I've just had another death to "hunting fever". And i've got to say i'm slightly annoyed by how stupid the colonists are at times.
I know this is probably hard or impossible, but something needs to happen to prevent colonists from shooting other colonists.
You see, i'm noticing that i'm short on meat for meals, so the next thing I do is order some hunts... Guess what, colonist A grabs his pistol, walks two meters and proceeds to shot the animal from a distance even snipers would have trouble shooting it. Fine and all, it takes ages to kill it because he misses 99% of his shots but whatever. Now comes colonist B, my crafter, walking by, whistling, thinking nothing bad and just doing his job getting rocks to make stone blocks. Colonist A sees him walking right into his line of fire thinking: "Meh, whatever I won't hit him anyways." Colonist A shoots another shot at the exact moment colonist B walks into his line of fire. Guess what? Half a second later, Colonist B lies on the ground brains splattered around and a patch of blood expanding around his corpse.
So in the aftermath: My hunter is still trying to kill the god damn animal like nothing happened. I lost my crafter because the AI is stupid when it comes to hunting.
Point is: Something needs to happen... Colonists being invulnerable to friendly fire, or the more elegant way: tell the AI to stop shooting if a friendly crosses its line of fire. This gets me frustrated to no end. :-\
I really love the game, but some small things are just frustrating. Anyways, thanks for the great game!
I think that the real problem is that any pawn between a shot and a target will get hit more times than not.
Even blind colonists can be very deadly with M-24s if you tell them to aim at something/someone behind your actual target, as the pawn in between will act as a super-magnet and attract the bullet.
Example:
B-----Cx-----A
Whereas A = shooter, B = intended target, C = random animal passing by, and x = point of impact. (--- = anticipated bullet path)
I see a two-fold solution to a two-fold problem.
The 1st problem is of course the innocents getting in the way. The game really should draw an invisible safe zone, a corridor, between the hunter and the target animal. It could be 5 squares wide. Colonists should not be allowed to traverse that corridor. First, a straight line is drawn from the hunter to the animal. The software decides which squares are touched by this line. Now we have (more or less) a 1 square wide corridor, a forbidden zone. From there, we tell the software to widen the corridor, let's say 2 squares to each direction, resulting in a 5-square wide no-go zone. The resulting corridor gets updated as the target or the hunter moves.
The 2nd problem is the ridiculous amount of bullets that fly before the game animal dies. That's in utter and complete contrast to the reality. IRL any humane hunter intends to kill with one shot, or sometimes several hunters fire their rifles simultaneously if it's a bigger animal, like a moose. It's no wonder that RimWorld sees such a massive amount of hunting accidents. Hunting definitely needs tweaking. It's highly risky and unrealiable as an automated task, and requires babysitting. I never assign automated hunters, not even one. I do all my RimWorld hunting manually.
Automated hunters could have, for example, doubled or tripled aiming times, and weapon damages against animals. They should never fire their guns from the max distance, but instead pick the halfway spot.
Another solution would be to let the player assign a hunting spot for the hunter. When the hunter arrives at that spot, he would start shooting at any and all animals that enter his weapon's range. Colonists should avoid that kill circle as much as possible. Alternatively, the hunter should avoid firing his weapon if there's a fellow colonist within 10 square radius of the target animal.
Yet another solution would be to let go of automated hunting altogether, and switch to traps.
You should try equipping your hunter with a melee weapon instead, if he's good enough and has enough armour he won't get hurt too badly, and he won't be taking potshots from across the map
Quote from: DaveStrider on October 19, 2014, 09:40:53 AM
You should try equipping your hunter with a melee weapon instead, if he's good enough and has enough armour he won't get hurt too badly, and he won't be taking potshots from across the map
Quote from: Lost Cause on October 16, 2014, 11:19:10 AMI gave the guy the full power armour, hyperwave clothing under that, two bionic claws, two bionic legs and he had 11 points of melee skill yet he lost and was killed outright in a one on one fight with a raging monkey.
Don't Use Melee XD
The problem with melee attacking animals is that with the new damage model, even a squirrel can kill a fully armored hunter in one hit if you are unlucky. Or bite an eye out.. I once had a squirrel outright bite through the skull and destroying the brain of one of my colonists if I remember correctly. So I try to avoid melee as much as i can.
my guy managed to level his melee form lvl 3 to lvl 10 just from hunting, i guess he just had a lot of luck. (for the record he had 2 mechanoid blade arms, bionic legs and eyes, and full power armour + devilstrand undies)
Whatever starting colonist I have that is going to be my hunter always gets the starting rifle. I don't think I have ever had one hunting accident but I would agree that colonists that are not drafted should have some type of danger avoidance. Specifically when I'm letting my turrets take care of a small raiding party and several of my people decide to repair all the sandbags in the middle of a firefight, getting killed in the process.
Not hunting on your doorstep is also an option.
I once gave a Minigun to my hunter. Oooh, he shooted too many colonist with his gun :) He even destroyed buildings in his way!
So I give all my hunters just a pistol. They shoot pretty good with it, maybe need like 5 or 6 shoots to kill, and they dont kill any colonists anymore.
