Chain shotguns are fantastic

[Covered in Weasels]

I just want to say how much I love this new weapon. It's the perfect remedy for charging tribal warriors or manhunting animals. With clever use of intervening terrain can be used to devastating effect against raiders with long tamed weaponry. My caravans never leave home without one

[ITypedThis]

Indeed! I use them to ambush attackers from behind while colonists distract them from far away with assault rifles, but nothing is as deadly as they are.

[mumblemumble]

its certainly a great disabling fire-arm. The 3 x 20 damage per salvo is amazing for disabling, where dozens of heavy SMG shots would otherwise not work.

...still wish guns were a bit deeper though.

[cultist]

I have seen a pawn stand and fire point blank at an animal over 10 times with the CS without connecting a single hit. The pawn had average shooting and no health problems. I like the idea of a devastating super close range weapon but the accuracy is a bit ridiculous. At that range it shouldn't even be possible to miss a target when you're firing with that much spread in one direction.

[Panzer]

Yeah I had the same experience, its a bit of an all or nothing gun, deal high damage or none at all. I found heavy smgs and charge rifles to be more reliable, even in close range combat. Will give it another try though, lets see what happens if I have a lot of people using it.

[TheMeInTeam]

It's solid for large numbers of dumb-charging enemies but these are precisely the easiest enemies to handle in the game with any killbox ever or even non-killbox tactics.

For stuff like "peek out of door" machine pistol is still best, followed by pump shotgun (you want as little cooldown time as possible so you can duck back in before they can warm up + shoot).  Minigun has a great cooldown time too if shooting at stuff that doesn't target you until you shoot it (IE raiders beating on a wall).

Even a group of pawns alternating throwing grenades on the floor so that you get one every 40 ticks or less can probably outperform this new weapon easily, and it doesn't have the range to fill other niches.

[SpaceDorf]

Yeah, the accuracy is a bit strange for a automatic shotgun ..
With all the other Weapon Mods I have totally forgotten about that thing.
It may shine as hunting weapon where you always have the first shot.

[Panzer]

It doesnt really shine anywhere the base accuracy is so low you might even miss all 3 shots point blank, only the upper 3 quality tiers are really useful in my experience.
It is pretty good vs huge critters though, centipedes, muffs, megaspiders, everything with a body size above 100%. Might be worth using against infestations, a few guys that only target the megaspiders while everyone else deals with the small ones, could work out.

[ProjectXa3]

Yeah, it might not be all that, but it's still neat, and it was added as somebody's rewards package for backing the game some enormous amount. Apparently their original reward addition was going to be some kind of "gun that launches robo-spiders to fight for you" but that didn't work out for some reason.

[Perq]

I have seen a pawn stand and fire point blank at an animal over 10 times with the CS without connecting a single hit. The pawn had average shooting and no health problems. I like the idea of a devastating super close range weapon but the accuracy is a bit ridiculous. At that range it shouldn't even be possible to miss a target when you're firing with that much spread in one direction.

While I agree that accuracy is a little weird at times, tbh firing a gun at someone who is attacking you with a melee weapon is not as easy as you may think. Such spread and poor accuracy does actually make sense. If weapons were too accurate in point-blank range, melee weapons would make no sense.

[cultist]

While I agree that accuracy is a little weird at times, tbh firing a gun at someone who is attacking you with a melee weapon is not as easy as you may think. Such spread and poor accuracy does actually make sense. If weapons were too accurate in point-blank range, melee weapons would make no sense.

Pawn wasn't under attack. I drafted him, put him right next to a passive animal (can't remember which, something medium-sized that's worth hunting like a boar or deer) and forced him to attack. 10 misses in a row, each miss encompassing 3 shots. So 30 projectiles failed to connect even once. At touch range. Shooting was probably around 6-8, i. e. not great but passable.

[TheMeInTeam]

I have seen a pawn stand and fire point blank at an animal over 10 times with the CS without connecting a single hit. The pawn had average shooting and no health problems. I like the idea of a devastating super close range weapon but the accuracy is a bit ridiculous. At that range it shouldn't even be possible to miss a target when you're firing with that much spread in one direction.

While I agree that accuracy is a little weird at times, tbh firing a gun at someone who is attacking you with a melee weapon is not as easy as you may think. Such spread and poor accuracy does actually make sense. If weapons were too accurate in point-blank range, melee weapons would make no sense.

The game overblows "touch" range to make melee viable.  Base accuracy for chain shotgun at touch range (<4 tiles) is worse than "short" (15 tiles).  If your pawn is a poor shot on top of it, you can get very low odds where long runs of misses are plausible/expected on average.

This is *not* true for all guns.  Melee pawns do not want to run into touch range vs heavy SMG for example, which has > 11 DPS there.  There are a handful of firearms in this game that outperform everything except scyther blade/power claw/plasteel longsword type weapons in melee already at "touch" range, and the only recourse melee has vs those is to equip a shield belt and down the shooter before they break through it.

Chain shotgun is basically a short range minigun.  It is pretty bad for picks on individual targets, but its expected damage/time climbs when firing into a crowd (it's also available much earlier than minigun). 

[SpaceDorf]

And boy is the minigun one evil melee weapon
Firing at touch range was deadly in A16 , haven't tested in A17 yet

[TheMeInTeam]

And boy is the minigun one evil melee weapon
Firing at touch range was deadly in A16 , haven't tested in A17 yet

At max touch range lots of shots wildly miss.

At literal melee range, there's very little in the game that can stay standing, only things that would have a chance are thrumbos and centipedes.  Even they might go down if unlucky though.