Factorio – Turrets Guide in Tips

Turrets Explained

You need a robust power generation if you need to fire more than a couple volleys every few minutes.

Plus laser towers have a relatively high drain (the energy cost when not doing anything), which adds up after a while.

More importantly, both laser and gun turrets share the same weakness, they only target the closest enemy (well, technically true for flamethrowers as well I guess but not an issue for those).

This means that they have to deal with every single bitter before targetting spitters, so if you want to avoid taking damage from spiters you need a whole lot more turrets.

Gun turrets also happen to increase their damage significantly faster from research, since they get the bonus for the ammo and for the turret itself, and both end up multiplicating each other.

The downside being that they need ammo, and better ammo means a higher base damage as well.

Flamethrower turrets work a bit differently, they “target” the closest enemy but the attack usually lands where the target was when the “shot” was fired, which makes them absolutely useless against the first few bitters.

Anything coming after those will have to walk through the fire left on the ground, which does quite a bit of damage, and spitters in particular melt really quickly when in that fire (bitters also take a lot of damage but they usually have a bigger health pool so they die a bit slower).

That’s why you usually want to combine flamethower turrets with either laser or gun turrets.

In the late game, when you can make uranium ammo, gun turrets can absolutely destroy even the biggest bitters, but early on laser turrets do a good job as long as you can get them enough power.