Armored train

[Ziomek24]

Hi. Will the armored train with firing turrets + more durable rails ever be added to the game? It would be a lot of fun and opportunities. One might be tempted to add defensive towers connected to the station and train to this signal. If x <turret for x time, it is attacked, it sends a signal to the armored train, which moves to the stations to help defend it. What do you think about it? First of all, I would like to know the position of the creators of this great game.

[FuryoftheStars]

There is an armored train mod, though it has some graphical and other issues.

Honestly, I’d love just a single wagon type with a gun turret and that’d be sufficient for me, though the rest would be nice, too.

[Ziomek24]

I realize it, but it works poorly, precisely because the makers of Factorio did not give some needed stuff for this. I would like to know if they are going to do anything about it and why.

[FuryoftheStars]

Well, actually, its working poorly is not the devs' fault. There are mistakes in the sprite sheets themselves and there are ways to fix the code issues the mod has. I wanted to fix it up myself, but as I'm not a graphical artist, I'd need the original 3D assets they used to create the sprite sheets (or new ones from someone else), and I don't want to take the time to half-ass a fix for it.

[robot256]

I actually tried to make a rewrite of the Armored Train code that reduces overhead by like 100x (mostly by not teleporting turrets on non-moving trains). But the maintainer wasn't interested in adopting it at the time, and my code is out of date now.

The biggest gameplay problem I found was that as soon as one turret gets attacked and destroyed, the train is basically immobile (and switches to manual control), defeating the purpose of having everything on a train. Also, the train is vulnerable on a straight track when attacked from one end, because only one wagon will be in range, and you can't limit artillery wagons to only attack toward the sides. Then there was the problem of more powerful weapons causing friendly-fire damage when covering adjacent wagons that are being attacked inside their own firing range. If you put the train inside a walled enclosure, you could also build turrets on the ground, and the train itself was too slow-moving to be used as a "rapid response force".

There are ways to address these shortcomings. Make tracks invincible, increase armor and shields on the wagons, don't use explosive ammunition, make wagons with more than one turret in them. For it to become a vanilla feature, these have to have intuitive and balanced solutions, and fill a niche that isn't already met by turrets, tanks, and spidertrons. If a mod demonstrates this and becomes popular, it might make it to vanilla, but I think we're pretty far from that point right now.

In my opinion, the task of defending trains in transit or at artillery outposts would be better achieved by a wagon that can deploy combat robots (like a mobile version of this suggestion here). The more I think about it, the more awesome this sounds...

[Ziomek24]

Very interesting. I am not a programmer, but I can try to create a 3D model, because I already have experience. Everything has to be done, it just needs someone to do it.