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Auto Warz — Weapons & Ammunition Design

Document Type: Design Document Version: 0.2 Last Updated: 2026-09-06 Vault destination: 01_Design Documents Phase: Phase 1 — Launch release (the ammunition ladder and planet defence). Ship weapons draw on the same ladder in the Phase 2 War Update Related Documents: [37_Planet Threats & Defence Design](<./37_Planet Threats & Defence Design.md>) · [24_Module System Design](<./24_Module System Design.md>) · [08_Research Tree Design](<../Content/08_Research Tree Design.md>) · [25_Power System Design](<./25_Power System Design.md>) · [15_Ship & Army Points Design](<../Content/15_Ship & Army Points Design.md>) · [35_Economy Design](<./35_Economy Design.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) Closes: OI-360, OI-362

Purpose of This Document

[37_Planet Threats & Defence Design](<./37_Planet Threats & Defence Design.md>) says what is coming and why. This document says what you shoot it with, and what that costs.

It owns the ammunition ladder, which is not only a planet-layer concern: the same ladder feeds ship weapons in the War Update, which is what makes the war consumes what the factory makes a literal statement rather than a thematic one.

1. The Principle

Defence is a production line, not a purchase.

A turret is a consumer. It is fed, it runs down, and it competes for throughput with everything else the factory is doing. It is a smelter that shoots.

[31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>) already states the consequence, in the sentence the whole war layer is built on:

"Your ammunition line delivered 40 a minute. The front consumed 60."

That is equally true of a wall of turrets on the planet, years before there is a war.

Defence is measured in items per minute, not in turret count.

Twenty turrets fed at ten rounds a minute is a worse defence than eight turrets fed at forty. The player who has understood this is playing the game correctly.

2. Two Families, and One of Them Feeds the Enemy

Family Consumes Costs you Signature
Kinetic Items, from the ammunition ladder Materials and belt throughput Low
Energy Power, continuously while engaging Generation capacity High

Both already exist in [04_Factory & Resource System Design](<./04_Factory & Resource System Design.md>), as the Basic Turret at 15 PU and the Laser Turret at 40 PU.

2.1 The trap

[37_Planet Threats & Defence Design](<./37_Planet Threats & Defence Design.md>) §4 makes power signature one of the two things that draws the Ferals.

Building an energy grid to fight the ferals makes more ferals come.

Energy defence is a positive feedback loop into the exact threat it is meant to answer. That is not a bug to balance away, it is the most interesting decision in planet defence, and it should be legible enough for a player to walk into it once and understand it immediately afterwards.

It deepens with tier. Canonical §4 records that Machine Mk power draw rises slightly faster than output. So a Mk3 energy turret is disproportionately loud, and upgrading your energy defence disproportionately raises the pressure on it.

2.2 Which family answers which threat

Neither family is the answer to both, and neither is useless against either.

Natives Ferals
Kinetic Good. They come overland in numbers Good, and quiet
Energy Good, and it costs no materials Good, and it calls more of them

So the honest advice inside the game is: kinetic against the thing you attracted with power, energy against the thing you attracted with smoke. Answering each threat with the other family's weapon is the stable configuration, and discovering that is a real moment.

3. Everything Tiers, and Two Different Things Do the Tiering

Decided 2026-09-06. Both halves are true, and they are not the same mechanism.

Buildings tier by upgrade kit. Ammunition tiers by research.

3.1 Buildings tier the way every other building tiers

A turret is a building. It has Base Mk and Machine Mk, raised by the same four universal upgrade kits as everything else, applied in place by Genesis, preserving modules, port configuration and contents ([24_Module System Design](<./24_Module System Design.md>) §5a, Canonical §4).

The two tracks land on a turret with unusual clarity:

Track On a normal building On a turret
Base Mk Port throughput and filtering How fast the magazine refills. Your reload
Machine Mk Speed, recipes, module slots Rate of fire, what it can chamber, and slots

There is no Heavy Turret building. There is a turret at Mk3.

3.2 Research unlocks the ammunition, not the turret

Canonical §4: "Research unlocks recipes; a recipe may require a Mk-N building." Applied here:

  • The Defence branch unlocks ammunition recipes.
  • A higher ammunition requires a turret at Mk2 or Mk3 to chamber it.
  • The turret gets there by upgrade kit, which is a crafting and construction action.

3.3 Why this is better than either half alone

You never rebuild your defence line to improve it.

Upgrading is a kit applied in place, so the line you carefully placed, ported and moduled survives. Improving what it fires is a factory problem: can I produce the better ammunition at rate. Both axes are things the player does with the factory, and neither is a trip to the build menu.

It also means a defence line improves while you are not looking at it. Research a better round, start producing it, and the wall you built ten hours ago starts hitting harder without being touched.

4. One Ammunition Ladder, Shared With Ships

Decided 2026-09-06. Planet turrets and ship weapons draw on the same ammunition items.

