I am enjoying my time with alpha 5 a lot !
One thing that bothers me is that I have found a tactic to break a siege that may be a little too powerful.
When I get besieged, I equip my best shooters with sniper rifles.
First, they dispatch the sniper wielding besiegers if there are any. It is usually possible to pick them one or two at a time, versus my 4 or 5 competent shooters.
When they are no longer a menace, they snipe the mortars. It is a very efficient way to destroy them, and the explosions and fire can kill the surrounding ennemies.
I wonder if this is an expected strategy or an exploit. The besiegers never try to mount a counter assault on my sniper team. The only downside is that snipers are prone to mental breakdowns since they have to travel a lot and snipe for a at least a whole day while looking at people dying.
Well I'm sure Tynan will be reading what people post abut alpha 5 and what people have come up with to defeat sieges. I am sure in future updates he will balance sieges so that a sniper team isn't over powered.
Its not a powerfull tactic keep in mind that killing them one by one consume alot of time, which could be spend on something else like sleeping or eating to not get insane :D
unfortunatley, lacking sniper-rifles (we has pistols... gangsta, innit?) I've not found a decent way to avoid losing my entire base to a mortar raid...
Ok, i've been playing for a while and am starting to get on with everything, then a group of raiders nearly a HUNDRED strong drop in, lay down mortars and lay waste to everything i've spent the last six or seven hours building...
once, that sucks. twice, that's annoying... EVERY TIME i get a siege, it's goodnight gracie.
Interestingly I too have had huge issues with this. I do however like it when you are able to reverse it and use mortars for yourself. Ive had a couple of large attacks that have been seen running away because my mortars are firing fiery death upon them.
I am intrigued however as to what constitutes to good aim on a mortar. I presume high shooting skill would help here but does it really have an affect or is it always random?
Shooting skill doesn't affect mortar accuracy as of now.
I am aware of the sniper-vs-siege semi-exploit. Thinking about ways to counter that - I may just have the siegers go into assault mode once about 25% of them have died.
Quote from: Tynan on July 06, 2014, 10:18:03 AM
Shooting skill doesn't affect mortar accuracy as of now.
I am aware of the sniper-vs-siege semi-exploit. Thinking about ways to counter that - I may just have the siegers go into assault mode once about 25% of them have died.
You could always set the percentage of mortars built to a number based on how many raiders spawn, then out of that number hold what is required to man the mortars back whilst the rest act as they would normally and after a short period start an assualt.
Because of how devastating the mortars are however im not sure whether limiting the number of them would be worth thinking. I just had a raid of around 7 mortars which completely decimated my base. I can understand that later on in the game that would be fine but I had a small colony of around 7 people and so as you can imagine 7 mortars with a team of around 20 raiders made it a little difficult to stay alive longer than a couple of minutes.
Can you post the savegame of that? Because 20 raiders and 7 mortars doesn't sound right to me. What storyteller is this?
I think it the sniper exploit would be 50% solved if the mortars attacked the colony as a whole rather than just the nearest colonist. For me, most of the benefit is in stopping the damage to my structures rather than actually gaining the ability to destroy the siege with a sniper (they all seem to run out of food eventually anyway). It's a secondary decision whether to try to kill a few of the enemy to give the whole group a morale hit or to try taking out their mortars. On the other hand, I don't think I could even afford to send a colonist out to snipe if I needed my colonists to constantly fight fires.
Overall, I wish sieges were more about punching holes in the colony's defenses so that the enemy could attack. I've found they're usually very well-powered anyway, so a real offense against them often isn't an option, although I wouldn't want to get rid of the variety provided by having to play at guerilla warfare. They're definitely something the game needed.
The first siege I've had was 6 mortars (5 incendiary, 1 explosive) along with 15 pirates. This was on Chill Callie around day 90, with 6 colonists. I sent in a couple snipers to knock out the mortars, but base suffered some minor damage (solar panels and farms burned up). I'd say it's not that much of an exploit because the pirates usually advance to shoot you. However they went insane quickly, probably halving their numbers by the second day. I didn't even have to kill them, so many became dazed that they eventually starved.
Quote from: Tynan on July 06, 2014, 10:18:03 AM
Shooting skill doesn't affect mortar accuracy as of now.
I am aware of the sniper-vs-siege semi-exploit. Thinking about ways to counter that - I may just have the siegers go into assault mode once about 25% of them have died.
