Just thought I'd gripe a bit. I'm playing Phoebe as usual, fairly hard difficulty, and most of the raids are easily handled, albeit with a bit of injuries.
For instance, a group of about 8 poorly armed outlanders did a siege, I think I got one stab from a shiv and killed 5. Another was mechanoids, which took a lot of patience with a sniper rifle (my only one) but was handled eventually. Only one man lost a leg, not too bad.
So my tribals with 1 sniper rifle, a mech minigun, and 8 axes then gets assaulted by about 30 boomrats.
What the F? How is that remotely in line with the other "big threats"? I had absolutely no way to survive that encounter. I had to reload an earlier day, it was a literally unwinnable situation. There is no vanilla way to handle that as a tribal start.
But just about any massive (and laggy) manhunter pack is going to do that, when it spawns like 3-5x my number of colonists. Boomrats obviously are pretty bad. But it felt like a very Randy situation, and I shouldn't get those as Phoebe or even Cass.
Lock your doors and stay inside. Unlike raids, there's nothing forcing you to fight manhunter packs.
I made a similar thread (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=31596.msg323780#msg323780) a few weeks ago. It's interesting that my thread was also about boomrats. I've experienced lots of manhunter hordes now, but that particular one was something else in its level of intensity. What seemed to make it different to any other I've faced is that the boomrats were able to detect, lock on and attack (their state showing as "Attacking so-and-so") colonists on the other side of my base through my base, walls and all. So I could hardly move at all in my base without them detecting and attacking from round the other side of the map. It all ended in huge fires inside my base, alien ship, Zzt fire and a deer manhunter pack in the most testing chain of events I've ever faced in the game!
So I'm not sure that all Manhunter packs have the same operating logic. It was like boomrats have been given some extra sensory ability boost, more powerful than the smell of a bloodhound.
I had an interesting situation earlier today with a manhunter pack. I had a new recruit with an alcohol addition issue that I was working through withdrawl, and he had a mental break and was wandering around outside in a daze. Then I got a manhunter muffalo pack attack. So I couldn't just plan on staying inside until they calmed down, because a pawn doing dazed wandering won't respect zones.
I ended up drafting someone else and arresting the alcoholic, and fortunately he came along peacefully. So I was able to go into lockdown, at least until one of the muffaloes got in a fight with one of my cassowaries. Then I got pissed and started taking pot shots at the muffies from doorways and eventually picked them all off with no further casualties.
That wouldn't have worked so well with boomrats, though.
I had a pretty scary situation where manhunting boomrats made it into one of my wooden huts in the super early game. My poor colonists were stuck inside their bedrooms until the boomrats decided to leave :(
It made for a good story, though.
Theres no existing game mechanic that can't be won against. There's always a solution, you just have to be prepared ahead of time in case it happens :P
I agree that certain manhunters in manhunter packs do need to be toned town a little by having their combat power rating increased. Boomrats are near-enough suicidal to engage in melee, for instance, and it's extremely difficult to hit them with firearms due to their incredible movement speed and tiny body size, and their sheer numbers.
Although as already mentioned, you can pretty much just shut manhunters out and probably pound them with mortars
You're not supposed to engage them, you're supposed to hide inside until they go away. If you do manage to kill a manhunter pack, you've potentially beaten one of the harder events in the game (depending on type and number of animals - early manhunter events tend to be just a slightly worse version of the Mad animal event.)
It's important to distinguish *boomrat* manhunters from other sorts. I just got attacked by a muffalo manhunter pack of 30 muffalo. My freezer is now seriously full of muffalo meat.
What makes boomrats such a challenge is that they're too small to shoot, too fast to outrun, and you can't melee them. There's just really no good offensive options against them.
Hiding inside and waiting for them to starve to death and explode is just about the only thing you can do. BTW, applying the wood beatdown to any wandering pawns works well to keep them inside.
They don't have to starve and die before they "go away." They'll leave on their own after a solid 24 hours. At least, that's my experience with all of the manhunter packs I've seen.
I really like manhunting hordes as an incident, they give a different enemy to fight with, this is good. But in my opinion such big hordes give you no choice between trying to firefight or hide inside. playing over 10 years game leads to numbers that could easily be halved and still be too dangerous for you to put the nose out of the door.
Going forward, use stronger doors at the base entrances, Plasteel being the best, and divide all the base's corridors into sections linked with doors that are normally held open but can be closed in times of emergency. That way, if the base is penetrated, the intruders can be isolated without being allowed to have the run of the base.
I almost always fight manhunter packs. Muffalo (https://i.redd.it/i3gkhl9uaoky.png) are my favourite, because they're easy and give lots of meat. Boomalopes are fun, because they chain react into a huge explosion. Boars (http://i.imgur.com/EQsDl6q.png), elephants, rhinos? Bring it on. I'll even take on wargs, despite them being faster and stronger than humans.
But boomrats? Boomrats are nothing but trouble. Their explosion is too small for a chain reaction. Their tiny bodies are too hard to hit. Their movement speed is too high to run from. When the fight is over, half the colony has lost a finger or toe and gained nothing but an eye scar or infection.