[08_Research Tree Design](<../Content/08_Research Tree Design.md>) Branch 6 already starts this ladder with existing manufactured goods, Metal Plates and then Hull Plating, rather than inventing a bespoke ammo item. That is the right instinct and it is kept:

Ammunition is things the factory already makes. There is no ammo_mk1.

4.1 What that buys

Defence competes with expansion for the same items. Every plate fired is a plate not built with. That is the price on "more" arriving in the most direct possible form, and it needs no separate system to enforce it.

The Phase 1 ammunition line is the War Update's ammunition line. The chain a player builds in their first fifty hours to hold off the natives is the chain they later push through the gate. Not an analogy, the same items. [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>) describes contribution as "a measured record of goods — x iron, x ammunition", and this is where that ammunition comes from.

It closes half of OI-343. The ten ship components have APR values and no recipes. The weapons among them do not need their own ammunition design; they need to name which rung of this ladder they consume and at what rate.

4.2 A rung buys rate, range and spread. Never damage

Decided 2026-09-06 (OI-362).

Ammunition does not hit harder. It hits more often, further out, and wider.

Axis What it buys
Rate of fire More shots per second
Range Reach
Spread How much of a group one shot covers

Damage per shot is constant across the entire ladder. That is the decision, and it is doing four jobs.

1. Nothing goes obsolete. A Mk1 turret firing Metal Plates is never useless. It is slow and short-ranged, and it still kills what it hits. A player who cannot yet make the good round is behind, not locked out.

2. Every rung raises consumption, so research is a commitment. Rate of fire is the first term, so a better round empties the magazine faster. Unlocking a rung without scaling the line that feeds it leaves the player worse off than before they researched it — more shots fired, more often, and a line that cannot keep up.

That is not a trap to soften. It is §1 arriving in its purest form: defence is measured in items per minute, and better ammunition raises the number you have to hit.

3. It couples the two tier tracks. A faster round drains the magazine faster, which demands a higher Base Mk to refill it (§3.1). So one research node cascades into a production demand and a construction demand:

research a rung  →  fires faster  →  magazine drains faster
                 →  needs higher Base Mk   (an upgrade kit, so a crafting cost)
                 →  needs more throughput  (a factory problem)

Neither of those is a build-menu click. Both are the factory.

4. Range and spread are geometry. A longer round means the same wall covers more ground, or the same coverage needs fewer turrets, or the line can be pulled back off the frontier. A new rung changes where turrets belong, not only how many. Layout consequences are the kind this game is made of.

Spread is the anti-swarm answer, and it matters most against ferals, who arrive drawn en masse to a signature rather than pushing a frontier the way natives do.

One caution for tuning: 08_Research Tree Design Turret Upgrade I grants a flat range +30%, fire rate +20% on the building, which is the same two axes. Two sources of one stat is normal, but the ammunition should be the dominant source, or choosing a round stops mattering.

4.3 Ship weapons split the same way

Ship weapon Family
Laser Cannon Energy
Missile Launcher Kinetic
Pulse Cannon Open, see Open Questions

Which means the kinetic-versus-energy trade the player learned on their own planet is the same trade they make when designing a warship, with the signature term replaced by a fuel and reactor term. The lesson transfers.

5. The Magazine Is a Buffer

A turret holds a small internal magazine, fed through its ports by belt or drone like any other building's input buffer.

The magazine is deliberately small. It is a buffer, not a stockpile.

A defence line that runs dry mid-attack is a logistics failure you can diagnose, not bad luck.

The player can walk the line afterwards and see exactly which turret starved and which belt fed it. That is the same diagnosable failure principle the war layer runs on ([31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>)), and it arrives on the planet first, at a scale where the lesson is cheap.

Two consequences worth stating:

  • A turret is a normal building with normal ports. No special supply mechanism, no magic feed. It is on the network or it is not.
  • Base Mk matters more than it looks. Refill rate is the difference between a turret that fires in bursts and one that fires continuously, and it is bought with a kit rather than a recipe.

6. Turrets Take Modules

Turrets are buildings, so they take modules on the same slot model ([24_Module System Design](<./24_Module System Design.md>)). All four existing module types have real meaning on a turret, which is a good sign that nothing new needs inventing:

Module On a turret
Efficiency Cuts power draw. On an energy turret this cuts your signature, which is a direct answer to §2.1's trap
Productivity More output per input: more shots per round. Stretches a strained ammunition line
Status Detailed and remote readout, which on a turret means magazine level — the single most useful thing to see from across the base
Power Pole Distributes power from the turret roof. A defence line doubles as grid coverage at the perimeter

The Efficiency module is the one to notice. It is the starter module, it is cheap, and on an energy turret it partially defuses the trap that makes energy defence dangerous. A player who works that out has connected three systems on their own.

7. What Answers What

Ferals fly. Decided 2026-09-06, and it is what makes the fortification half of the Defence branch a real decision rather than a border you draw once.

