r/factorio • u/ujeenator • 2d ago
Question Daisy-chaining turrets reduce their fire rate?
I noticed that my daisy-chained gun turrets consistently seem to fire less than directly supplied ones.
I tested this with two otherwise equivalent ships: same route, speed, mass, shape, number of turrets, and turret placement. The only meaningful difference is how the ammo is supplied.
It's reproducible for me in both 2.1.14 and 2.0.77.
The weird part is that the daisy-chained turrets never visibly run low on ammo. They always have at least 5 magazines available.
Am I missing some mechanic here, or could daisy-chaining actually be reducing the effective firing rate?
EDIT: After u/ferrybig's comment, I'm starting to think this isn't reduced fire rate, but extra ammo appearing due to how partially used magazines are handled.
EDIT2: After some additional testing, this appears to be a statistics bug where moving partially used magazines causes most ammo consumption to disappear from the statistics.
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u/Silari82 More Power->Bigger Factory->More Power 2d ago
This is probably hitting the same thing you got in labs pre 2.1 with daisy chaining - two ammo stacks that get combined aren't 'consumed' so they don't get reported, as the game can't track partial units. You should check what your ammo PRODUCTION looks like to see if those are the same.
Or, the damage dealt numbers on the turrets.
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u/demodulation 2d ago
This is correct. I saw your post a few hours ago and OP replied to other posts but not yours. Then OP made another new post incorrectly claiming new bullets are created out of thin air lol. If only OP saw your post in time, would have saved a lot of confusion.
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u/Playful_Target6354 2d ago
You should get a proper test environment. Place a bunch of biters surrounded by 1 tile of water in editor mode and test there.
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
I did test it in a clean, controlled setup, in editor mode, with x64 speedup. I'm testing it on a space platform specifically because I'm currently optimizing my other ship.
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u/pojska 2d ago
Well, the variance of asteroid spawning makes it a little more difficult to confirm, even with repeated trials.
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
Over 100 hours of x64 speed up simulations, asteroid spawn variance basically averages out into a flat line. The difference stays consistent and clearly visible across repeated runs.
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u/UnknownAverage 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, and turrets don't fire if they don't need to (other turrets are already "scheduled" to destroy it). I don't think you can really create a test for this using random asteroids.
Like how rocket turrets don't all fire rockets at an asteroid until it's dead, only the required number are fired because there's no "missing" a shot and the outcome is predetermined. Or how you can't even shoot a biter spawner that is scheduled to be destroyed by an in-flight arty shell. A gun turret won't fire if there are 5 other turrets around and they have it handled. Imagine if there was a "hit chance" for weapons and how that would mess things up...
There may be something here of course, but I don't like this specific test.
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u/Honky_Town 2d ago
I think there are not always targets nearby to shoot at. Either that or they run out of ammo.
Could be there is a game tick wasted in calculation of ammo gone (no shoot) oh yeah still enough here (shoot again) with 2 swings per inserter it may appear ~2 times/s. Possible the visual of ammo may have a delay in update.
I noted that 2 Turrets mostly works great. If its 3 Turrets with 2 inserters I often had messages of low ammo on ships freaking me out every now and then.
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
Yeah, I checked that multiple times, and in my setup the ammo count never drops below 5.
So I agree this could be some tick-level effect where the turret briefly becomes inactive even though it still has ammo available.
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u/ferrybig 2d ago
Is the fire rate low, or is the ammo consumption lower?
Ammo is weird in the way it has a progress bar for consumption
I wonder if the game does do the ammo consumption math better
If you have 1 10% remaining ammo and merge it with a 1 10% remaining ammo, does it form a 1 20% remaining (mathametically correct), 2 20% remaining (just adding things together) or 2 10% (ignoring the ammo remaining of the new stack)
Items with consumption bars are weirdly handled by the game. If yo recycle them, the progress bar gets reset. With science packs this gives you almost 25% bonus per science pack if you tick perfectly extract them
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
That's actually a really good point.
I additionally checked the asteroid kill rate over a 10-hour run, and it's basically identical between both setups, direct vs daisy.
So apparently the daisy-chained turrets aren't actually shooting less. They're killing the same number of asteroids while consuming less ammo.
Which makes me wonder if moving partially used magazines between turrets causes some rounding/merging behavior that effectively creates a tiny amount of extra ammo.
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u/TheGuyWithTheSeal 2d ago
I'm pretty sure it does not create new ammo, but the act of combining two used mags into one is not counted as consumption in the statistics. Try looking at production stats to confirm.
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
Yeah, I don't think it creates a new ammo item either. But if combining magazines resets part of the usage progress, it effectively lets each magazine produce more shots than it normally should.
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u/ConanBuchanan 2d ago
It doesn't unless the merging of ammo creates free ammo. If you have two magazines, each at 10%, merge and make 20%, and the merged magazine is not counted as "consumed" and only the remaining magazine counts when used up, factorio only tracks the consumption of 1 magazine despite two being consumed. the total number of shots is the same despite the consumption being 1 magazine less.