I think a simpler and better solution would be to have the raiders "react" after simply being shot at. Have them stop focusing on the mortar shots and go into either a defensive mode behind good cover and at least some of them shooting back, or have them go into a slightly more aggressive mode where they seek cover in range to shoot back. Don't let them just sit there for awhile and be exploited while the first 25% of them die.
Another option would be to have them simply build walls instead of sandbags, this would seriously increase the defense of the entire mortar party, where the player must now do what most people do to the ai raiders. They are forced to move into closer range just to be able to get a shot off. Both the raiders and mortars would be completely safe from a distance, and players could attempt to rush in and kill them or break through the walls. Unless of course the player can out mortar the enemies.
So I assume this means that sieges never have thousands of raiders who zerg rush? If so I am pleased and so will my gaming performance :3.
Snipers are quite rare and ineffective against large groups. However, I hope that in a future update in a siege half of the raiders attack the walls while half lob mortars toward your base
With the update surface structures are less useful but subterainian ones are golden. This also makes me fear solar flares a tad great update xD,
I've seen seiges of around 30-40 setting up about 8 mortars.
so far i absolutely love seiges, though i have noticed that when attacking them early, after each raider gets shot (it seems to only really take a couple of hits on them) they usually panic and run, its fairly easy to break sieges with your own attack squad.
Quote from: Ender on July 08, 2014, 01:04:25 AM
so far i absolutely love seiges, though i have noticed that when attacking them early, after each raider gets shot (it seems to only really take a couple of hits on them) they usually panic and run, its fairly easy to break sieges with your own attack squad.
Which is a lil more realistic if you ask me, cause I'd run too if all my buds and I were shot.
Quote from: Tynan on July 06, 2014, 10:18:03 AM
Shooting skill doesn't affect mortar accuracy as of now.
I am aware of the sniper-vs-siege semi-exploit. Thinking about ways to counter that - I may just have the siegers go into assault mode once about 25% of them have died.
If you did that, you would overwhelm every colony I've tried. Typically I only have 4-6 colonist, and sieges have a dozen plus. Its hard enough when dealing with the mental breakdowns associated with manning a mortar base.
Speaking of which, can you bring back the "Soldier is tired" feature so we could rotate them out instead of having them go the mental breakdown route? I pause and release anybody that is having mental issues, but its often too late - by the time they get food, or sleep, or whatever their highest priority is, I lose them. Suffering at least twice as many losses to that vs. actual combat damage. Yeah, I can arrest them, but when you only have 6, and 4 are in prison, and the prisons take a round and they escape, it gets frustrating.
Related: Whats with prisoners going into Rage mode and escaping? I'm routinely having them bash their way through wooden doors, often to drop unconscious shortly thereafter, but not always.
Quote from: HalfBrother on July 06, 2014, 04:57:31 PM
The first siege I've had was 6 mortars (5 incendiary, 1 explosive) along with 15 pirates. This was on Chill Callie around day 90, with 6 colonists. I sent in a couple snipers to knock out the mortars, but base suffered some minor damage (solar panels and farms burned up). I'd say it's not that much of an exploit because the pirates usually advance to shoot you. However they went insane quickly, probably halving their numbers by the second day. I didn't even have to kill them, so many became dazed that they eventually starved.
One approach I took, which seems to help, is to build my mortar field well beyond the colony, and of course, spread out so that one direct hit doesn't take out more than one colonist. Recently I've been building a 3x3 grid of mortars with a half dozen spaces or so between them, ideally in a desert so that fires go out quickly. Even though I typically only have 4-6 colonist to man them, the rest serve as spares should a few be destroyed.
Am I missing it, or does mortar fire rate seem random? I haven't spotted any type of recharge rate like rifles have.
Quote from: Cassey on July 08, 2014, 11:34:31 AM
Quote from: HalfBrother on July 06, 2014, 04:57:31 PM
The first siege I've had was 6 mortars (5 incendiary, 1 explosive) along with 15 pirates. This was on Chill Callie around day 90, with 6 colonists. I sent in a couple snipers to knock out the mortars, but base suffered some minor damage (solar panels and farms burned up). I'd say it's not that much of an exploit because the pirates usually advance to shoot you. However they went insane quickly, probably halving their numbers by the second day. I didn't even have to kill them, so many became dazed that they eventually starved.
One approach I took, which seems to help, is to build my mortar field well beyond the colony, and of course, spread out so that one direct hit doesn't take out more than one colonist. Recently I've been building a 3x3 grid of mortars with a half dozen spaces or so between them, ideally in a desert so that fires go out quickly. Even though I typically only have 4-6 colonist to man them, the rest serve as spares should a few be destroyed.