Tool Natives Ferals Notes
Wall / Reinforced Wall Blocks. They come overland and they path Nothing. They fly over Walls shape where the natives arrive, which is what makes turret placement a choice
Gate (automated on proximity) Blocks, and lets your own traffic through Nothing
Kinetic turret Good Good, and quiet The generalist
Energy turret Good Good, but see §2.1
EMP Emitter Stuns groups Stuns groups, and they are machines Costs power, which is signature
Radar / Deep Radar Shows movement and tier Shows movement Reading the threat is half the answer

Walls answer natives. EMP answers ferals. Turrets answer both. That is the shape, and it means a base built only of turrets is playable but crude.

8. Defence Bots and Offence

Bots do not eat ammunition. Decided 2026-09-06.

The Unit Spawner produces defence bots, which are built from materials and consumed when they die. That gives offence a different sink shape from defence:

Sink Shape
Turrets Ammunition A rate you must sustain
Bots Materials A batch you spend

Clearing a nest is therefore a stockpiling decision: build up a force, spend it, take the ground. Holding a line is a throughput decision. Two different relationships with the factory, and a player who is good at one is not automatically good at the other.

Bots are the only Phase 1 units the player commands, and the reason they earn their place is in [37_Planet Threats & Defence Design](<./37_Planet Threats & Defence Design.md>) §9: producing units, sending them somewhere and losing some of them is the shape of the entire war layer, taught on the ground for free.

Ferals cannot be attacked at source. They have no nest. Bots are for natives only.

9. What Branch 6 Changed

Applied 2026-09-06 as Branch 6 amendment §0.5, closing OI-361, under the research document's own §0.3 protocol. Recorded here because this document is why it changed.

Was Now
Turret Upgrade II unlocks Heavy Turret (2×2, distinct building) Unlocks Hull Plating ammunition, requiring a Turret at Machine Mk2 to chamber
Advanced Fortification unlocks Reinforced Wall (distinct building) Gate automation only. The wall reaches higher HP by upgrade kit
Audit note: "Reinforced Wall and Heavy Turret are distinct buildings rather than Mk levels, so they are legitimate research unlocks" Withdrawn. All buildings tier

Turret Upgrade I (range +30%, fire rate +20%) is a flat effect on the building and survives unchanged, as does the Combat Doctrine infinite node. No other branch was touched.

The general rule this makes explicit: under Canonical §4, no building is ever a research unlock at a higher tier. Research unlocks recipes; a recipe may require a Mk-N building; the Mk comes from a kit. Any node anywhere in the tree that unlocks a bigger version of an existing building is stale by construction, and Branch 6 was where that first showed up.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md, area threats.

Open Questions

  • The rungs of the ammunition ladder. Metal Plates and Hull Plating are the first two. Whether the upper rungs stay as existing manufactured goods or need dedicated items is open, and it is a judgement about whether "a plate is ammunition" keeps reading sensibly at the top of the tree
  • What a Pulse Cannon is. Kinetic, energy, or a third thing that justifies its existence
  • Consumption rates, which is where the balance of the whole sink lives. Belongs with the item, building, recipe and flow pass rather than here
  • Whether spread should be capped, since an uncapped spread eventually makes turret count irrelevant against swarms
  • Whether Turret Upgrade I's flat +30% range and +20% fire rate should shrink, now that the ammunition ladder owns those same two axes (§4.2)
  • What happens to a turret's magazine contents when the turret is destroyed. 37_Planet Threats §8.2 says a destroyed building's contents are gone, which would apply, but it is worth confirming that a full magazine is not a punishing thing to lose
  • Whether the EMP Emitter should be the only answer to a feral swarm, or merely the best one
  • Signature contribution per turret, which needs a number before §2.1's trap can be tuned

Revision History

Version Date Changes
0.2 2026-09-06 §4.2 added, closing OI-362: a rung buys rate of fire, range and spread, never damage. Four consequences recorded — nothing goes obsolete; every rung raises consumption, so researching one without scaling the line leaves the player worse off; it couples the two tier tracks, since a faster round drains the magazine and demands a higher Base Mk, cascading one research node into a production demand and a construction demand; and range and spread are geometry, changing where turrets belong rather than how many. Spread noted as the anti-swarm answer, which points it at the ferals. Caution recorded that Turret Upgrade I grants the same two axes flat and must not out-weigh the ammunition.
0.1 2026-09-06 Initial document, closing OI-360. Defence is a production line, not a purchase, measured in items per minute. Two families: kinetic consumes items, energy consumes power, and energy defence raises the signature that draws the ferals, deepening with Machine Mk. Everything tiers, by two different mechanisms: buildings by universal upgrade kit in place, ammunition by research, so a defence line is never rebuilt to be improved and improves while unattended. One ammunition ladder shared with ship weapons, drawn from goods the factory already makes, which makes the Phase 1 line the War Update line and closes half of OI-343. The magazine is a buffer, so a line that runs dry is a diagnosable logistics failure. Turrets take modules, and all four existing types have real meaning, Efficiency partially defusing the energy trap. Ferals fly, so walls answer natives, EMP answers ferals and turrets answer both. Bots are built and spent, giving offence a batch sink against defence's rate sink. Three Branch 6 nodes recorded as needing amendment.