In 0.19 traps are much more deadly but they break after a single use. This seems like a decent compromise on the face of it, but in my experience it almost completely negates the use of anything other than wooden traps, and even then this is very difficult on maps with short growing seasons or no natural tree spawn.
The reason is that traps require 30 resources to construct, just under half of their former cost. In a typical raid I will lose upwards of 10 wooden traps, which means at least 300 wood to replace them, or the full harvest of 10 typical trees (pine, birch, poplar). This happens every few game days, resulting in an insanely heavy demand for wood. In my unstable playthrough starting a week or so ago, I managed to completely denude my large boreal forest map in the first year - there were no harvestable trees remaining! Fortunately it appears that natural tree spawn was buffed in the past few days as my map in year 3 is now repopulated (year 2 it remained largely desolate). Nevertheless the time investment in chopping trees and rebuilding traps remains prohibitive - I typically barely have a chance to rebuild before the next attack comes along.
While wooden traps are a struggle to use, I cannot imagine how anyone could support the consumption of 300 steel or 300 stone blocks every few game days. The resource cost for even a modest trap use is just staggering! IMO this is far too heavy of a nerf to trap usage. My suggestion would be for traps to have a chance to break on use which averages at say 3 uses per trap. Thus a typical trap would cost 10 resources, which is still a heavy load but not unbearable.
Thoughts?
Well first it's important to have the right expectation of what traps *should* be capable of. It sounds like you think you should be able to just mass traps indefinitely and defeat every threat that way, regardless of wood availability, regardless of mineral availability. Now you're finding this is cost-prohibitive and feel that it's a problem with the game.
However, the design goal isn't that you should be able to defeat every threat just by massing traps regardless of situations. If you're trying to do that, and finding it cost-prohibitive, it sounds like everything is working as intended.
Overall the goal is for the game to have variety - of necessary tools, of strategies between different resource availabilities and game phases and threat types, of threats and goals. Traps are supposed to be one tool in the toolbox, not a total answer by themselves. Also, we want different biomes to feel different, not the same, so if traps are much more or less useful in different biomes/mineral conditions, that's a design success. If massing traps was a total solution everywhere at all times, the game would have much less variety.
So use traps as appropriate, but don't expect to win just by spamming them everywhere. It won't work; you need to use a variety of tools and a more complex strategy. Mix in some use of turrets and soldiers; use traps for key areas, emergency situations, fallback positions. Try burn boxes, killboxes. Call allies if you need to, or send some attack animals, or use IED traps in other circumstances. Launch some artillery and have a superweapon or two on hand if things get really bad.
The thing is...spamming stone traps is still super effective. My two-tile-wide corridor of death is still killing raiders left and right. I picked stone because I am playing on a desert biome. If I were playing on a temperate forest, I imagine I would just mass wooden traps everywhere ;P
I know, Tynan, I know...You thought you outsmarted us
I find a corridor with wooden traps followed by stone traps to be quite effective. The wooden traps tend to nab the small animals that just wander in, and usually also get the first few raiders though it takes several traps per raider. Anybody who can get through the wooden traps deserves the greater damage output of the stone traps.
Quote from: Tynan on August 29, 2018, 07:54:27 PM
Thank you for your response Tynan. The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate? My figures are based around losing 10 traps in a fight, which I deem a very small number of traps, yet still requires an exorbitant amount of resources and maintenance even if made from wood. It seems to me that you feel that losing 2 or 3 traps per fight is more appropriate, which suggests an extremely sparse scattering of traps. At this point, why bother?
Quote from: giltirn on August 29, 2018, 10:49:19 PM
The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate?
I guess the answer is however many will stave off that amount of loss of another - more valuable - resource.
How many traps is a person's arm worth? Or their life? Or the medicine to fix them? Or the serum to grow back their leg? Or the bionic leg? Etc.
For me the answer is all the traps it takes. I spam them and am happy to use wood instead of plasteel and advanced components to fix up my people. Then I have turrets and sandbags to further weigh the odds in my favor.
