Mining is it. Find a node, hope it kicks enough out to cover you for a bit, barring that hope you find enough components, like car batteries, that break down into lead to keep them topped up.

[theFlu]

7 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

At the cost of time mining/salvaging/crafting as you go and using a basic material needed for other things.

Hmm.. I don't disagree with any of that, but for me, iron has mostly been at a surplus from day one. I've been getting most of my gear and all of my tools from trader/quest -loop. So feeding some or even most of my iron to a turret didn't really make me go mine for more. And most of the time I don't mine for ammo at all, it's all from loot; d50 now, my ammo is in three writable boxes and I'm going to need to make a second box for 7.62 in a couple days. That makes mining for turret ammo stick out to me as a difference; just a slight annoyance for sure, a night here and there, but expensive for me in comparison.

[Riamus]

Yeah, iron is never a problem until you are building forged steel bases.  But at that point, you should be doing a lot of iron mining anyhow.  So using some for turret ammo wasn't a big deal.  But now that it's lead?  I never mine lead.  I never have any reason to mine lead and so doing so just for turret ammo is a waste of time for me.  I get so much ammo and ammo crafting materials that I have no need to mine to craft.  I don't feel like starting now that turret ammo needs lead.  I never use turrets except on my horde base - never as a portable weapon - so there's no reason not to just stop using them altogether.  They were there as a cheap source of a little extra damage during horde night that I never actually needed but added just because it was cheap.  I don't need that extra damage and spending time mining lead for ammo isn't worth that little extra damage.  I can stick to regular turrets and other things instead.  Junk turrets have gone the way of the dodo with this change to ammo, imo.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[hiemfire]

@theFlu & @Riamus

We're 3 different usage cases coming to the same or similar conclusion, the switching turret ammo (other than shot) from using just iron to relying on lead for all three types without the buff to ammo availability that ammo for other weapons received has knocked the junk turret's usefulness as a weapon from on par/slightly stronger than other weapons to being questionable.

[warmer]

I don't think this makes sense. Why would something your character basically invents have ammo for it in the wild?

[theFlu]

5 hours ago, warmer said:

I don't think this makes sense. Why would something your character basically invents have ammo for it in the wild?

I've basically thought of it as a scrap thrower this far; internally something like an automatic slingshot from JoergSprave, with a magazine of just pockets moving around nuts, bolts and anything you can squeeze dense enough with a few taps from a hammer.

 

So it wouldn't exactly have ammo lying around, just ... anything

[BFT2020]

6 hours ago, warmer said:

I don't think this makes sense. Why would something your character basically invents have ammo for it in the wild?

 

That's why I removed the T0 equipment from loot and trader inventories.

[hiemfire]

10 hours ago, warmer said:

Why would something your character basically invents have ammo for it in the wild?

Why do we find junk turrets, which you think we "basically invent", in loot without having the skills needed to actually craft them?

[Riamus]

7 hours ago, theFlu said:

I've basically thought of it as a scrap thrower this far; internally something like an automatic slingshot from JoergSprave, with a magazine of just pockets moving around nuts, bolts and anything you can squeeze dense enough with a few taps from a hammer.

Exactly.  But now that it requires lead to make the ammo, it throws that idea of what the junk turrets are right out the window.  I considered them to be the same kind of thing as well, but if you need lead for them, then it obviously requires actual bullets of some form and so it can't be a "junk" turret anymore.  Granted, it's called a robotic turret instead of junk turret in the game, but still...

Edited July 23, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[seagas]

Well me being 99.9% of the time a solo player, my junkie has been a second gun when doing higher tier level quest and guards me while mining. But I agree that I don't understand why they switched to lead for ammo.

[Kazgrel]

@hiemfire shells break down into buckshot iirc, so a source of lead, but I'd rather feed our shotgun user(s).  Sorry for late reply; I don't check in every day here.

 

I almost wonder if TFP saw something akin to what I did in my last A20 playthrough where I used nothing but my 2 junk turrets with AP ammo and cleared blood moon hordes with ease, even being on insane difficulty.  It was costly, though; around 5k rounds of ammo used by those things which was around 30k iron.  I suppose that's cheap by late game standards but that's still a LOT of iron.  Now it has lead attached to it as a cost...at that point we just make AP ammo for our own guns and some explosives.

Edited July 25, 2023 by Kazgrel
Typo (see edit history)

[hiemfire]

2 hours ago, Kazgrel said:

@hiemfire shells break down into buckshot iirc, so a source of lead, but I'd rather feed our shotgun user(s).

Perfectly reasonable.

2 hours ago, Kazgrel said:

Sorry for late reply; I don't check in every day here.

No worries on that 

2 hours ago, Kazgrel said:

I almost wonder if TFP saw something akin to what I did in my last A20 playthrough where I used nothing but my 2 junk turrets with AP ammo and cleared blood moon hordes with ease, even being on insane difficulty.  It was costly, though; around 5k rounds of ammo used by those things which was around 30k iron.  I suppose that's cheap by late game standards but that's still a LOT of iron.  Now it has lead attached to it as a cost...at that point we just make AP ammo for our own guns and some explosives.

I get the feeling they never had to deal with nightime screamer chains in the wasteland.