Assult Rifle vs. Minigun vs. LMG vs. Charged Rifle

[vampiresoap]

Hey guys, thank you all for so many thoughtful replies!! All very helpful I was wondering...so why would you give low skill pawns miniguns or assult rifles? Wouldn't they just miss like...everything? Shouldn't they be using more accurate weapons?

[XeoNovaDan]

Miniguns have a forced miss radius, so no matter how accurate the pawn is, they'll almost always miss anyway. For that reason, minigun quality makes no difference whatsoever (e.g. a 20% HP awful minigun is just as effective as a brand new legendary). Assault rifles on the other hand, they do ideally need skilled/careful shooters to take full advantage of their range - a level 13 should cut it in most cases.

[Wanderer_joins]

Assault rifles on the other hand, they do ideally need skilled/careful shooters to take full advantage of their range - a level 13 should cut it in most cases.

You nailed it, sniper rifles and miniguns are niche weapons you can't ignore. To discuss on the other one it depends heavily on your colonists.

I'm running a game with mostly terrible shooters, you can somewhat offset this disavantage playing short ranged.

[Serenity]

Aside from the forced missing, remember how it was said that it is meant against large groups of enemies? When 30 tribals or man hunters come at you it doesn't matter much if you miss one. You are very likely hit the ones around the target.

[XeoNovaDan]

Aside from the forced missing, remember how [the minigun] was said that it is meant against large groups of enemies?

Already previously mentioned it on page 1, so I just didn't want to re-iterate

Minigun: Highly underrated. A lot of people criticise the minigun because of its poor accuracy against single targets, but that's not what it's meant for; it's a weapon that excels at crowd control. If there's a group of enemies, force a trigger-happy minigunner (forced miss radius so accuracy is completely irrelevant) to aim at the rear-most enemy and watch everybody in front and around soak all of the bullets, and a squad will shred a lot of things. In the case of urban combat, aim at a wall and watch anybody that walks into the path go down pretty quickly.

TL;DR: Excellent crowd control weapon, literally anybody can use it as long as they can equip a gun, blows other weapons out of the water against crowds - except for rocket launchers.

[ShadowTani]

Well if you really want to handle mech ships, you paste them with mortars using a sandbagged turret line set up near the wreck to keep the mechs in place after they pop out, but I'd already written too much, so cheers.

That's definitively true for mech ships, but mechanoids may also arrive like regular raids. ;3 So the tip was more in regards to tackling ones that arrive before you got a good kill box (still good for helping the killbox dispatch them swifter though), or whenever they decide to drop pod down into the middle of your base where there's often much less opportunities for snipers to do shot-and-run tactics.

Was that bit about increased incapacitation chance something official about the weapon, or something you've noticed through playing? I never only have one charge rifle in a place, so the massed fire makes it a moot point, but that sounds interesting for both slave trade and "recruitment."

Blunt melee is still safer in regards to not outright killing a pawn, but charge rifles does a pretty good job at it too. It's probably not official, just a nifty coincidence I've noticed. The primary factor for this is probably that they are technically low-damage per-shot and therefore don't shot off body parts too easily unless it's a direct finger/toe/ear hit (so I'm happy about Tynan reverting the chances of hitting fingers/toes/ears, lol), essentially being able to spread the damage around more evenly across a pawns body.

[Britnoth]

I lost my trust in assault rifles when I had to use them against armored pirate on Go-Juice. It took insane number of bullets to put him down. I prefer my pirates with lesser ammounts of bigger holes in them.

Assault Rifle is a bad weapon. Never could understand why it is liked so much on these forums.

High accuracy, good range, burst fire, okay damage. Looks excellent on paper. Shame the weapon does not really have a niche you actually want to be using it for:


Sniper and Survival Rifles comfortably out range, out accuracy, and out damage it. In theory the AR should be more effective than the survival at mid ranges, but 18 damage in one hit is often more telling than 21 spread over 3.

Minigun has 1 more range and totally outclasses it in the spray and pray long range aoe fire role.

Charge Rifle (and to a much lesser extent the LMG) outgun it at medium-short range. CR has the damage per shot that takes targets down while the AR just makes them angry.

SMG competes with the charge rifle at short ranges, again AR cannot compete.


So... what niche is the AR left for? A usable all round weapon where you don't know what range you will be fighting at?

The problem here is that experienced players should be picking their fights so they are fighting at the range of their choice. That is the strength of the defender.

Open field caravan ambushes are almost always going to be at shorter than 20 tile range. The AI is not going to hang back and try to out range you.

This leaves the AR as the weapon of choice for single target enemies at a range of.... 24-31 tiles. Or 27-31 tiles if you prefer the LMGs higher rate of fire over accuracy.

Why would you choose to shoot at this range? Simple: it allows you to stand safely distant behind a turret line and still shoot at enemies as they enter the killbox. CR, LMG, SMG all lack the range to do this. Sniper and survival rifles take longer to aim, so the target is often dead before they get to shoot.

Assault Rifle shines when used as a weapon along with turrets. Which is perhaps why newer players rate it so highly. 

An alternative of course, is to just build some more turrets instead. Less components, less research, an order of magnitude faster to construct than crafting a rifle. Which is why the assault rifle is a bottom tier weapon. 

But hey, it's still better than the machine pistol.

[NinjaDiscoJew]

Here is a accuracy caculator you can mess around with and decide for yourself.
https://cityofthesky.com/RimworldAccuracyCalculator.html

[XeoNovaDan]

Here is a accuracy caculator you can mess around with and decide for yourself.
https://cityofthesky.com/RimworldAccuracyCalculator.html

That accuracy calculator is outdated and only uses values for A15 - note Luciferium's values for example, and it only allows for up to 190% manipulation and 160% sight. You can get as high as 270% manipulation and 230% sight in vanilla RimWorld (Full bionics, trauma savantism, fibrous mechanites, sensory mechanites, luciferium, go-juice) - although it's much easier to get 140% manipulation and 180% sight (which is still above what the mentioned calculator allows for).



Also, it's impossible to get that straight line in shooter accuracy, so that's another discrepancy with this calculator.

I know this is a bit of self-promotion (but relevant to this discussion), but I'd personally recommend using my accuracy calculator instead which is up-to-date with A16 and actually correct (although the A17 unstable version needs updating).