Quote from: 5thHorseman on August 30, 2018, 12:22:09 AM
Quote from: giltirn on August 29, 2018, 10:49:19 PM
The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate?
I guess the answer is however many will stave off that amount of loss of another - more valuable - resource.
How many traps is a person's arm worth? Or their life? Or the medicine to fix them? Or the serum to grow back their leg? Or the bionic leg? Etc.
For me the answer is all the traps it takes. I spam them and am happy to use wood instead of plasteel and advanced components to fix up my people. Then I have turrets and sandbags to further weigh the odds in my favor.
I spam them too, but then end up getting sucked into a black-hole of wood chopping and trap rebuilding. It's a slow and subtle death of a colony - what some might call a noob trap. Experienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 12:46:24 AM
I spam them too, but then end up getting sucked into a black-hole of wood chopping and trap rebuilding. It's a slow and subtle death of a colony - what some might call a noob trap. Experienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.
Just up and move your colony after a few years. Fresh place and fresh resources.
They're best used inside the base, against drops, in the least intuitive places possible. In hallways, inside bedrooms, outside bedrooms, in workshops, etc.
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 12:46:24 AMExperienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.
You seem to say that because they aren't a total solution, nobody ever has any reason to use them ever. It's not a valid inference.
In reality it's in between, as it should be: Useful sometimes, less useful other times, based on circumstances and strategy. Not a total solution; not totally useless. I look forward to seeing how the metagame works out as players get experience with them.
As 5H noted, I suspect they're still OP if used optimally, but so many RW strategies are.
Thought I'd just chime in here - My last playthrough was on Medium because I had the flu (which was kicking my ass for 3 weeks straight) , 85% of all threats were trivially crushed by wooden traps on a temperate map with standard winters.
It took ~3 years before I seriously considered using any form of defense other than wooden traps and a basic U shaped wall with an entire cardinal direction left completely open.
I was sick as a dog and barely capable of coherent thought and I very nearly experienced boredom in my delirious state because traps were removing almost all of the combat from the game.
Now, I've had a lot of experience playing at higher difficulties - Traps are less effective when enemy density increases and resources/opportunity cost are tighter. But "less" is -rather obviously- a relative term. They have their place in a well rounded defense and can be used in a variety of creative ways unique to them to negate threats varying from sieges to drop pods.
Traps are useful in their current state. Steel traps quite expensive if used incorrectly, they're not always appropriate. Are they still located in key locations in my bases because damage density is worth the aforementioned cost? Yes.
Can you shoot yourself in the foot by splurging all your resources into terribly placed traps? Absolutely. But you could say that of literally anything.
In my experience traps are still redicously OP in B19 on forest biomes. It takes a day of work of a tree cuter and a construction guy to make a defense that makes all mid game raids in any difficulty trivial. And I'm not even talking about trap corridors, which feel cheesy, it's enough to just build a lot of traps on corners and across walls of your buildings or natural hills and then just run in circles untill the raid is grinded. It doesn't even feel cheesy, just unballanced. The strategy would be still OP even with old trap costs, it will became not spammable I guess at level of 1.5 of old trap cost.
I have to restrict myself to not use this strategy, because, like killboxes, it kills fun, but I prefer to be restricted by game rules, not my own will, because overcoming restrictions posed by a game is enjoyable. I'll probably nerf the traps with a custom mod on my next run.
Randy Merciless, NB runs, B19, only interface mods, Temperate forest with nerfed animal spawn and crop yilds
I like the traps but use them as last line of defence between my pawns and the enemy. When someone comes near my sandsacks the traps hopefully stop him.
In the beginning i had only some traps at importand points. Then i build more and more. Yeah, i had to buy wood sometimes but more for my artists.
Now large parts of my wood traps get destroyed when a turret get destroyed but thats the price to pay.
I think it is okay and i like to use them.
I think traps are pretty much balanced. They provide a strong effect on high ressource cost with low maintenance.
What I don't like is that they don't have any synergy with anything. Worst case looks like this: colonist shoots at attacker. arm get hit to 15/35 health. Attacker takes cover, cover had a wooden trap placed. Bam, arm get reduced to -35/35. Now all 'preparation' the colonist did is lost. Would have been no difference if there was just the trap alone.
