It appears that turrets have once again being nerfed to disincentivize the kill box/kill maze play style. I personally don't build turrets or kill boxes but I don't think the solution is to nerf turrets patch after patch.
Players shouldn't have to build killboxes to win nor should kill boxes be the safest, most efficient way to deal with raids. Turret nerfs won't change this until they so nerfed they aren't useable even in kill-box defensive setup, much less a non-killbox one. And even after all that, we'd just left with turretless trap mazes as the next best alternative.
1) Building killboxes can be necessary late-game, depending on the storyteller, the game in general really doesn't like you to be unusually rich, hence modded games tend to face an extreme number of enemies due to the inflated wealth. This is can be unbearable without killboxes. Eliminating this necessity is a prerequisite for other strategies to be fun.
2) Pawns are too precious to risk in combat, they are irreplaceable and your chances of finding a useful one are completely up in the air. This is probably part of the intended experience, but do recognize the problems it causes. If this part of the game is given some leeway, perhaps introduce a universal mercenary system available for everyone with its quirks and drawbacks I know there's a merc mod on the workshop but it's hardly balanced for vanilla.
3)Traps and kill mazes
If you have ever watched anyone play the game, you'd recognize this asinine long winding corridor maze thing filled with traps that dispatch the entire raid with zero player input. The pathing of raider ai will obsessively favor open spaces despite the ridiculously long winding corridor. This should change, make them recognize the existence of doors, make special enemies that could unlock doors or blow up walls, make their behavior unpredictable. Possibly even adding limited sapping(not the obsessive, omnipotent one) behavior to regular raid. Tribals could have hammers which target doors, outlanders could have demoman or something.
4) Sieges
Sieges are pathetic and don't force the player to attack at all. Attackers are forced to build mortar on the spot which means they will always lose the artillery duel. To make things worse I've found I never had to build/research mortars or shells myself as they are supplied by the siege itself. They are literally a weaker standard raid that drops in food, materials, and weapons for you.
I propose make later sieges airdrop pre-constructed mortars that can be installed instantly, uncap the max number of mortars to be above 2 and maybe make the enemy mortars and ammunition rigged to explode when siege fails if that's not enough.
I always joke that if the internet did not exist every player who accumulates enough wealth would eventually discover killboxes on their own, so it is very much something the 'game' makes similar to my other two pet peeves (freezer rooms and non hydroponic greenhouses).
"It feels like cheating but what choice do I have?".
For sure smarter attacks could mean smaller attacks and less dependency on sending a wave of raiders at you. One thing I saw a mod do... and something ants do... is considering a dead raider a 'wall' for a brief amount of time in other words if a raider falls in a trap other raiders avoid that area. Combine this with a behavior that says 'if there is no path, dig a way' and raiders going down a narrow maze of traps would hit one, say 'my path is blocked' and start chipping at the wall until the 'psychological barrier' times out and another raider eats a trap. With raiders digging their way to you you could probably cut the number of them in half and still be threatened... as you say they can turn sapper behavior on and off depending on if there is a path with no make believe dead raider barriers in the way. The idea of some of them having hammers as you say or pick axes or C4 would be nuts.
I love the idea of dropping fully formed mortars and let's be honest... this is what Mechanoids do now as of 'royalty' they drop onto the map ready to rock with their turrets and other goodies. Meanwhile when raiders drop they take all day to set up and even if you do not mortar them you can snipe them really effectively. Personally I've always dreamed of grenade launchers... in between a rocket launcher and a turret, launching grenades from a 'half a map' distance as the rest of the raiders charge towards your defenses.
Maybe the limited sapper behavior should be limited to doors only, currently, there is minimal movement efficiency loss since the player could simply replace every other wall segment with door, ridiculous trap mazes should require careful planning or deal the fact that it would hinder your own colonists as much as the raiders.
Oh wow. That hasn't been my experience with sieges - I find them terribly dangerous. I'm not keen to start an artillery duel - even one shell landing in a base could be disastrous, and if I go fight them, I don't have any of my defenses.