Am I missing it, or does mortar fire rate seem random? I haven't spotted any type of recharge rate like rifles have.
your missing it, in fact, it tells you exactly how long until the mortar can fire again, just select the mortar and in the little info box, where normally if it was a colonist, you would see their name and stuff, it will tell you. and once that time runs out you can zoom in and see the mortar do the loading to fire animation like all the other guns do.
Thanks... It was WELL past midnight when I was playing...
I love the new siege mechanic, however, I think it could be more interesting and nuanced if it functioned a bit more like a siege, as opposed to a 1 day battle of long-range bombardment.
Thus far, I've had 2 sieges in my Chill Callie game. I'll discuss the second siege to illustrate my point, though the first was a similar experience. The siege occurred around day 80, with 7 mortars (6 explosive, 1 incendiary) and 18 pirates. I was fighting back with 7 colonists and 4 mortars, lined up with 6 spaces between each mortar. Fortunately, I was able to fire my first volley of mortar shells just as the pirate's finished constructing their mortars. A lucky hit destroyed 2 of their mortars. Their first 2 volleys destroyed 2 of my mortars and killed 1 colonist. Alarmed by the toll already taken in the opening stages of the siege, I sent out 2 snipers to harass the enemy. From this point on, the battle went decidedly in my favor. The pirates stupidly targeted my snipers with their mortars, as my mortars (2 surviving + 1 rebuilt) rained death from above. The whole thing was over in less than a day.
It was fun, but a bit disappointing, as I felt I won only due to the stupid behavior of the pirates, and because it felt more like a long-range battle than an actual siege. The rate of attrition that results from mortar bombardment is far too great (on both sides) to be sustainable for multiple days. It seems I need to neutralize their mortar firepower as quickly as possible (either with overwhelming mortar firepower of my own, or by ground attack) if I want to avoid getting bombed into the stone age.
Simply weathering the attack is not a viable option, and therein lies my disappointment. I should expect mortar fire to burn my crops, destroy exposed fragile equipment such as solar panels, and make it dangerous for colonists to be outside. I can prepare for these threats by maintaining large stockpiles of food and batteries, and by bringing my colonists indoors. But, unfortunately, these measures make little difference when mortar shells blow through stone walls as if they were made of paper.
It has turned out on wide testing that they do sometimes end up with really extreme numbers of mortars, as do players. I'm thinking of doing an ammo system for artillery in future so everyone doesn't just pour shells at each other freely all the time.
Personally, I generally like the lack of ammo in the game; one less thing to micromanage. I suppose it would be fine for mortars, especially if there is a "Munitions Worktable" to maintain one's stockpile of shells.
Regardless, I think the deadliness of explosive mortar shells ought to be addressed. Specifically, the fact that nothing provides any meaningful protection from them aside from being under a mountain.
I don't think even roofs will save you from mortars, or at least the thin rock/metal roofs. If mortars did use ammunition it would be a good idea to buff their fire speed as currently you have to wait half a day for mortars to fire another round off. Also it would be nice if fast forwarding was possible even while under a mortar attack as the chances of your colonists dying from them is slim.
Mountain anti no roof zones are mortar immune. My first objective when starting was the burrow into the mountain like a dwarf.
Sadly never had a seige yet. Little ore and no internal power sources. Didn't get lucky on this one. in fact unless I get a power source soon I'm frakked if fighting more than 10 raiders in a siege.
OK, just finished another frustrating night. Things I can control and do poorly I have no problems with. Things totally out of my control that destroy 6-10 hours of work is, well, annoying.
I have my colony up to a dozen or so folks, and have a nice 3 x 4 grid of mortar launchers awaiting use. Problem is that siegers appear to be able to drop in, build a half-dozen launchers, and attack all before my guys can even get to the the launchers. Yeah, maybe there are 20-30 of them, but they shouldn't be able to build them faster than my guys can walk. I managed to get one guy to the grid and half the mortars were blown to pieces before the rest of my crew could get there - and its not a far walk.
Then Random Randy had his way with me, and brought in a second group of siegers while the first was still attacking....
Oh, Randy needs a bit of a governor too: I had three colonies decide to come visit all at the same time. Holy hell broke loose, they destroy a big chunk of my stuff fighting each other, and then the rating went down for some reason and they turned and attacked me! Instant death - my dozen vs. 50-60 of them with no warning.