My current defense is an S-shaped corridor. In the first row, colonist defend and retreat through doors. in the second are traps only and in the third are the colonists and towers again.
It would be great if traps would be used to soften enemy, not kill them outright. This would counter the current situation where traps are better to be used stacked in a row with no interruption.
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 12:46:24 AM
Quote from: 5thHorseman on August 30, 2018, 12:22:09 AM
Quote from: giltirn on August 29, 2018, 10:49:19 PM
The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate?
I guess the answer is however many will stave off that amount of loss of another - more valuable - resource.
How many traps is a person's arm worth? Or their life? Or the medicine to fix them? Or the serum to grow back their leg? Or the bionic leg? Etc.
For me the answer is all the traps it takes. I spam them and am happy to use wood instead of plasteel and advanced components to fix up my people. Then I have turrets and sandbags to further weigh the odds in my favor.
I spam them too, but then end up getting sucked into a black-hole of wood chopping and trap rebuilding. It's a slow and subtle death of a colony - what some might call a noob trap. Experienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.
You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.
Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.
There's always going to be a cost for each fight. That cost can be in many different forms: materials for traps, medicine for injuries, time/food for animals, materials for bionics, etc. Traps and turrets used to have no upkeep cost and they were rightfully nerfed.
Quote from: Tynan on August 30, 2018, 02:27:12 AM
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 12:46:24 AMExperienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.
You seem to say that because they aren't a total solution, nobody ever has any reason to use them ever. It's not a valid inference.
In reality it's in between, as it should be: Useful sometimes, less useful other times, based on circumstances and strategy. Not a total solution; not totally useless. I look forward to seeing how the metagame works out as players get experience with them.
As 5H noted, I suspect they're still OP if used optimally, but so many RW strategies are.
I have something like 350 hours in Rimworld and so would consider myself an experienced player. The attraction of traps is that they use renewable resource, unlike any other defense in the game. If your colony relies upon IEDs, turrets and mortars you will quickly reach a point where you are entirely dependent upon external sources of steel and components. Unfortunately there are no reliable sources of these resources; bulk goods traders are few and far between, leaving mining colonies or settlement trading as your only real options. Both of these options come with a number of severe downsides including the need to maintain a significant number of pack animals, lots of micromanagement either in the generation of trade goods or in controlling your miners, plus extended periods when your base is heavily undermanned and vulnerable.
Edit: As to the metagame it seems obvious to me that it will inevitably lead to two groups of people: those who use traps only as last-ditch defenses behind their front lines, in which case they will rarely ever see action, or those like myself who will end up shackled to the trap economy.
Quote from: Firestonezz on August 30, 2018, 11:13:00 AM
You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.
Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.
Have you tried growing trees in 0.19? I have. On my boreal forest I set out a tree farm in year one when wood became an issue. Unfortunately because of the short growing period, the very long planting time (a lovely 0.19 mega-nerf) and the fact that you can only plant in growing season meant that I could only seed the field towards the end of the growing period in year 2. I'm on year 4 now and the trees still have not reached a harvestable state. Put it this way: even the best tree generates 1.15 wood per day of its growing season. For a mild-ish map with say 25 days of growing period, that is 29 wood per year per tree. If I need 300 wood every, say, 7 days, that means 43 wood per day or 2600 wood per year. Thus I would need to be planting and maintaining something like 100 trees or more!
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 11:29:19 AM
Quote from: Firestonezz on August 30, 2018, 11:13:00 AM
You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.
Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.
Have you tried growing trees in 0.19? I have. On my boreal forest I set out a tree farm in year one when wood became an issue. Unfortunately because of the short growing period, the very long planting time (a lovely 0.19 mega-nerf) and the fact that you can only plant in growing season meant that I could only seed the field towards the end of the growing period in year 2. I'm on year 4 now and the trees still have not reached a harvestable state. Put it this way: even the best tree generates 1.15 wood per day of its growing season. For a mild-ish map with say 25 days of growing period, that is 29 wood per year per tree. If I need 300 wood every, say, 7 days, that means 43 wood per day or 2600 wood per year. Thus I would need to be planting and maintaining something like 100 trees or more!