Given I like to play on slightly larger maps, the time the enemy takes building mortars is almost over before I can even get any soldiers there to respond!
No thank you, let them build mortars themselves.
I think in general when we talk about these issues with sieges we forget that the game is balanced around medium maps or something like that. I play on the biggest size maps most of the time too and can tell you that if you decreased the amount of time they took to set up you'd make the sniping response impossible and might even lose people that are far out in the field. Well it would be a different gameplay style for sure than it is now, not saying harder or easier.
Also I find a lot of the times that we players think we need killboxes but we don't, we just have to get more creative and use natural choke points on the maps, build panic rooms or bunkers with med beds and medicine in outlying spots near where miners work or caravans go in and out, putting IEDs around the map, etc. There's many things you can do apart from building killboxes but of course most players will just default to automating even the fights whereas players like me prefer microing the fights and automating the everday life of the colony. When RimWorld is a bit too unrealistic or slow to me I just use mods. I wouldn't expect the developers to cave into what I'm trying to do when they intended me to build a ship ASAP and get off the planet ASAP and everything in the game is supposed to pressure you to do that.
Because of my CPU I use 275x275 Mountain Maps, more is slowing me down to much.
So sieges are mostly ressource drops for me as well. I actually wait until the mortars are build before attacking, then I start sniping the pawns manning the mortars until everybody attacks.
Then I use natural cover and choke points.
I can see the point for killboxes and trapcorridors on flat maps, where there is no natural cover.
And if we are being honest. What else is a medieval castle than a giant killbox filled with trained soldiers and their supply train.
For me, there are two mods that prevent me from using killboxes.
"Embrasures" which prevents the enemy from overrunning me with numbers and I have actual chance to survive a shootout.
and
"More Slaves" through which Slavers have a bigger supply of potential colonists. Not equipped mercenaries but a potential ally you have to invest in.
Quote from: Breadbox on February 28, 2020, 11:56:50 AM
I propose make later sieges airdrop pre-constructed mortars that can be installed instantly, uncap the max number of mortars to be above 2 and maybe make the enemy mortars and ammunition rigged to explode when siege fails if that's not enough.
I agree mortars can be made to be slightly more harder.
Maybe 1 mortar can arrive ready to go and another two + have to be constructed.
If the AI builds the sandbags they normally bring on the right angle, it can be pretty dangerous to take on, especially if a few of the raiders have sniper rifles/ doomsday launchers.
Turrets weren't objectively nerfed in the patch, since they cost less and the market value for them went down.
I've been recently playing a run through on savage difficulty, and mech clusters can be seriously dangerous. Combined with infestations, sappers, and drop pod raids, there is still a bit to be scared about.
I do agree that long winded hallways with traps is cheesing it. Maybe increasing their resource cost, market value, time to set up and decreasing damage is a way to go.
Although keep in mind a lot of players with those intense late game bases have been either playing it at lower difficulty, easier biomes and with OP mods - such as decoys, Embrasures, turrets with no drawbacks, infinitive power sources and turn off events like infestations that challenge them.
--
This is my base after 3 years on savage difficulty. No traps and only one turret in the middle to hold up infestations.
Quote from: LWM on February 28, 2020, 02:06:51 PM
Oh wow. That hasn't been my experience with sieges - I find them terribly dangerous. I'm not keen to start an artillery duel - even one shell landing in a base could be disastrous, and if I go fight them, I don't have any of my defenses.
Given I like to play on slightly larger maps, the time the enemy takes building mortars is almost over before I can even get any soldiers there to respond!
No thank you, let them build mortars themselves.
What is your siege response then? I used to attack the siege position but realized it to be a risk and a big waste of time. Now I just man the mortars and pay no attention.
Maybe I shouldn't have said 'artillery duel' since I rarely ever had the enemy finishes construction of their mortars. If you have incendiary shells, you don't even need more than one mortar.
QuoteTurrets weren't objectively nerfed in the patch, since they cost less and the market value for them went down.
Bruh, turrets have been massively nerfed across the board, mini turrets cost the same, it's damage output is cut by 1/3 and its health 1/6. Auto-cannon(damage and ap halved/more than halved) and Uranium slug are hit even harder.
