Let's talk turrets

[Johnny Masters]

I sure hope so. Part of the great appeal for me are its wild-west, firefly-ish themes of concurrence of low- and high-tech, dog eat dog and surviving against all odds. Strange, that the low-tech part receives few love. I'll be reconciled when Maces pop up in A8, though.

Yeah, me too. I kinda wishes there were a slower progress, at least as a game mode. I really like early game tech in games.

[Mikhail Reign]

Exploits are only a problem in multiplayer games, because it gives players an advantage over other's by abusing exploits. In a single player game though it does not matter at all.

So if it turned out that the simplest way to get through the original Half Life was to press forward and madly flail with the crowbar, that would be OK with you? It would be OK with all of the other weapons paled in comparison, and thus weren't worth using? No - that would be bad game design. The idea that is up to the player to 'play' a vanilla game properly seems like an excuse to lazy design. Granted, a player can mod a game to make it simpler or more difficult, but in a stock standard version of the game, there shouldn't be a side step that can be easily taken, and is fact encouraged by the game, to make it simplistic and easy

If you really have a problem with killboxes being overpowered then just don't make them, it is that simple. For people like me who want to play open colonies how the hell am I supposed to defend a colony without any turret's?

Like everyone has suggested, give the colonist them selves more ways to defend them selves. Manned pillboxes, manned hardpoints, trenches, cloaking devises etc etc.

The problem with your argument is that you're saying you feel like you have to build underground and use killboxes, because you don't feel like you have the choice to play any other style. So how does it make any sense at all to remove or make turrets harder to build, do you honestly believe the change will stop you building an underground base and abusing the AI? 100% it will have the opposite effect and drive you underground quicker.

In conjunction with improved AI, so that it doesn't attack at a single point, which is chosen by the player, yes, yes I do.

...and yes it is totally fine and quite fun to impose limits on yourself when playing through a game like this.

Yes. There is nothing wrong with making up some of your own 'game' as well, but the game needs to be able to stand on its own two feet alone as well.

[Mathenaut]

Thus the question of how can turrets be redesigned to offer more deployment options than a killbox setup.

This guy and this post have made the most sense of anything in this thread.

The problem is though that the majority of players that want to change turrets don't seem to be willing to try new tactics and experiment with open colonies. So the question is... would changing anything, change anything?

This sort of capitalizes on the point.  The reason most turret discussions are difficult is because most of these advocates for change are usually along the lines of pushing the community to adapt their style of play, justified by alot of weak anecdote.  Even worse, alot of their offered solutions don't address most problems, or only serve to make them worse.