Don't rely on a single source then; use trading, caravans, naturally-growing trees, and tree farms together.
Also, this doesn't change the fact that you can use other materials to build traps when wood resources get low. I substituted in stone/steel traps for my colony when I was running low on wood until I was able to stock up again by waiting for tree growth, caravaning to farm other tiles, and calling in traders to buy wood.
For what it's worth, I've been finding traps to be in a pretty good spot right now. Early/early-mid game, some well placed traps have either entirely defeated or greatly thinned out raids for me, so at that point they're more than worth the investment. Then as I research turrets, get better weapons and armor, etc. I am able to transition to other defense strategies and use traps more sparingly at certain strategic points, so that the total resource investment into traps never really increases throughout the game, but they still remain useful. I guess, as Tynan said, it really comes down to how you are trying/expecting to use them. Overall, though, I think traps are very useful and not OP (or I'm just not smart enough to use them in way that they're OP). So it seems like they're at least somewhere around the balance sweet spot.
Quote from: Firestonezz on August 30, 2018, 01:15:37 PM
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 11:29:19 AM
Quote from: Firestonezz on August 30, 2018, 11:13:00 AM
You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.
Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.
Have you tried growing trees in 0.19? I have. On my boreal forest I set out a tree farm in year one when wood became an issue. Unfortunately because of the short growing period, the very long planting time (a lovely 0.19 mega-nerf) and the fact that you can only plant in growing season meant that I could only seed the field towards the end of the growing period in year 2. I'm on year 4 now and the trees still have not reached a harvestable state. Put it this way: even the best tree generates 1.15 wood per day of its growing season. For a mild-ish map with say 25 days of growing period, that is 29 wood per year per tree. If I need 300 wood every, say, 7 days, that means 43 wood per day or 2600 wood per year. Thus I would need to be planting and maintaining something like 100 trees or more!
Don't rely on a single source then; use trading, caravans, naturally-growing trees, and tree farms together.
Also, this doesn't change the fact that you can use other materials to build traps when wood resources get low. I substituted in stone/steel traps for my colony when I was running low on wood until I was able to stock up again by waiting for tree growth, caravaning to farm other tiles, and calling in traders to buy wood.
Your strategy remains only practical for very small scale trap use. I doubt even the most caravan-happy player could sustain a loss of 300 of any combination of wood, steel or stone blocks every few days in perpetuity. The number is just too large. 300 steel is just over 8.5 tiles of steel. 300 stone blocks is 15 stone chunks. 300 wood is 10 trees. What I've been trying to communicate this whole thread is that the trap cost is just too high for sustainable use at what I consider a reasonable level of losing 10 traps per attack. Even losing 3 traps per fight the number is too high.
In contrast a turret needs rearming with 40 steel every 120 shots, i.e. the cost of 1.3 traps to do 1320 cumulative damage (11 damage per shot), something like 10x or 20x more damage per unit resource. If traps are given such a nerf then IMO turrets should also be nerfed as well!
The defense changes in .19 make it so the trap corridor of death strategy no longer works. For me they've been working fine as part of a layer of defenses. 300 wood by the time you're getting raids that have 10 traps triggered shouldn't be too expensive, that's approximately the cost of setting up a new bedroom for a pawn. For me the cost is approximately 2 pawn days of work to chop trees and reinstall the traps. Obviously this is biome dependent as to how available the resources are.
A direct comparison to turrets seems like an apples to oranges comparison. Turrets have a larger up front cost to build, maintenance issues (power/batteries/breakdowns/etc.), and can catastrophically explode if things go wrong possibly including other turrets if placed too close together.
Quote from: mindlar on August 30, 2018, 03:28:59 PM
The defense changes in .19 make it so the trap corridor of death strategy no longer works. For me they've been working fine as part of a layer of defenses. 300 wood by the time you're getting raids that have 10 traps triggered shouldn't be too expensive, that's approximately the cost of setting up a new bedroom for a pawn. For me the cost is approximately 2 pawn days of work to chop trees and reinstall the traps. Obviously this is biome dependent as to how available the resources are.
