Perhaps my walls are too ammo-hungry and lead patches too sparse...

Anyway, isn't it weird that the Uranium ammo recipe uses lead? Perhaps the answer should be to keep basic and piercing ammo recipes as-is, but to craft Uranium ammo direct from raw ingredients (that being Tungsten + Steel + Depleted Uranium, if one simply subtracts lead from the existing recipe).

Or, perhaps, all three ammo types should be crafted directly from raw ingredients including some type of propellant too, but that would make basic ammo too hard at the start and may be too large a change to roll into this mod.

As you can tell I haven't thought about this a lot, but it would be nice to have Lead-less Uranium ammo!

Thanks, these are good questions and suggestions. Some background: for ammunition, I basically switched iron to lead in for the basic firearm magazine, and then switched copper to tungsten for piercing rounds magazine. So the "plate" material counts are roughly the same. (Incidentally, tungsten is ~twice the raw ore cost of copper, but that was also a separate design choice for the Tungsten resource mod, that seems to not be the issue here).

For your immediate problem, I may already have a solution: there is a setting that enables alternative ammunition recipes for basic firearm magazines, each requiring less lead.

Two question I have:
- How large have you built?
- If you can recall, what frequency of lead ore did you use in the new game sliders/presets?

Balancing lead ore is a bit tough. Generally people need a ton at the start, so patches near the starting point have a higher-than average richness. But for science-per-minute-focused bases, generally lead ends up in low demand, as only a small amount is used in science packs compared to iron/copper/etc. As such, eventually after about 700 tiles, it falls off to a much lower richness, that then scales in the "vanilla" factorio way.

However, there are so many ways to play factorio. I had attempted to balance it so that it was always present, but not overbearing. If someone is using mostly bullet defense, I may have made the richness a too low. The previously-mentioned feature came in regarding RSO. I presume you're using vanilla, and if so, it's clear I have some more balancing to do on vanilla. I'll think through options and see what I can do.

As far as a rework with some sort of propellant, I do like that idea, but indeed, it might be out of scope for this mod. I'll put it on the list of things to consider for the future :)

To me it seems that lead usage is quite dependant on combat. My lead patches are large but around 1/3 the density of most other patches. Meanwhile I have far too much Zircon and Wolframite; you can't balance everything!

• How large have you built?

Currently about 200 science-per-minute, upgrading to 1k. For uranium ammo, I have some peaks of > 200/m lasting up to 1h but mostly under 20/m (Rampant does weird things sometimes).

I use the Long Range Turret mod and even with several damage upgrades, laser turrets are still worse than these gun turrets, hence why the base is still dependant on ammo production (also Howitzer ammo plus flame turret fuel).

• If you can recall, what frequency of lead ore did you use in the new game sliders/presets?

No, I don't recall, and likely didn't choose wisely!

As far as a rework with some sort of propellant, I do like that idea, but indeed, it might be out of scope for this mod. I'll put it on the list of things to consider for the future :)

Just an idea! I do find in Factorio there's an over-abundance of recipes which use the previous-tier item. Having ammo not use this upgrade-method seems better. Ammo-production factories are fairly likely to be independent of Mil-tech production lines in any case (at least, if any volume of ammo is needed). Also, curiously, there don't appear to be many mods which tweak the ammo recipe.