I think the signal is pretty clear that Tynan doesn't like the turret killboxes, I just personally hope something more interesting could be done because raiders still get funneled too easily.
Quote
Bruh, turrets have been massively nerfed across the board, mini turrets cost the same, it's damage output is cut by 1/3 and its health 1/6. Auto-cannon(damage and ap halved/more than halved) and Uranium slug are hit even harder.
Wasn't the plasteel cost reduced form 60 down to 30 for mini turrets and market value reduced 30%? I think the same changed were done for the other turrets too, so you can afford more of them and raid strength won't be as increased as much as a result?
This is actually the one thing I'm really upset about in the 1.1 update. It's not just a tuning either -- turrets are nerfed into the ground (and I wasn't even aware of the huge drop in HP, which makes it even worse). It quite effectively have removed turrets from the game, as they are pretty much pointless to build now.
As a player that doesn't use wealth control and like to play long games with (eventually) many colonists, this is a death sentence. In the mid or at least late game, it was necessary to have some type of turret and/or killbox defense to survive. Not to automate combat. To survive.
These changes may mean that playing how I prefer is no longer possible. I always detested using heavy wealth control to ensure more manageable raids, and prefered an active (but later on, turret-assisted) defence instead. It was more fun.
If Tynan really wanted to kill killboxes, this may have done it. Unless people want to use 100 traps in there or something.
But believe you me, taking on 40+ centipedes (and however many other mechs arrive) in the open, effectively without turrets, is not going to be a fun experience. Well, if you survive long enough for such raids to be possible that is.
That is why I asked earlier if this was a balancing trick where they first nerf them to the extreme, and then gradually revert the changes. It's all I can hope.
:'(
Quote from: Pangaea on February 29, 2020, 04:21:37 PM
This is actually the one thing I'm really upset about in the 1.1 update. It's not just a tuning either -- turrets are nerfed into the ground (and I wasn't even aware of the huge drop in HP, which makes it even worse). It quite effectively have removed turrets from the game, as they are pretty much pointless to build now.
As a player that doesn't use wealth control and like to play long games with (eventually) many colonists, this is a death sentence. In the mid or at least late game, it was necessary to have some type of turret and/or killbox defense to survive. Not to automate combat. To survive.
These changes may mean that playing how I prefer is no longer possible. I always detested using heavy wealth control to ensure more manageable raids, and prefered an active (but later on, turret-assisted) defence instead. It was more fun.
If Tynan really wanted to kill killboxes, this may have done it. Unless people want to use 100 traps in there or something.
But believe you me, taking on 40+ centipedes (and however many other mechs arrive) in the open, effectively without turrets, is not going to be a fun experience. Well, if you survive long enough for such raids to be possible that is.
That is why I asked earlier if this was a balancing trick where they first nerf them to the extreme, and then gradually revert the changes. It's all I can hope.
:'(
Turrets still have a place, but not as the main mechanism (they never did) to manage raids or other dangers. There's more to life than killboxes....
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Defense_structures
Have fun out there on the Rim.
ok then orbital drops of T-1000 may be the solution for you!!! CALL NOW AT 214-555....
lol, reminded me. The good old hardcoreSK t-800 infiltrators as they would make me sit in the killbox. but to be serious i think you can solve part of this problem by forcing the player to move as a yearly thing due to folds ( as ex ) then the player would have to return to there ruiend base.
or you simply teach the AI not to attack through the killbox which i tried with CE team years ago (while they were implementing the melee system...) and baseded it on zenhier implementation of betterpathfinding back then we notcied the AI becoming "a pussy" so much so if a sniper is trying to push they would all fallback regroup then attack at once just the sniper, thus a raid took more than 2 hours just of us watching them do that. unfortunaly i didn't finish the it and now i'm done my MS i feel i can return to it but god have rimworld changed a lot!!!
The real solution is to make the AI actually have a goal other than "fuck over the player in any way possible."
If they lose all 25 of their guys and one of our guys loses a finger, they win. Any "fixing" of combat that doesn't address that fails to address combat.