Cassey
Quote from: Tynan on July 08, 2014, 08:03:26 PM
It has turned out on wide testing that they do sometimes end up with really extreme numbers of mortars, as do players. I'm thinking of doing an ammo system for artillery in future so everyone doesn't just pour shells at each other freely all the time.
Instead of constant firing, why not have them do a barrage?
Shoot roughly at the same time for maximum chaos!
I still hold that the most effective way of dealing with this is not to fire mortars back but take your crack team of attackers down and destroy the whole lot of them. I have done this with 3-5 well armed attackers against 20-30. Those mortar installations blow up very nicely and take out whole lots of them
Oh... is it possible to mass aim them as well? Currently wasting a lot of time each cycle clicking on all 12 mortars, one at a time, scrolling the screen, and doing C. If I don't, I have found them tracking wayward attackers (whomever is closest) instead of targeting the mass of them.
Quote from: Cassey on July 09, 2014, 03:40:32 AM
OK, just finished another frustrating night. Things I can control and do poorly I have no problems with. Things totally out of my control that destroy 6-10 hours of work is, well, annoying.
I have my colony up to a dozen or so folks, and have a nice 3 x 4 grid of mortar launchers awaiting use. Problem is that siegers appear to be able to drop in, build a half-dozen launchers, and attack all before my guys can even get to the the launchers. Yeah, maybe there are 20-30 of them, but they shouldn't be able to build them faster than my guys can walk. I managed to get one guy to the grid and half the mortars were blown to pieces before the rest of my crew could get there - and its not a far walk.
Then Random Randy had his way with me, and brought in a second group of siegers while the first was still attacking....
Oh, Randy needs a bit of a governor too: I had three colonies decide to come visit all at the same time. Holy hell broke loose, they destroy a big chunk of my stuff fighting each other, and then the rating went down for some reason and they turned and attacked me! Instant death - my dozen vs. 50-60 of them with no warning.
Cassey
I like Randy like this, many events many random. Its awesome.
I'm fascinated by this mechanic and hopefully some of my feedback can get your brains going.
The AI needs some sort of a motive and goal coded in that is the driving force behind the act of a siege. Retaliation for a prior act, aggressive expansion, resource scarcity, etc. could all color a siege in completely different ways.
As for the shelling, I like the idea of limiting the resource, but if there was some way for the AI to assess battle readiness of the colony, that might help to generate agency for the next action of the attack.
For example, if I assign (Leader) to Frank, Frank runs a check to see if Turrets are visible from his location, if the visible attack point has power, if colonists are visible, and what time of day it is. If these conditions are met, Frank issues a storm order to accomplish the team's goal (steal crops, steal uranium, kill Bob who killed their teammate in a prior attack, etc.)
Lastly, I would also code in a battering ram of sorts. These crazy avatars knock down metal doors a bit too easy for my taste, and a battering ram would be a nice modifier that could make it a bit more realistic.
Sorry for the wall of text!
Quote from: Vylsok on July 11, 2014, 11:06:35 PM
I'm fascinated by this mechanic and hopefully some of my feedback can get your brains going.
The AI needs some sort of a motive and goal coded in that is the driving force behind the act of a siege. Retaliation for a prior act, aggressive expansion, resource scarcity, etc. could all color a siege in completely different ways.
As for the shelling, I like the idea of limiting the resource, but if there was some way for the AI to assess battle readiness of the colony, that might help to generate agency for the next action of the attack.
For example, if I assign (Leader) to Frank, Frank runs a check to see if Turrets are visible from his location, if the visible attack point has power, if colonists are visible, and what time of day it is. If these conditions are met, Frank issues a storm order to accomplish the team's goal (steal crops, steal uranium, kill Bob who killed their teammate in a prior attack, etc.)
Lastly, I would also code in a battering ram of sorts. These crazy avatars knock down metal doors a bit too easy for my taste, and a battering ram would be a nice modifier that could make it a bit more realistic.
Sorry for the wall of text!
This is all a fairly new feature and I'm sure we'll see advances on this towards alpha's 7 or 8. Looks like next round of improvements involve map generation and such.
I found really easy way to break the sieges.
All you need is 4-8 explosive mortars. Start shelling pirates as soon as they arrive. You only need to land two lucky hits to destroy 1 mortar.
Mortar self-detonation -> chain reaction with nearby mortars -> lots of dead pirates -> tantrum spiral -> pirates shooting each other -> more mortar explosions -> siege broken.