A direct comparison to turrets seems like an apples to oranges comparison. Turrets have a larger up front cost to build, maintenance issues (power/batteries/breakdowns/etc.), and can catastrophically explode if things go wrong possibly including other turrets if placed too close together.
Well you don't need to set up a new bedroom every 5 days; comparing the ongoing cost of traps to the one-off cost of furniture really is an apples to oranges comparison. OTOH it makes perfect sense to compare two components of the varied defense strategy that Tynan wishes us to adopt. A turret costs 100 steel + 3 components (which can be crafted for a further 36 steel), i.e. the cost of 4.5 steel traps. Maybe you lose one turret every couple of raids so lets say your entire killbox's worth of turrets costs only say 2 traps worth of resources as an ongoing cost. And unlike traps this cost is reduced if you have more turrets!
Small scale is how this game is intended to be played as raid point scaling has a component which is effectively represented by wealth^2.
It's not just traps, practically every fair defense loses effectiveness as enemy scaling increases. Exceptions being mortars, doom/trips and <secret degenerate killbox strat which will not be described here>
Quote from: bbqftw on August 30, 2018, 05:04:40 PM
Small scale is how this game is intended to be played as raid point scaling has a component which is effectively represented by wealth^2.
It's not just traps, practically every fair defense loses effectiveness as enemy scaling increases. Exceptions being mortars, doom/trips and <secret degenerate killbox strat which will not be described here>
Tynan is gonna throw a fit if he sees that statement about point scaling, considering he's already said more than once that more than just wealth goes into strength factor for events and raids.
The point about strategies eventually losing effectiveness with scaling isn't necessarily wrong though, but that's because this game isn't designed around infinite playtime on a single save. You're expected to either die or leave the planet currently, how you die depends on how beefy your hardware is(not as big as an issue since 1.9 actually has a cap to how high the point scaling can be). Playing for those 10+ ingame years is doable, but the game's progression loop and content during that loop really isn't built for playthroughs that long and it really shows after the 3-4th year.
I personally had no issues with trap costs in my 1.9 playthrough, but I enjoy mountainous/large hill biomes because they're ore-rich and easy access to stone. Obviously this is going to change depending on the biome you start in, for better or worse.
Quote from: giltirn on August 30, 2018, 01:41:47 PM
Your strategy remains only practical for very small scale trap use. I doubt even the most caravan-happy player could sustain a loss of 300 of any combination of wood, steel or stone blocks every few days in perpetuity.
It's frankly just not that hard to request a constant supply of caravans from allied factions. Iirc it's a 4 day cooldown per faction so you can get a Bulk Goods caravan every 2 days. They have ~300 steel 100% of the time.
If you make a concerted effort you can trivially afford the cost of the steel and the subsequent gifts required to keep the faction relations high.
As for wood? Well it's essentially infinite in half the game's biomes.
As for stone? Have you actually used a deep drill on a location with no or exhausted resources? If you want stone chunks.. you can have as many as your mining skill allows.. And it's plenty!
Quote
What I've been trying to communicate this whole thread is that the trap cost is just too high for sustainable use at what I consider a reasonable level of losing 10 traps per attack. Even losing 3 traps per fight the number is too high.
Sorry but.. it's quite manageable. There's really no two ways about it.
Quote
In contrast a turret needs rearming with 40 steel every 120 shots, i.e. the cost of 1.3 traps to do 1320 cumulative damage (11 damage per shot), something like 10x or 20x more damage per unit resource. If traps are given such a nerf then IMO turrets should also be nerfed as well!
The turret comparison is.. pretty freaking invalid for a variety of reasons. The way you're approaching this topic is pretty bonkers to be honest.
I mean did you write that with the intention of nobody thinking about what you'd said for a quarter of a second? The accuracy alone of turrets alone makes the direct damage potential comparison completely invalid.
Turrets can be destroyed by attackers without ever interacting with them.
They have a constant power drain.
Turrets can't be made out of renewable, cheap resources.