If anything, i feel the new turret changes make killboxes more neccessary - with this very overtuned nerf turrets definitely dont cut it anymore in a open defense, they've been struggling before already, especially past early midgame. Im no stranger to using animals and pawns in my fights against raids but when raids are so methodical and only ever come to wholly wipe you off the map (f.e how raiders always will set fire to your base) this isnt something we can allow happening.
Especially since even a single lone raider not being tied up in the fight will likely lose you half your damn base. And trying up 80+ raiders is impossible without a killbox, even before already.
Quote from: 5thHorseman on February 29, 2020, 09:52:53 PM
The real solution is to make the AI actually have a goal other than "fuck over the player in any way possible."
what?
like entertainment as a goal? what mad scientist would make this AI? see my point is confirmed. the only AI suitble for rimworld is a heuristic search AI that would calculate all possible past, current, future events in order to make a suitble decision.
Quote from: 5thHorseman on February 29, 2020, 09:52:53 PM
The real solution is to make the AI actually have a goal other than "fuck over the player in any way possible."
If they lose all 25 of their guys and one of our guys loses a finger, they win. Any "fixing" of combat that doesn't address that fails to address combat.
By goal do you mean purpose or victory condition? I bet you half the players, including me, don't know what winning is in RimWorld either. Good luck trying to define it for raiders.
Joking aside, there's mods out there that fix raider AI slightly but you and everyone else out there including really smart people all understand that we're not talking about how people would react - but sadly - our limitations are how bits and bytes react. I think is where RimWorld breaks down as a colony simulator (because they all do, they can't fix the lack of AI having a singularity - not that it ever will but that's a tangent).
No guys, the only thing that will fix the stupid aspect of RimWorld is when the game has a modded or official working player versus player mode where the goal is to wipe out the other guy's colony.
Isn't this like the oldest debate in computer science too by the way? You guys looking for the holy grail of AI fighting people are looking for something that's not real and never will be real. The real action is when players fight.
Also keep in mind huge raider counts are because of massive accumulated wealth... I just finished the game (year 6, hosted the emperor) and I was seeing raids of like 20 (from various directions) for my endgame fights.
The 4 imperial guardsmen and my various shooters where enough, with help from mortars and land mines placed 'along paths' that sometimes they hit, usually they do not. I also had turrets. They... distract enemies sometimes.
I feel like the killbox would only be needed had I mined out my entire maps resources or if they ever ad some more endgame foes like you see in mods (power armored pirates, massive mechanoids).
This is a game from 1.0, with a killbox that some detest. After dying many times without one, I ended up concluding it was a necessity. At least for how I prefer to play the games.
And honestly, taking on something like this in the open (and remember this is a fairly normal-sized raid/ship, it's not a one-off, and same with the 200+ tribals).
We still suffered heavy damages, one person died, and from what I recall 7-8 others were incapacitated and I had a couple of people trying to frantically get them into hospital and fix them up before they bled out. It was total chaos. But because we had turret support (until everything blew up from the ~15 inferno cannons), it was possible to survive.
But for all I know, Tynan also detests stuff like this, and wanted it gone. Who knows. But I liked to be able to play long games like this, and take on colossal raids :'(
Quote from: RicRider on March 01, 2020, 08:03:56 AM
Quote from: 5thHorseman on February 29, 2020, 09:52:53 PM
The real solution is to make the AI actually have a goal other than "fuck over the player in any way possible."
If they lose all 25 of their guys and one of our guys loses a finger, they win. Any "fixing" of combat that doesn't address that fails to address combat.
By goal do you mean purpose or victory condition? I bet you half the players, including me, don't know what winning is in RimWorld either. Good luck trying to define it for raiders.
Joking aside, there's mods out there that fix raider AI slightly but you and everyone else out there including really smart people all understand that we're not talking about how people would react - but sadly - our limitations are how bits and bytes react. I think is where RimWorld breaks down as a colony simulator (because they all do, they can't fix the lack of AI having a singularity - not that it ever will but that's a tangent).
