Factorio Forums

1. What did you do?

Picked an artillery turret ghost and tried to place it where it could fire on a choke point. Tried again after crafting an artillery turret and holding it in my cursor.

2. What happened?

No range circle (either minimum or maximum) was displayed, whether on the surface view or the zoomed out (pixelated) map view. This happens whether you have the actual artillery turret item in hand, a ghost, or a blueprint containing artillery turrets - no range preview overlay is shown.

No range circle overlay is shown with an artillery turret ghost selected in the cursor (train tracks placed as a ruler - the 32 tile minimum range is well inside the bounds of the screenshot):



The same is true with a physical artillery turret held in the hand; no range circle is displayed:



Only after the turret is physically placed does the turret coverage ring (showing both the minimum and maximum range) display, and even then only in the zoomed-out map view, not at the surface level zoom:



3. What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

A range preview circle should be shown when placing turrets, so you know how far they can fire and what area they cover, whether as a physical item in hand:



Or as a ghost:



I'm pretty sure artillery turrets used to have a range preview circle. Either way, correctly placing artillery turrets without a range preview makes it extremely inconvenient and time consuming, especially if they're being placed by a roboport network with long travel times between the artillery turret source and desired location of the turret.

4. Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

Always

This should have been fixed in 2.0.48:
viewtopic.php?p=670569#p670569

Except maybe for ghost turrets that have already been placed:
viewtopic.php?p=671854&hilit=turret+range#p671854

That is a similar issue, but it's a separate bug. The one you linked says that other, already placed turrets don't display their ranges while you're placing a new one. But the bug I reported is that artillery turrets - only artillery turrets - don't show their own range while placing, while every other turret type does show its range when you have one selected in your hand (either as a ghost or as an actual item) to allow you to place it correctly.

Maybe they are related behind the scenes, but the range display behavior of artillery turrets is uniquely non-functional among turrets.

Please keep in mind that "Artillery turret" despite having word "turret" in its name, is a completly different entity type than other types of turrets, which means changes to normal turrets are not required to also apply to artillery turrets. Given that artillery turrets have range usually large enough to almost always be outside of the screen, this feels more like an idea/suggestion topic than a bug report.

Thanks for the report however as mentioned artillery are not standard "turrets" and due to their range covering essentially the entire screen at all times they were never setup to draw their area when in the cursor.