It's not just an apples-to-oranges comparison, it's apples to coyotes at this point. There are so many differences in their basic design and use.
Moreover every possibly defensive tool shouldn't be expected to be equally powerful.
Using that logic SANDBAGS should be as powerful as IEDs or turrets.
---
I get the impression that your main concern (that traps -in your mind- aren't viable in whatever your idea of long term is ) is derived from you not actually attempting much of what you're complaining about.
You can easily play for 10+ years and make good use of traps throughout on most difficulties in most biomes.
Their effectiveness will vary but.. they're quite viable.
Hi everyone, hope your day is sunny :)
I had used traps more and more and like them more in compareson to the old traps. They have benefits to IDEs because they only harm one target and can be used near your defence. And the costs are okay, which is my playing experience.
If they would cost less i would only spawn them earlier.
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
It's frankly just not that hard to request a constant supply of caravans from allied factions. Iirc it's a 4 day cooldown per faction so you can get a Bulk Goods caravan every 2 days. They have ~300 steel 100% of the time.
If you make a concerted effort you can trivially afford the cost of the steel and the subsequent gifts required to keep the faction relations high.
That's a good point, I forgot about requesting caravans. This certainly makes the acquisition of large amounts of steel or wood much easier provided you keep up with trade good production.
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
As for wood? Well it's essentially infinite in half the game's biomes.
Did you not see the part where I completely emptied a large map of all harvestable wood in the first year? It's not amount, it's rate. Steel is also infinite because it drops from the sky in the form of cargo pods and meteors, but the rate is too low for it to be a practical long-term solution for steel issues.
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
As for stone? Have you actually used a deep drill on a location with no or exhausted resources? If you want stone chunks.. you can have as many as your mining skill allows.. And it's plenty!
I haven't. Let me ask; how many chunks can a decent miner expect to extract per day?
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
The turret comparison is.. pretty freaking invalid for a variety of reasons. The way you're approaching this topic is pretty bonkers to be honest.
I mean did you write that with the intention of nobody thinking about what you'd said for a quarter of a second? The accuracy alone of turrets alone makes the direct damage potential comparison completely invalid.
Turrets can be destroyed by attackers without ever interacting with them.
They have a constant power drain.
Turrets can't be made out of renewable, cheap resources.
It's not just an apples-to-oranges comparison, it's apples to coyotes at this point. There are so many differences in their basic design and use.
Moreover every possibly defensive tool shouldn't be expected to be equally powerful.
Using that logic SANDBAGS should be as powerful as IEDs or turrets.
Here you lose me completely. Sandbags are not defensive weapons, they are cover. The defensive weapons are mortars, ieds, turrets and traps. All of these things have an amount of damage to enemy forces that they might be expected to do over their lifetime, and an associated resource cost. I pointed out that there's an order of magnitude of difference in damage/resource between turrets and traps to the point where only a particularly stubborn person would bother using them once turrets become available. Plus turrets are area-effect weapons whose potential scales with the number of turrets and whose costs decrease proportionately (you lose less turrets if you have more). Most of the other 'costs' of turrets are easily manageable. Constant power drain? Build a switch for God's sake! Non-renewable resources? You just spent this entire thread telling me how trivial it is to get enough steel to build the Golden Gate Bridge every other day. And if you are losing turrets to attackers outside of the turret range you really need to work on your turret placement - a couple of walls carefully placed and this will never happen.
Quote from: Boboid on August 31, 2018, 02:25:16 AM
I get the impression that your main concern (that traps -in your mind- aren't viable in whatever your idea of long term is ) is derived from you not actually attempting much of what you're complaining about.
You can easily play for 10+ years and make good use of traps throughout on most difficulties in most biomes.
Their effectiveness will vary but.. they're quite viable.
As I have pointed out several times, these concerns are based around an ongoing game that I have been playing now for a few weeks (currently ~4 years in). In this game I had serious serious wood issues *on a forest biome* even with what I consider modest trap usage. I admit it has been better since tree spawn rates were buffed, but it is clear this strategy will be ineffective on a desert, plains or tundra biome. Unfortunately I'm going to have to transition to more powerful traps as these days it takes 3 or 4 traps to bring down the heavily armored raiders that are hitting me. I intend to look further into deep drilling as I am down to the dregs on stone chunks on my map already.