No guys, the only thing that will fix the stupid aspect of RimWorld is when the game has a modded or official working player versus player mode where the goal is to wipe out the other guy's colony.
Isn't this like the oldest debate in computer science too by the way? You guys looking for the holy grail of AI fighting people are looking for something that's not real and never will be real. The real action is when players fight.
Hmmm. holy grail isn't, however the foundation of AI in this game for combat is good but rather weak. consider this: balancing is a purely statistical thing based experiments and results as in you would monitor the stats and periodically automatically adjusts the balance. the goal of a rimworld raid is easy to define because a raid is only one battle in a war...
i'm planning on working on a new AI for combat and would appreciate some help due to the fact i'm kinda rusty when it come to moding after 4 years of python only data science research.
tbh the AI should be able to build and maintain an attack base in every raid no only for sieges.
so no it's hard but not that hard.
Quote from: Karim666 on March 01, 2020, 12:03:23 PM
Hmmm. holy grail isn't, however the foundation of AI in this game for combat is good but rather weak. consider this: balancing is a purely statistical thing based experiments and results as in you would monitor the stats and periodically automatically adjusts the balance. the goal of a rimworld raid is easy to define because a raid is only one battle in a war...
I don't really understand your first paragraph. I think what you're saying is that game balance is achieved by looking at stats (from players I assume) and adjusting balance accordingly, but while that sounds good on paper, what does that actually mean? Can you explain in another way?
Quote from: Karim666 on March 01, 2020, 12:03:23 PM
i'm planning on working on a new AI for combat and would appreciate some help due to the fact i'm kinda rusty when it come to moding after 4 years of python only data science research.
tbh the AI should be able to build and maintain an attack base in every raid no only for sieges.
so no it's hard but not that hard.
I definitely don't know anything about coding so can't help you there, but what I can tell you is that if your goal is to make an AI that can build and maintain sieges then that's a pretty good goal and I'd download that mod. What makes people like me download mods is partly how realistic they are and also how good they are at making me feel like I'm not interacting with a computer, but in a way interacting with my own intelligence... if that makes sense without sounding too pretentious? My point is playing RimWorld single player is a bit like playing chess against a computer. We kind of expect to lose but not because the machine is expected to be smart since it's just a dumb toaster but because we've artificially raised the difficulty through hit points, endurance, injuries, other mechanics, whatever. We're not even trying to make the AI smarter, just create the illusion that it is.
Quote from: Karim666 on March 01, 2020, 12:03:23 PM
i'm planning on working on a new AI for combat and would appreciate some help due to the fact i'm kinda rusty when it come to moding after 4 years of python only data science research.
This. You are doing God's work.
Killboxes work, and are necessary to use on high difficulty or ballooned wealth, because the AI takes no precautions against them. Mechs always fall for it. Sapper raids are a small improvement, but even then you can use troops to lure part or all of the raiders to the killbox.
A human player, even if they couldn't visibly see deadfalls or IEDs, would know to avoid obvious restricted corridors, kill zones faced by sandbag bunkers and turret fields of fire. They would see the wall and turret layout, lol, then attack everywhere
but the killbox. Even with fog of war or restricted LOS (which the player doesn't have to deal with, so I don't see why the raiders would), a human player could still guess where the kill box is as they advance and explore.
And if the core of a colony is too well defended in general, a human raider would just burn undefended crops and structures, or plink at vulnerable exterior features from a distance. No reason to go zerg rush right away.
Then there's the option to simply withdraw if the colony is not vulnerable enough to attack. Maybe come back when the colony catches plague.
If the AI could plan attacks like a player, killboxes would be dead.
Quote from: RicRider on March 01, 2020, 08:03:56 AM
Quote from: 5thHorseman on February 29, 2020, 09:52:53 PM
The real solution is to make the AI actually have a goal other than "fuck over the player in any way possible."
If they lose all 25 of their guys and one of our guys loses a finger, they win. Any "fixing" of combat that doesn't address that fails to address combat.
By goal do you mean purpose or victory condition?
Of the fight, yes.
