Flamethrower turret

Flamethrower turret is a defensive building that projects a stream of burning oil at enemies in range. Unlike gun turrets and laser turrets, it does not fire an instant projectile: it aims at where the target was when it fired, so it can miss the front enemy in a moving group and hit enemies behind it instead. This behavior makes it especially effective against clustered attacks, where one burst can light up several enemies at once.

Its damage is heavily influenced by the type of oil used as ammunition and by research bonuses. The oil bonus is multiplicative with damage research, and the turret benefits from both the flamethrower turret damage bonus and the flamethrower ammo damage bonus. Because these bonuses stack multiplicatively, its damage scaling is much stronger than the plain numbers on the technology descriptions suggest. The turret also creates fire on the ground, and if it keeps firing at the same spot, that fire intensifies over time, lasting up to 30 seconds and reaching up to 6 times its base damage. Multiple turrets shooting the same tile do not speed up this intensification, because the fire has a cooldown between intensity increases.

Flamethrower turrets are powerful because most enemies have no fire resistance, and a fully ignited target can take enough damage to be fatal very quickly. Most enemy units are ignited when directly hit by the flame stream, including spidertrons, but the player, cars, tanks, and trains are not. The turret first targets the closest non-ignited enemy; once all enemies in range are burning, it switches to the closest enemy instead. An enemy can take damage from every fire patch it is touching, so tightly packed enemies can suffer multiplied damage from overlapping flames.

Fire resistance is applied in several different ways, which matters for tougher targets. Direct splash damage is low but frequent, while the fire sticker and intensified fire patches deal much more damage over time. Spawners and large worms have flat fire resistance that mostly reduces direct splash damage, but not the damage from strong fire patches. Tanks, trains, and spidertrons have much higher flat fire resistance, which can suppress low-level flames but becomes much less effective once the fire patches are strongly intensified.

In practice, flamethrower turrets are best used where enemies are forced to approach in groups, especially at choke points and along walls. Their area damage and strong scaling make them excellent against large waves, and they become particularly dangerous when supported by damage research and better oil. They are less suited to precision defense against single fast targets, but they are among the strongest tools for holding a front line under heavy pressure.

In Space Age, flamethrowers are burner devices and cannot be placed on space platforms. Asteroids also have 100% fire damage resistance. By contrast, pentapods on Gleba have no resistance to flamethrowers, and even large pentapods can take heavy damage from them. The demolishers on Vulcanus have 100% fire resistance, so flamethrower turrets are ineffective against them.