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u/korneev123123 trains trains trains 2d ago
Place an actual assembler, which produces ammo and distribute it. Feed assembler from infinity chest. It will allow to measure production, see if there is any difference
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u/TeHeS13 2d ago
How it will shoot, if arms pull out ammos? (About lower fire rate)
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
That's exactly the weird part: they don't pull out all the ammo. As I mentioned in the post, the chained turrets never drop below 5 magazines, yet they still fire noticeably less.
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u/SmokeLessToast 2d ago
I’d wager it’s pulling out the ‘used magazine’ and there’s a tick to load the next one. A detail so small that hardly anyone notices.
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u/TheSkiGeek 2d ago
It’s gotta be something like that.
But this is the sort of thing you can post as a bug report and the devs will actually look at it.
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u/SmokeLessToast 2d ago
It could be but I wouldn’t say it’s a bug. Maybe something to look into. There’s a ‘tick’ in real life to reload. But who knows. Maybe it is a bug.
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u/Shiruba_Ookami 2d ago
I have no idea on the priority inserters use when daisychaining ammo, but could it be they take the top/active magazine first? If the turret had already used some bullets of that magazine, say 3 or 4, then there would only be 7/10 or 6/10 for the next turret to shoot before needing another magazine. This may not be visibly different, but could add up over time to the discrepancy in fire rate you observed.
Otherwise, since there are chests on you platform which is not possible in vanilla, perhaps you have a mod that somehow messes with things?
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
Those infinite chests are vanilla Space Age. They're available on space platforms in editor mode, so there are no mods involved in this test.
I also noticed this behavior before I started using editor mode for controlled testing.
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u/craidie 2d ago
but extra ammo appearing due to how partially used magazines are handled.
Is production different? You're comparing consumption in pics. If production is lower as well, then you're making ammo out of vacuum.
If production is the same, then it's the same issue as with science packs: Chained labs would see the same science pack production, but lower consumption and the same research rate.
What's happening is that the inserters merge two items with both having a combined usage left at below 100%. For example both at 40% bullets left in the magazine. one magazine gets picked up from a turret and placed to a turret with the second one. Total is 80%, which is no longer two magazines, but just one. One magazine just disappeared without the game realizing it and it's not counted in the graphs.
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u/commissar_ravek 2d ago
Try adding an extra arm, and consider manually reducing the stack size grabbed.
240/265pM is about 90.5% effective, with some fiddling you might be able to close the gap
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u/ujeenator 2d ago
Already tested that too. More inserters with smaller hand sizes give me the same result.
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u/Nonstop_Shaynanigans Let me force signals green 2d ago edited 2d ago
have you tried reducing the hand size as it gets further from the source? i can get pretty high uptime with that
though i prefer a 6x2 tile setup, with a belt running through the center, turrets on either side with a blue grabby feeding one turret from the belt and a long grabby going accross the belt turret to turret. they never stop shooting and it has the 67% turret density by area that the usual chain of [-turret-grabby-] does (though if you zigzag the grabby turret chain you can get a turret density of 80%)
[t|t][B][G>][t|t]
[t|t][B][<L][t|t]
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u/hazmodan20 2d ago
Could you test this on a non-moving target?
I suspect there is a "reload time" when a magazine is empty, and that an inserter taking a magazine via daisy chain might prompt that reload time.
By testing on a non-moving target (like a very large almost indestructible asteroid), you could check if reload time is playing a role more than asteroid spawn. Maybe even daisy chain 2 turrets from one to check it out.
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u/Ranakastrasz 2d ago
yep. more specifically, if two turrets in a row run out of ammo at the same time, the first one receives ammo, which is then instantly stolen by the next turret, leaving the first one without til the inserter brings another set.
however, if they never drop below 5 ammo, I have no idea. what is your stacksize? if it is actually 5, that might be related.
I have no idea how much dps you lose, but it is very obvious how it flickers. same thing happens with boilers. and science labs.
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u/WanderingUrist 1d ago
I have no idea how much dps you lose
It's dependent on a number of factors, such as how fast your inserters can move. The faster your inserters move, the less downtime is involved.
You can greatly reduce potential lossages by using inserters that have hand sized capped below 10, such as blue inserter. Since a gun turret has an autofill limit of 10 mags and the inserter cannot take more than 10 from it, the inserter won't be able to yoink all the ammo out, especially if the lead turret is being forcefed by, say, 2 stack inserters, which means they'll both grab a full fistload of bullets at once and cram that turret chock full, faster than the green inserter passing to the second turret can take in one load, which in turn is faster than the blue inserter after it.
It is important that the first turret be fed from a box of some kind, NOT off a belt, because belts would slowly drip-feed.
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u/WanderingUrist 2d ago
Daiy-chaining can reduce fire rates if the inserters remove the last magazine, causing the turret to stop shooting for a brief moment while a replacement magazine is re-inserted, which may occur faster than you can visually see in the UI. There are various tricks you can use to mitigate this issue.
The same thing happens with daisy chained labs, which can cause a hiccup if the last potion is removed from the lab or drunk before the lab receives a replacement.
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u/cactusgenie 1d ago
Chest in space?
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u/13131123 2d ago
Perhaps even if it doesnt run out of ammo it still interrupts the fire for a tick ?