If you drop podded in to an enemy base with the intent to ransack it, and saw that it had more mortars than you had people, and they could easily man those mortars and defend their walls, you'd probably run. At least, I would. Even if I saw that I could mine through a bedroom wall in order to set the bed on fire.
The AI? Nope that bed's a burnin' folks, I don't care that your sister just got shredded by a shell get in there you maggot.
THAT is what makes kill boxes not just useful, but necessary.
As to how to do it? I don't know. I don't care. It's not my game and I'm not even a programmer. But until the game continues to send wave after wave of tribals to die just so they can hopefully cause an infectious scratch on one of my colonists (which will then of course cause havoc when the doctor decides it's more important to play horeshoes instead of treat them, or go on an 18 day food binge when I try to force the treatment) I'll be trying to find ways to siphon them through a zone of assured death.
I never understood what's so bad in killboxes. To me they are necessary evil (though can you really call it evil if players like them?), especially for late game which doesn't scale very well with your wealth.
I mean, in late game an usual pawn will face impossible odds, so the only way is to use some form of prepared defenses.
On top of all that building and maintaining killbox takes resources, time and serious planning. Even in 1.0 my killboxes were often overwhelmed by enemies (perhaps I suck at building them) and all those nerfs just feel really unnecessary.
Unless tynan wants rimworld to be project zomboid type of game, in which you only play to eventually die and you only play to discover how will it happen.
Quote from: FTR on March 02, 2020, 02:21:17 PM
I never understood what's so bad in killboxes. To me they are necessary evil (though can you really call it evil if players like them?), especially for late game which doesn't scale very well with your wealth.
I mean, in late game an usual pawn will face impossible odds, so the only way is to use some form of prepared defenses.
On top of all that building and maintaining killbox takes resources, time and serious planning. Even in 1.0 my killboxes were often overwhelmed by enemies (perhaps I suck at building them) and all those nerfs just feel really unnecessary.
Unless tynan wants rimworld to be project zomboid type of game, in which you only play to eventually die and you only play to discover how will it happen.
To be fair, it's been stated that it is a game that if you keep going you will lose. The entire game is built around land, build, research, build ship, and leave. ideally all in about three years or so. Going beyond that is a bit like going to the far lands in minecraft: It works, but the numbers get wonky. I usually don't even build a ship, I like to play colonys as long as I can, and it does become pretty obvious that beyond a certain wealth, beyond a certain age, beyond a certain population, the game has no idea what to do. it just continues scaling the only way it knows how which eventually results in the entire world landing in your base to wipe you out. There are mods you can use to help mitigate that, but that's the foundation of the game right there.
Quote from: ShadowKatt on March 02, 2020, 03:17:53 PMI usually don't even build a ship, I like to play colonys as long as I can, and it does become pretty obvious that beyond a certain wealth, beyond a certain age, beyond a certain population, the game has no idea what to do. it just continues scaling the only way it knows how which eventually results in the entire world landing in your base to wipe you out. There are mods you can use to help mitigate that, but that's the foundation of the game right there.
That's exactly what I am thinking, I couldn't describe it better myself. I am playing in the similar fashion. I DO eventually leave, but before I do I really want to enjoy my colony and beat every possible challenge and maybe later on, eventually leave. I hate rushing my games and I feel like unfortunately rimworld puts you on the timer to leave the planet or bad late game scaling will ruin you.
I wish there would be some endless mode or pseudo-endless mode in which main goal isn't to leave but to conquer the planet or something.
Not even sure OP and I are playing the same game.
Every time I try to make killboxes the AI seems to pick up on it and send nothing but sappers and sieges my way. I eventually end up with so many holes hastily half-patched in my walls that I give up and just open everything up and start fighting alongside the turrets. Putting colonists behind solid cover in carefully picked places and having an open strategy
If anything I find it especially annoying that the AI doesn't have to deal with fog of war over any hidden areas. I can't recall how many times I thought I was being super-safe digging deep into a mountain only to have the AI drop in the valley next door and after digging 2 or 3 blocks open up a huge network of tunnels that leads them right next to my storage area.
It's always the damn storage area.....
Or mechanoids hot-dropping directly into my kitchen...