I always select one animal from a herd to be hunted down, then I select another far away from the first and so on. Animals close to the colony are best killed by turret force-attack.
This happens often when I have multiple hunters and multiple hunting targets.
This has happened so many times with my sniper that I quit hunting animals.
Thanks,
EBrown
You could try hunting farther away from your colony, brilliant idea I know.
----
......ok..ok..maybe that was a bit harsh....
For giggles, I gave my Hunter a minigun. As for the order: hunt that one deer across the map. I had food for days. After watching the show of spray and pray, I gave him his m24 back.
When I do hunt in the front-yard, the hunter is drafted. That way I can micro manage him.
I typically have just one pawn hunting, which brings in plenty of food and minimizes accidents. However, what's really hilarious is when a squirrel is shot to death in the middle of a pitched sniper battle, just because it was standing in the middle. It must freak the little people out when they realize they live in a strictly 2-dimensional world.
I do think there needs to be some way to prevent friendly fire, though. Accidents happen, but sensible people can still generally stop themselves from shooting each other when they're on the same side.
I just have 1 Guy hunt quite far away from my colony.
Its ironically funny though when you watch a sniper bullet fly across the map and hit one of your colonists, its that moment of panic what kicks in as you try to draft the hunter as fast as you can before he takes everyone out.
I gave a hunter an M16 moments before a travelling party from an (friendly till then) group of Outlanders decided to come for a visit. And of COURSE they had to spawn in the group of deer currently getting hunted. Funny thing is my hunter managed to kill 3 of them before killing the deer, than walked up to the corpse of the deer (while under fire from the 2 surviving visitors), grab the corpse and walk back to the base like nothing ever happened. And he only got one bullet in an arm. I was so amazed to watch this that I did not even draft him (okay i planned to let him die in the retaliation fire for his own stupidity).
Still I would wholeheartedly agree! The AI needs a friend / foe safety while hunting.
In a firefight during an assault this could be tricky interesting as well because the worst injuries are from my colonists shooting at flanking melee attackers.
Schematic:
xABx E
xxxx
x= Sandbags
A= Colonist A (Aiming at E)
B= Colonist B (getting a Shootgun load from A into the back)
E= Tribe Attacker with a club charging the funny people hurting themselves with the boomsticks
I really wish the AI would realize that the shortest way (through the brains of a colonymember) is not the best way to shoot an attacker.
Quote from: Aerouge on October 20, 2014, 09:12:18 AM
Schematic:
xABx E
xxxx
x= Sandbags
A= Colonist A (Aiming at E)
B= Colonist B (getting a Shootgun load from A into the back)
E= Tribe Attacker with a club charging the funny people hurting themselves with the boomsticks
I really wish the AI would realize that the shortest way (through the brains of a colonymember) is not the best way to shoot an attacker.
In this instance you need to be sorting out your positioning of the drafted colonists to avoid it if an enemy makes it close to you shooters.
Quote from: Thorin on October 20, 2014, 03:21:19 AMWhen I do hunt in the front-yard, the hunter is drafted. That way I can micro manage him.
I think that's one of my few complaints about Rimworld, that the combat/shooting has to be so micromanaged. Turrets spewing out bullets? Sure seems like a great time to sweep in front of them.
Wouldn't it be nice to just disable friendly fire during hunting at least? Or maybe it's enabled because hunting accidents make the game tell better stories? :-\
The best strategy seems to be limiting the number of hunters in addition to not hunting in high-traffic areas. An AI that's a little more friendly fire savvy would be nice, though.
I am against any specific disabling of friendly fire for hunting, I don't see a reason that it should be treated differentiate from any other type of combat.
That being said the whole AI system could do with some changes to make pawns smarter,
From not walking into the line of fire to avoiding killboxes.
I would prefer a simple friendly check before firing. A pawn should scan all available targets before firing, choose which has the highest hit %, and then scan for a friendly between themselves and the target. If a friendly is found, they could choose the next highest target and again check. If no targets exist without interference, they could just aim but not fire until the obstruction has moved. I've had a lot of friendly fire incidents not just involving hunting, but also with the tribals who's most powerful tactic is the lemming-like charge which often results in so much more damage from friendly fire than their clubs.
In case Ty is watching this thread, I don't want to sound too much of a backseat developer here. I don't code and from what little I know, it's a nightmare to implement even the smallest of fixes if you're adding in something entirely new, not modifying something already built.. but I really do feel that before this game goes live, there should be some improvement in pawn A.I. They work perfectly fine for now while 90% of us understand Early Access (and let's be honest here, Rimworld's early access is so much better than some games that have fully released..), but I think a little work to make sure that our colonists aren't accidentally murdering each other would go a long way in quality control.
Quote from: EscapeZeppelin on October 20, 2014, 03:58:03 PM
I think that's one of my few complaints about Rimworld, that the combat/shooting has to be so micromanaged. Turrets spewing out bullets? Sure seems like a great time to sweep in front of them.
Apparently we have a bit of a different taste ;D That's just one of the reasons I do love it.
Hey miner, you're going to bed, no problems with that,. but do take some metal back with you. You grower, the same for you to.. haul some stuff back when done.
Keeps me a bit more actively involved with the game, like an overseer.