To make sieges dangerous, pirates
1) should not cluster their mortars
2) should have "dead zone" like player-placed mortars have. Now they use mortars on the nearby tantruming pirates, creating more chain explosions
3) should target important structures instead of hostiles. Now they are too easily distracted by mechanoids / single colonist / visitors / tantruming pirates
Something is not right about the balance here.... Why not allow the player to strategically send in snipers to take out the mortar raiders?? How else are we supposed to defend our base?
Seeing that mortar aim is super poor and if we've made our own mortars then us hitting the small raider camp is really hard opposed to the raiders hitting somewhere on our base. Even if the raider mortars miss their intended target then they will likely still hit something we see as important.
It sounds to me that the purpose of the mortar sieges (from the developers side) is to setup an unfair advantage to the player, making it so we have such a hard time coming up with a solution. Then once bigger mortar sieges happen then it's pretty much game over.
So what's the intended resolve to dealing with the mortar attacks?
I'd say one out of 8 shots will hit on target or close enough to count.
If you can survive a siege for longer than 4 days the raiders should automatically suicide.
If you burrow into a mountain and set up ship reactors you can hold out against a siege indefinitely but the raiders can not. Expensive but worth it for allowing free energy.
That said the intention of raider sieges is simply broken 5 colonists vs 90 raiders is a no brainer, now add a trench and defenses and those 5 colonists have no hope of winning especially if they have to walk across a field of dead bodies.
That said the best strategy is simply not to fight end game or if you do hit hard and hit often.
Quote from: Nibiru1221 on July 14, 2014, 05:30:21 PM
Something is not right about the balance here.... Why not allow the player to strategically send in snipers to take out the mortar raiders?? How else are we supposed to defend our base?
Seeing that mortar aim is super poor and if we've made our own mortars then us hitting the small raider camp is really hard opposed to the raiders hitting somewhere on our base. Even if the raider mortars miss their intended target then they will likely still hit something we see as important.
It sounds to me that the purpose of the mortar sieges (from the developers side) is to setup an unfair advantage to the player, making it so we have such a hard time coming up with a solution. Then once bigger mortar sieges happen then it's pretty much game over.
So what's the intended resolve to dealing with the mortar attacks?
Its not true actually, i think that siges are broken with large disadvntage to raiders. First thing is the sniper element that draw mortar fire. Second that that one sniper can solo kill entire sige. Its quite easy on large siges and more trickier on smaller ones.
For smaller ones i try to destroy mortars that have food in thier blast radious, raiders eat alot and food drop last them around 2-3 days if i remmber correctly so destroying it is good, also killing few raiders and making hurt few others give them - mood making them go insante faster.
Large siges oh man ... this is quite n/c my solo sniper did kill so much large siges with just 5 - 7 shots. Strategy is simple really aim and try to destroy mortars that are close to each other, since in large siges they are mostly clustered, and if your lucky you will only need to destroy one mortar and chain reaction will do the rest.
Only couter to sniper are raider snipers but they can be killed, weak point of this strategy is when sige is stationed between the moutains with just only one way of approach and have few snipers on the front, since this will take around a day or 2 to kill the sige and will require sniper colonist rotation.
The thing that got me was somewhere I read someone said that sending a sniper in to take out a raiding mortar party was an exploit.. Then Tynan said something about going to make it harder for people from doing this.
So the enemy can sit way off on the other side of the map and nearly destroy our base with fire or simple damage and that's all okay, but us sending a sniper out to pick them off from a safe distance is an exploit??
I don't think it's an exploit... Why else have sniper rifles in the game if not to keep at a safe distance to pick off the enemy?
There already seems to be enough against this attempted solution since the sniper could easily get shot by the mortar or he could get hungry or sleepy and if he's too far from base then could go crazy and either leave or wander off.
On large maps I completely agree, but on tiny maps the sniper solution is rather OP.
unless they outnumber you 30 to 1.
Weird how paradoxially the more 'difficult' a siege becomes, the more easy it is to destroy it, however if they get one complete volley then the carnage at your base is extreme.
Well, I'm on day 250 with Cassandra Classic (no savescumming), and sieges feel like a free metal to me.
I have 8 colonists and 8 mortars. I've never bothered sending my colonists outside the perimeter to break sieges. Few volleys is enough to create chain reaction with exploding mortars, after which the siege consume itself in tantrum spiral.
Quote from: Nibiru1221 on July 15, 2014, 02:16:47 AM
I don't think it's an exploit... Why else have sniper rifles in the game if not to keep at a safe distance to pick off the enemy?
I agree, especially when the enemy is equipped with M-24's and miniguns as well. It isn't a I-win button fire and forget situation to setup snipers, it takes a little effort on the player's part.