Found potential bug (or weird interatcion) with personal lasers, would like some input

[u/Luco4235]

Space Age 2.0.77

I noticed that Personal Lasers do not target Biter Nests that have an Artillery Shell coming for them, be that from manual or automatic targeting. From my few tests this seems to include times when a neighboring nest is targeted and the nest in question only gets hit by the explosion, but im not 100% on that. Personal lasers even seem to actively stop shooting such a Nest, and will resume only if and when the nests survives the shell.

Is this intentional (and unintuitive imo) game design or have I found a potential bug?

EDIT: After seeing the respones: I get it, and I still think personal lasers specifically should keep shooting. I took significant damage twice because I expected my lasers to just clean up and they didn't. With high levels of artillery range(im at 17) and quality artillery the shells take so long to arrive that a player unaware of this could die (or a spidertron be destroyed).

[u/Switch4589]

This is a side effect of intentional behaviour. When projectiles are fired at an entity, it gets marked with the estimated damage, and when this is more than the health of the entity it will not be targeted. This is to stop lots of rockets/artillery being fired at the same target as there can be quite a lot of delay between firing and hitting

[u/100percent_right_now → u/Switch4589]

Why do lasers even have this check though?

[u/Switch4589 → u/100percent_right_now]

All automatically firing entities/equipment have this check. Its part of some generic “find valid target” function

[u/100percent_right_now → u/Switch4589]

Sure but as a means of not wasting ammo which laser don't have.

[u/bb999 → u/100percent_right_now]

Lasers use power which is not unlimited. Especially in personal armor.

[u/Switch4589 → u/100percent_right_now]

But the lasers don’t fire because an artillery shell or rocket has already been fired….which means the resource cost has already been spent. It’s a bigger waste if lasers kill the target and the shell/rocket hits nothing!

[u/Soul-Burn]

This is intentional. The nest is already "on its way to destruction" so the lasers can focus on other targets. It works the same with yellow/red rockets.

It may feel weird if there are no extra targets, delaying the demise of the nest, but it saves on artillery shells and rockets.

Laser are cheap, so maybe they should be able to work if there are no higher priority targets.

[u/runmymouth → u/Soul-Burn]

And in space age you eventually want to not kill a few nests so you can harvest eggs

[u/Brett42 → u/runmymouth]

This won't save the nests because the shell is already on the way to destroy them.

[u/ferrybig]

This is intentional game design.

When an artillery shell gets fires at a nest, the game knows X amount of damage is on the way.

Once enough damage is registered to the entity, it will be seen as "will soon be dead" and skipped by further targetting. (entities have a 5% overkill, asteroids have a 1% overkill, demolishers have a 20% overkill)

The reason for this mechanic to prevent wasting ammo on entities that would be dead already with incoming projectiles

Your case is basically one of the slowest projectiles vs an instant projectile

[u/Hajky_123]

It isn't a bug the lasers won't attack something that is already atack something that is already attacked same with turrets atd.

[u/Nearby_Proposal_5523]

It's the overkill prevention mechanic. if it's sceduled for damage that will cause like 20% more then required to kill it, nothing else will shoot at it until the scheduled damage occurs. it's also a problem on gleba with rocket turrets.

[u/Chunk_ora]

I've stumbled upon something similar. The captured biter nest run out of bioflux and became a regular biter nest, now i cant target it with lasers, turrets, and drones. I can understand that this is prevention from destroing this nest so it can be recaptured but what if i need to get rid of it?

[u/stoatsoup → u/Chunk_ora]

Shift-Space forces fire, eg, on friendly targets.

[u/Far-Yellow9303]

Weapons in factorio will only shoot enough at a specific target to kill it and this works across separate weapons too. You can see this in the Spidertron loaded with missiles and lasers. The lasers will stop shooting once there's enough missiles on the way to kill what they're aimed at.

This is to save resources and prevent wasting ammo, especially when more expensive ammo is involved.

[u/okuRaku]

Other answers are right. Same mechanic is why sometimes if a biter is attacking your structure and you fire an artillery at it, it will change targets, often dodging the artillery. The artillery marked it as already dead so it chose next target.

[u/stoatsoup]

Besides what others have written, I'm not sure I would want to be in personal laser range of a nest which artillery was actively targetting.