Do blunt damage increase chance to incapacitate enemy?

[khun_poo]

The myth has told for generation that to capture your enemy by knock them down, blunt damage is the weapon of choice.

Well... according to my experience in this game, I found that damage type did not really involve with anything to knock down chance by specific. Blunt, Cut or Burn damage will make enemy pain, pain bring consciousness lose and blackout. If moving capability hit 0%, they'll also down the same way. So, any damage to their leg would downed target too. The only upside of blunt damage is that the target will less likely to have infectious wound and it is faster for patient to recovery since they don't loss their blood unless some organ got crush.

I found that pain, consciousness and moving capability of the target is the thing to concern when aiming to knock someone down.

So, the cheapest way IMO is to use a wooden shiv and poke a lot of hole to the target and let them bleed until dried (Blood loss (extreme): consciousness max 10%) will confirm to down. Sadly, it take a long time and a lot more effort to heal with high risk of infection chance.

According from my wiki research, burn damage also an effective way to knock down target. Burn wound cause a lot more pain than other damage source. The downside is that burn wound have high chance of infection, fire will still burn even if the target is down, fire are your absolute nightmare in the cave, fire also extinguish under rain. IMO, because fire are too difficult to control in Rimworld, it is less preferably weapon of choice to me 

The most effective way IMO is to using shock lance to burn the target's brain. This method is the fastest way yet expensive and high chance to cause brain scar. Sometime it is also ignite the target on fire too. Can't be use against target with psychic resistance trait or wearing psychic protection hat. Work like a charm when trying to capture wild Thrumbo alive. 

Thank you for reading, looking forward to every comment.

[Hans Lemurson]

I have found that large numbers of small wounds are more likely to bring a target down without maiming them.  It is, as you said, a bigger pain to patch them back up, but the wounds heal faster and are spread out over more of the body.  Healing seems to work on a per-wound basis.

[Madman666]

If what I know is correct, blunt damage causes a bit more pain, so its a "yes", it does incapacitate a bit more effectively (Hans is right as well - more smaller wounds will incapacitate better and with less overall damage to organs and parts than bigger wounds. So you ideally want to use something blunt, quick and causing small damage).

And also a "no" if you are speaking about downing more opponents instead of killing them, because each time a non-colony related live pawn gets incapacitated (no matter from what - no moving, no consciousness, pain, legs shot off) - game rolls a dice with 67% to just kill the pawn outright. So you can actually find corpses that took no fatal damage to any organ quite frequently. Apparently thats done for balance reasons, so player colony doesn't bloat quite so fast. That part I write assuming you don't know about game's death\down check, so if you do know that and only want to know about damage type efficiency - just ignore it.

[Kirby23590]

The chance to kill or down the enemy seems to be random, At least IMO and my eyes.

Using blunt weapons that are low or high quality still has a chance killing a pawn. Even with barehands and with fisticuffs still has 10% of killing.

I kind of agree it has to do with the pain system. The number of tiny wounds will put a man down. Sometimes bigger wounds will weaken them untill they drop dead or fall down unconscious, heavily bleeding or knocked out.

I don't know since the neolithic clubs has lost quality modifiers vs maces. But i think maces that are made of wood or plasteel or maybe steel are better if their are low quality or less damaging. Since using uranium maces = 50% of killing or breaking bones of an important pawn or colonist that you want to put down or capture.

I think i will agree with shock lances. But they are expensive in mid to early game and most be bought from exotic traders and has a 11% of setting the shock lance victim on fire. But atleast in B18 they lost the chance of killing the pawn back in the days of A14.

But i think pawns or enemies taking more hits and still fighting with tons of wounds has to do with ones with painstoppers implants and drugs such as go-juice and yayo

[Madman666]

Well the 67% death\down check game does is a real thing, there is even a mod, that disables this check, so that people are downed way more often instead of being dead outright. But yes, outside this sudden-death check its pretty random, depending on which part of the pawn's body takes a hit. Pretty much everything that has more than 10 damage on it has a chance to oneshot a human pawn's brain (if no helmet\hat is worn).

[TheMeInTeam]

You want to put people down without causing damage that is lethal in its own right.

The 67% chance of them dying on down will always be there, so it's just about minimizing the odds of a lethal injury happening before that check applies (such as taking torso, head, or vital organ to 0% health/efficiency, which is 100% kill when it happens).

I'd guess using fists or even a weaker blunt force item gives you the best probability, but most weak-ish blunt hits will get you close enough to the 67% floor.

[glob]

Buy these shock lances and use them when you need to capture a pawn alive. It is especially useful in the late game - after the raid gives up and starts running hit as many pirates with bionics with shock lances, capture them, extract bionics and let the captives go. A lance costs three times cheaper than a bionic anyway when you buy it from trader. try to buy as many lances as possible before the pirates start to appear with bionics.

[RyanRim]

One of them Orassan guns (or was it Rimsenal?) uses heating laser beams , I use that gun a lot to bring down unwanted pawns. These create a lot of small burns and the pawn wont attack cause he tries to put off the fires, while there is damage done after each 2 seconds. Otherwise I use maces on my best melee pawn, cause I don't want someone to just miss with such a banal weapon.

[Canute]

Yep, any weapon with burn/frost damage are great to get down pawns.
Glittertechs APB weapons or the Cryo launcher from orassans.

But i though the discussion is about without mods. Because there are serveral mod's with non-lethal weapons.