Factorio Forums

On a legendary quality artillery turret running out of ammo and being refilled by an inserter it is unable to auto-target a worm outside of normal artillery range until fired manually. It appears to happen consistently.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Place a legendary artillery turret with a two worms near the edge of its range (not right next to each other so splash damage doesn't kill both)
2. Add one shell to the turret
3. Wait until the turret stops moving
4. Add shells via inserter (no idea if inserter is needed)

Wild speculation about why this happens (almost certainly wrong):
Perhaps some optimization where an idle artillery turret only looks at the normal range to see if it should become active again.

Thanks for the report however I am not able to reproduce any issues using the steps you provide.

Are you sure the turret doesn't just need more time to search and find the worm to shoot?

Can you record a video of what you believe isn't working correctly?

Attached are the save file along with a recording. Something about the reproduction steps I sent is probably wrong.

When I load that save, and simply wait about 1 minute - the turret starts shooting the nests in the video. No manual firing is required.

I think the issue here is a simple misunderstanding of how artillery works. Artillery scans in a circle around itself spiraling outward looking for targets. The bigger the area it needs to search the longer it takes to find targets (since it's checking a bigger area). That means legendary artillery takes measurably longer to look over its entire shooting area and find the next target to shoot.

It's not that legendary artillery is *slower* than normal artillery - it's that it's trying to shoot at a significantly larger area which takes more time to check.

Boskid made this video showing the turrets scanning logic which helps explain it better:

Thanks for the explanation.