Flamethrower Balance

[obuw]

Hello all,

I have recently decided to play another game of Factorio to check out the latest changes, and upgraded to v14 from v12. And throughout the game, the most significant change I have noticed is the new insanely powerful flamethrower.

First of all, the damage it deals is leaps and bounds beyond any other weapon in the game. You can just spray a tiny split-second worth of flame onto each worm and biter nest, and everything burns down within a few seconds. And this is all with a completely un-upgraded flamethrower.

Second, it doesn't feel very satisfying to use. Sure it looks cool and all, but the fact that the flaming stream itself does miniscule damage compared to the damage-over-time of the fire it leaves behind, and the fact that it goes in a ballistic arc to begin with means you need to spray the ground right next to you, which just kills the biters instantly when they touch the flames. If you try to spray towards the biters like you'd use a shotgun, the flames just pass through them without doing any damage.

All this combines to essentially mean: You are penalized for spraying the weapon for less than a split-second. You deal basically no extra damage, and you waste ammo at an incredibly high rate. I think any weapon design that penalizes you for using it is not a very good one.

What are people's opinions on it? How do you think it could be tweaked so it doesn't completely overshadow the other weapons?

I actually have my own personal combat overhaul mod, and I'll experiment with the numbers to see where it leads, but I do like the fact that we now have a stream mechanic, and a weapon that deals damage via damage-over-time zones. I just feel that the numbers are off. And I'd like to hear what you guys think.

To begin the discussion, my first thoughts would be to greatly reduce the damage and duration of the fire it leaves behind, but increase the damage of the stream itself, possibly increase its velocity to make it possible to use it more reactively, and greatly increase its ammo per canister.


Edit: I guess I should note that in Friday Facts #169 - Combat revisit 2 (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-169) Twinsen has mentioned some of the planned balance changes for flamethrowers:

- Flamethrower gun has a minimum range of 3.
- The flames created on ground from the flamethrower significantly increase in duration and damage when more fuel is added to them by firing at the same spot.
- Increased fire resistance of biter bases.

Presumably the stacking duration and damage will be accompanied by a heavy nerf to default duration and damage. This alongside the increased fire resistance of biter bases should definitely help bring flamethrowers back in line with the rest of the weapons.

[aRatNamedSammy]

personally, flames are ok, cause in a game of "bitter sea", meaning biters to very high, you really need some serious firepower against loads of behemoth and big patch of big worms. have you already fight a pach of 100 big worms? not counting nests and bitters/spitters surrounding that patch!

[obuw]

Thanks for the input. I don't really like the "the game is hard so OP flamethrower is ok" argument. For instance, would you consider them balanced compared to, say, rockets? Since you can kill big worms with a flamethrower easily just by spraying a tiny speck of fuel on each big worm, while you need to shoot multiple rockets at each big worm to take them out, costing a truckload of resources.

If we ignore the laser turret creep tactics, the old way to take out big worm nests was laser drones, maybe poison capsules, and sometimes rockets. The flamethrower seems to completely trivialize them now rendering much of this specialized "siege" equipment useless. Not to mention its power versus biters.

[Adil]

Rockets was never a way. They're the most longstanding underpowered crap the game has. And devs promised to fix that in the next version.

However, speaking of flamethrower, it indeed brings mixed feelings. When you first come out with it, the provided power is overwhelming, turret creep is obsolete, no hit'n'run needed, you just steadily go ahead whilst eliminating the endless stream of creeps the spawners keep throwing at you. But mostly it just occupies the tank's niche. And later, with big and behemoths bitters, also comes their and turret numerousness, and the combat is reduced back to hit'n'run but with flames instead of shotgun.
And during that part of the game, the issues from the op indeed come to the sight. While playing recently, I did notice myself, that most effective method of use was doing a pair of quick squirts onto valuable targets and then running off and doing a bit more splashes of napalm on the ground to remove the innumerable horde. And at a times I would want to actually douse the oncoming enemies, for a change, I did find that aiming at anything but maxrange targets is rather unintuitive.

But I'd like to mention that with all these "balance X in combat" threads, the "X" is not an actual problem (unless "X" is a rockets), the "combat" is.
It is brought up repeatedly (and by people other than me) that with any amount of balancing flawed and retarded combat tactics will always crawl onto the spotlight, as long as the combat is built with mandatory fruitless fights in it. When it doesn't matter, how much enemies you've taken out as long as it is not spawners, the you are pressured to seek ways of taking out those as quick as possible, and the enemy units become irrelevant in their endless respawn. And the quickest way is almost the cheesiest one.

[Xeanoa]

When it doesn't matter, how much enemies you've taken out as long as it is not spawners, the you are pressured to seek ways of taking out those as quick as possible, and the enemy units become irrelevant in their endless respawn.

Kiting the biters while working your way through the worms to get the spawners is what's most fun about combat in this game. Hope that never changes.

[obuw]

Rockets was never a way. They're the most longstanding underpowered crap the game has. And devs promised to fix that in the next version.

However, speaking of flamethrower, it indeed brings mixed feelings. When you first come out with it, the provided power is overwhelming, turret creep is obsolete, no hit'n'run needed, you just steadily go ahead whilst eliminating the endless stream of creeps the spawners keep throwing at you. But mostly it just occupies the tank's niche. And later, with big and behemoths bitters, also comes their and turret numerousness, and the combat is reduced back to hit'n'run but with flames instead of shotgun.
And during that part of the game, the issues from the op indeed come to the sight. While playing recently, I did notice myself, that most effective method of use was doing a pair of quick squirts onto valuable targets and then running off and doing a bit more splashes of napalm on the ground to remove the innumerable horde. And at a times I would want to actually douse the oncoming enemies, for a change, I did find that aiming at anything but maxrange targets is rather unintuitive.

But I'd like to mention that with all these "balance X in combat" threads, the "X" is not an actual problem (unless "X" is a rockets), the "combat" is.
It is brought up repeatedly (and by people other than me) that with any amount of balancing flawed and retarded combat tactics will always crawl onto the spotlight, as long as the combat is built with mandatory fruitless fights in it. When it doesn't matter, how much enemies you've taken out as long as it is not spawners, the you are pressured to seek ways of taking out those as quick as possible, and the enemy units become irrelevant in their endless respawn. And the quickest way is almost the cheesiest one.

I do agree that rockets are pretty underpowered. I guess my memory has a skewed perception on their viability since I have greatly increased their viability as a long range weapon in my own mod. (3x the damage, much higher velocity, nearly double splash radius for HE rockets, and a smaller splash radius for regular rockets (instead of zero aoe)). I tend to forget how useless they are in the base game.

I think that the biggest issue with combat being "fruitless" is the fact you are punished so much for actually engaging in combat. The rate at which you consume ammo with weapons (apart from shotguns) is just obscene, so you just naturally want to minimize the time you spend fighting, get the alien artifacts and get out. I try to address this by greatly increasing the ammo counts per magazine for weapons and try to balance them in ways other than resource-cost, making them more skill-based to use, so you can go out and shoot some biters for fun without feeling like you're just wasting resources. Anyway this is a whole other can of worms, probably beyond the scope of this thread...

Kiting the biters while working your way through the worms to get the spawners is what's most fun about combat in this game. Hope that never changes.

Well the flamethrower in its current iteration allows you to just skip the biters and worms altogether and lob fiery death straight at the spawners.