Which is a darned shame, because that red leather is gorgeous. But noo, it all burns.
To the guys saying to lock yourself in... they broke down the doors faster than I could fix them. I didn't realize they leave after 24hr, so maybe I'll add granite doors to my stronghold and wait it out... I think I could keep granite doors repaired fast enough, right?
Quote from: DNK on April 30, 2017, 06:42:25 PM
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For doors leading from inside to outside the base, double-door them. If all but one of your peeps are inside and manhunters perhaps observed the straggler going in, they'll bash down the first door but not the second.
You can repair doors while they're trying to bash them down. Just order your best constructor to walk up to the door and start repairing. They give up after several blows. But it does help if all 50 aren't trying to bash down the same door.
If you're hiding in a bedroom, you could deconstruct a bed then build a wall right behind the door so there wouldn't actually be a path towards your cornered pawn/s. Haven't tried with stone walls, but wooden walls are pretty quick to build.
the other methods work just as fine tho
Harmless if you're careful but if you forget to close all doors or have a bad zoning it can be devastating even end game.
Never be casual with manhunter packs.
Quote from: about 30 midgets on April 30, 2017, 08:54:27 PM
If you're hiding in a bedroom, you could deconstruct a bed then build a wall right behind the door so there wouldn't actually be a path towards your cornered pawn/s. Haven't tried with stone walls, but wooden walls are pretty quick to build.
Excellent point -- manhunters don't break down walls. And it takes them a while to bust down a door. (I build all my exterior doors out of steel.) So just grab a few wood logs and barricade yourself in. Have one constructor stand their repairing the door while the one closest to the warehouse grabs a bundle.
Quote from: O Negative on April 30, 2017, 07:28:38 AM
They don't have to starve and die before they "go away." They'll leave on their own after a solid 24 hours. At least, that's my experience with all of the manhunter packs I've seen.
It depends on the type of animal (and possibly some RnG). Small animals will begin to starve faster, leading the event to end quickly. Large animals like rhinos or muffalo can hang around for much longer.
You've got to be really careful when repairing doors, as colonists will only do it when under automatic control and not when drafted. One of the original three colonists in my game died when someone was repairing a door and, upon completion, immediately opened it, letting hostiles in. So keep a very close eye on the repair completion percentage rate and be ready to stop the repairer at or before it reaches 100%.
Or make sure your zoneing is set so the constructor won't try to go through the door when it's fully repaired.
But now that I think about it, I've never seen animals enter through a door that a colonists was passing through. I've had plenty of times when I orders a colonist through a door and he/she got attacked by an animal several times before getting through, but the animal didn't follow through the door. Raiders might be a different story, though.
Yeah, that's a long-winded way of doing it - setting up and painting a new zone for every door that needs repairing in such circumstances - but my colonist would probably still be alive if I had. It was raiders that did for my colonist.
Quote from: The Man with No Name on May 01, 2017, 01:42:51 PM
You've got to be really careful when repairing doors, as colonists will only do it when under automatic control and not when drafted. One of the original three colonists in my game died when someone was repairing a door and, upon completion, immediately opened it, letting hostiles in.
You can forbid the door while your colonist is repairing it, he'll keep working on it until completion but not open it.
Quote from: Wanderer_joins on May 01, 2017, 03:05:12 PM
You can forbid the door while your colonist is repairing it, he'll keep working on it until completion but not open it.
Thanks, that's a great workaround!
Having an "inside" zone is fairly common -- you'll want one anyway if you get a toxic fallout, or if some of your colonists don't have parkas, that kind of thing. And if your base is surrounded by 50 manhunting wargs :) So if your door-repairman is set to "inside" he won't open the door after he fixes it.
Yeah, an "inside" zone is what I was thinking of when I suggested zones above. And that's all I've generally needed.
But if you're dealing with a situation where some raiders/manhunters have gotten inside your buildings, it gets more difficult, which is what I'm assuming The Man with No Name was thinking about when he replied to me. If my assumption was right, I agree with him, it could be pretty tedious at that point.
I guess you could just keep trimming your "inside" zone to remove any areas that have fallen to the attackers. But knowing myself, I'd probably forget to fix the "inside" zone to what it should be after the battle is over. Heck, I usually completely forget to unrectrict my pawns after the battle, and then spend the next day or so wondering why they aren't hauling steel from my mining area. :-P
I think I've seen a mod that gives you an alert if you have any pawns that aren't unrestricted. I really should find it and use it.
Make a mountain base and use all exploits from the other thread. Manhunters are meant to bruteforce people who like to turtle and wall up. Ironically, the only solution is to turtle up even more, even deeper, even stronger, ideally preventing your colonists to ever going outside.
I only build open colonies without walls, and when there's a manhunter pack, my guys retreat to community hall, which conveniently has a kitchen and a food storage, and there are some med supplies stored. They hang out in a huge combined rec and dining room, drink beer and smoke joints. It's basically a big party, so it's extremely rare for pawns to loose their marbles and do something stupid while the animals are running around on the streets. And when manhunter animals get sleepy pawns move out and hunt a few of them. It's easy, only thing which bugs me is the mess the animals leave, it can take days to clean.