This mod allows you to manually fire artillery at most targets in range all at once with a single click of a shortcut by using the power of chicken. A QOL improvement for targeting rather than modifying how artillery works, and more CPU friendly than increasing auto-fire range.

TLDR: Jump down to "USING THIS MOD"

BACKSTORY

Your factory was trucking along at high speed. Products were automatically rolling off the assembly line in a pleasing way, including artillery shells that were rapidly whisked away by trains, belts, and droids to be installed in your artillery.

Biters were being hammered by your constant barrage of artillered death every time they built in your automatic firing range, but it was time to expand your base yet again. You sat down at the artillery terminal to manually fire at the biter spawners out beyond the automatic range of your artillery. You began to click.

Click. click. click-click. Click. click. (Thinking about the production line you needed to expand...) click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. (Planning how you were going to head off an impending power crisis.) Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. Click. click. click-click. Click. click. clickity. clack(?) click.. click... click..... click........ Zzzzz

You awoke with a start and suddenly realized how clicking thousands of times had wasted a ton of time and very nearly cost your life as you became nearly bored to death!

A BETTER WAY

Roused to action by your near death experience, you instantly come up with a solution. You've been living on a supply of dehydrated chickens since you crashed on this planet; your ample supply being why there is not even a need for a hunger mechanic in the game. You quickly rehydrate one of the dehydrated chickens. You look into his forlorn eyes and tell him, "I'm not going to eat you. I'm naming you Billy," referencing Billy Witch Doctor Dot Com, who taught your third grade class in elementary school, including everything you know about resurrecting chickens. "You and I are going to be partners in getting me off this godsforsaken planet," you add.

Billy Witch Doctor Dot Com, Expert in Chicken Resurrections and your Third Grade Teacher

"Cluck," Billy replied, because he is a chicken.

Practically hearing the dramatic swell of epic music in the orchestra of your mind, you grab a staple gun and staple Billy's feet to the Artillery Firing Terminal table. Billy, shocked, appalled, and seemingly about to write a stern letter to the labor relations board, notices the bugs on the radar display. He begins pecking at them on the touchscreen like a chicken, and with an efficiency and lack of safety protocols that borders on insanity, the huge artillery rounds are launched into the air to the furthest reaches of their range, raining explosive death upon your enemies.

USING THIS MOD

This mod does not change your artillery in any way, as far as manual vs automatic range, damage, rate of fire, etc. It only uses a single shortcut click (remember to turn the shortcut on) to automatically place artillery flares on most targets within manual range. These flares are the red circle with an "X" in it like the ones you set with the artillery remote, and your artillery guns will shoot at them as soon as they are ready to fire. As is standard, the flares disappear as soon as a shot is sent at them, and they expire after several seconds even if not engaged. This is considered manual targeting since it's only triggered by the player clicking on the shortcut (it doesn't constantly scan for enemy buildings in range), so it gets the manual targeting bonus to range. Autotargeting at shorter range works normally.

Chicken Artillery Shortcut Icon

The targeting spreads itself out to avoid wasting ammo, and as a result it misses close-together targets. Artillery also has built-in inaccuracy as a characteristic of the weapon type, which will also cause some rounds to miss. For very close groupings of spawners, it will hit about 60% of the targets each time it is run. You can always run it again, though I recommend waiting for the first volley to hit before doing so so you don't send multiple rounds into the same target.

Chicken Artillery will not target enemies concealed by the fog of war - if you haven't explored an area, it will not find enemies there. You can use the artillery remote to explore areas, however. Just zoom way back and select unexplored area at the limit of your range. Per the vanilla functionality, you will get an alert on your cursor if you try to target beyond your range. After firing, the path of the artillery round will be explored and anything along the path will be targetable by Chicken Artillery in subsequent firings. If you have artillery spread out (eg., along the perimeter of your base), it will fire from various artillery pieces creating multiple angles to the target, increasing the area explored by artillery.

If there are many targets, the game will lag briefly right after the shortcut is clicked while it is placing the flares. On my laptop, this ends up being about a couple seconds of lag per thousand targets. I've had it target 3000-5000 targets at a time, so it can hang for nearly ten seconds right after shooting - don't be alarmed! This mod only ever does any work when it is manually clicked, so it has no on-going impact on performance. This can be very performance friendly compared to a mod increasing the auto-fire range significantly since that type of solution would be constantly looking for targets over an exponentially larger area.

SPECIAL THANKS

The original idea for this mod came from Ph0en1x in their Cast Artillery mod. I made some changes for personal use in prior versions of Factorio and covered the mod in chicken spackle. This update it to Factorio 2.0 is my first public release of my version.

Special thanks also to the team on Discord for helping me with some of the version updates! I'm not sure I would have made it just referencing the API documentation!

If I fail to update this mod, it can be taken over and maintained by someone else.