Gatling

Overview

 * The Gatling is a rapid-shooting tower, good against weak enemies and Soakers. It's the second cheapest tower when upgraded in the game after the Anti-air.
 * This tower is available to the player immediately after the completion of 1-1: Introduction.

Trivia

 * Previously in Sanctum 1 the Gatling design was used in the Accelerator, which concept was likely absorbed by Focus (the Accelerator in S1 increases its fire rate when firing).

Notes & tactics

 * This tower is good mainly for its high rate of fire, but each individual shot deals low amont of damage per hit. The weak individual shot renders it useless again average/highly armoured foes that'll take little to no damage from it, although improving the tower damage via overcharging and other damage-boosting measures can help to overcome this.
 * Despite the seemingly good DPS, the range of the tower is limited. Random damage towers with higher range can randomly deal overall more damage, especially if the lumes have armour.
 * An overcharged Gatling can randomly work well as a partial substitution of random towers and tower combos like the ACP+Focus duo, since Its superior speed keeps it capable against low-to-average health crowds that are not too dense, and potent vs many single high-health enemies. If overcharged enough, it can start to perform well vs enemies with high armour.
 * Gatling(s) alongside Kairos or Slow Fields can kill most weak lumes such as Walker Pups, Runners & Brood Mothers, giving the player(s) space to focus on larger threats. Other good support towers are the Range & Amp spires.
 * Like all projectile-using towers, the Gatling suffers from obstructions, that work as range decreasements and therefore damage reductors. While towers also can serve as such, small ones like dispensers & Drone and high towers like Violators & Anti-air are likely to be either low or zero obstruction to the sight of the tower.
 * Projectile-using towers that suffer from sight obstructions are the Scatter lasers & the ones with targeting system.
 * Overcharging the tower grants 35 damage per 100 resources (= 0,35 dmg per resource). This means overcharging gives 77,78% of the damage, gained by building level 3 Gatling towers.
 * The Gatling tends to work better if acting as a sole/few overcharged tower(s) per game, similarly to the Focus, ACP & Anti-air, especially if there is a Range Spire.
 * One reason is because it often finds too much obstruction of its sight if being more in numbers, while its vastly superior fire rate can help grealy vs multiple enemies without needs of building multiple towers, unlike the situation with Lightnings, Violators and some other towers. While the Focus is generally more sensitive to lack of sight, the Gatling should be left with less or no obstructions as well.
 * It can easily act as a sole tower and if used this way, it is less likely to act as an obstruction to the sight of other projectile-towers on its own.
 * Another reason is the situtation vs high-armoured lumes like Armoured heavies & Super heavies, that require serious overcharge from the Gatling to be dealt any damage. Also the overcharged Gatling has a better action vs lumes with low to average armor like Walker Warriors, Rhinos & Screamer Matriarchs. The theoretically lesser cost efficiency of the overcharging is still mostly enough to make for a good mid- and lategame performance in many of the maps.
 * Amp spire correlations
 * A level 1 Amp adds same amount of damage as overcharging a Gatling to more than 324 damage and makes for a bigger damage gain if being put before the overcharge.
 * A level 2 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging a Gatling to more than 405 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
 * A lvl 3 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging the Gatling to above 547 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
 * Overcharging the Amp adds the same amount of damage as overcharging the Gatling to >1750 dmg and from then on, max dmg gain can be reached by putting equal amounts of resources between them.
 * These correlations are in action for the damage value, reached only via upgrading & overcharging, without Tinkerer, Engineer, Core-tower synergy or already existing Amp spire. If any of these is in action, it is needed to calculate the damage, gained by pure overcharging/upgrading (or to remove the buffs) to see the real efficiency stats. Note that all these 4 mentioned buffs stack only additively (no multiplications).


 * The attack speed of the tower in-game is converted into shots per second this way: One in-game speed unit is 1/60 shots per second and therefore come the calculation - the Gatling has 399/60 = 6,65 shots per second. Only the Drone tower has a (barely) higher attack speed - 400 units ~ 6,67 shots/sec, which is just when a Drone group is sent to a target.
 * Overall, this tower can find good use in all game modes. While without %-buffing effects and in low-resource games it is behind the Focus against durable lumes, a game that uses Amp and perks such as Tinkerer & Engineer might progress to a moment when the Gatling can reach higher single-target DPS due to the tower's normal scaling, although this is mostly a feature of the Survival mode. Technically in Survival the Gatling tower has the biggest possible potential against single lume in the game such as ground bosses due to its good overcharge efficiency and good scaling with all non-overcharge buffs. However, one should keep in mind that this capability of the Gatling is just a single-target DPS and should there be even two lumes that to be targeted, it goes behind the Drone tower in overall DPS. The ACP beats the Gatling when it hits 4 or more lumes. Clearly, the Gatling cannot match the damage of the Anti-air vs flying lumes, like with all other damage towers. One additional weakness of the Gatling vs the Drone is that the Gatling has bigger need of tower sight and that Hoverers/Hoverer queens would technically 'halven' the damage, dealt by the Gatling, while the Drone would always damage the lume it targets, although kiting and holding those lumes can help improve damage. The Drone can perform better at making Soakers more vulnerable, although it could help this process as a Drone tower could send no more than one drone group.