------------------
To elaborate on another aspect of what bothers me about the trap change is how one of the goals of 0.19 was balancing to prevent the overwhelming use of killboxes. But when it came down to it, turrets were only given a relatively mild nerf whereas door-popping and traps were nerfed into the ground.
Killboxes are boring! So so boring. Build a few walls, drop down a bunch of turrets, go to sleep. And now we have even more powerful guns to further trivialize the experience. Autocannons for making mincemeat of mechanoids and long-range uranium-powered sniper turrets for ripping holes in their lines from the other side of the map!
Door popping was fun because it requires careful control and placement of travel and exit routes. Traps were fun because they had a high upfront resource cost which encouraged careful placement and funneling. These tools require forethought and preparation. Now doors take forever to close, drastically reducing the effectiveness of door techniques, and traps are changed into a mindless spam fest but with the wonderful addition of becoming more expensive the more effective they are! I don't even bother to think about where I put traps now, just dump a bunch down and forget about them until I see that once again I am low on logs and my map is as bare as a baby's backside.
Note also open doors no longer have cover and enemies can follow you through them. The videos posted by East had an overall negative result.
i think the new trap systems allows for interesting situational plays
the building time makes it possible (for skilled builders) to set up the traps near the enemy, luring them in, retreating and killing off the slowed down meele fighters
if they prepare before the attack thats easy to set up
if they attack immediately and are further away its possible near the base
this allows very interesting gameplays early and mid-game by using the map
Quote from: JimBeam on August 31, 2018, 05:11:41 PM
i think the new trap systems allows for interesting situational plays
the building time makes it possible (for skilled builders) to set up the traps near the enemy, luring them in, retreating and killing off the slowed down meele fighters
if they prepare before the attack thats easy to set up
if they attack immediately and are further away its possible near the base
this allows very interesting gameplays early and mid-game by using the map
You can actually reinstall traps, so just build them in your base and move them into the line of attack when you need 'em.
Quote from: Goldenpotatoes on August 30, 2018, 06:22:19 PM
Quote from: bbqftw on August 30, 2018, 05:04:40 PM
Small scale is how this game is intended to be played as raid point scaling has a component which is effectively represented by wealth^2.
It's not just traps, practically every fair defense loses effectiveness as enemy scaling increases. Exceptions being mortars, doom/trips and <secret degenerate killbox strat which will not be described here>
Tynan is gonna throw a fit if he sees that statement about point scaling, considering he's already said more than once that more than just wealth goes into strength factor for events and raids.
The point about strategies eventually losing effectiveness with scaling isn't necessarily wrong though, but that's because this game isn't designed around infinite playtime on a single save. You're expected to either die or leave the planet currently, how you die depends on how beefy your hardware is(not as big as an issue since 1.9 actually has a cap to how high the point scaling can be). Playing for those 10+ ingame years is doable, but the game's progression loop and content during that loop really isn't built for playthroughs that long and it really shows after the 3-4th year.
I personally had no issues with trap costs in my 1.9 playthrough, but I enjoy mountainous/large hill biomes because they're ore-rich and easy access to stone. Obviously this is going to change depending on the biome you start in, for better or worse.
A rectangle's area is dependent on width. If your consistent response to this fact is "well there are other factors governing its area" one might make some judgments..
There is only one term that is completely wealth independent, and it rarely contributes more than 15% to raid point strength under normal playthroughs.
The trap method is a very obvious way to transfer safety into wealth. Those who don't wish to endanger their colonist have the option to buy/farm the material to support defenses that don't require hands on approach. It is possible to have a playthrough with basically all non-violence colonist.
The flip side is also true. You can succeed with never using traps in normal raids. There is also the happy middle ground where you have a primary fighting area with cheap defenses. Your colonist get injured or indanger of getting run over you can fall back to your expensive defense area.
Quote from: giltirn on August 31, 2018, 07:47:23 PM
Quote from: JimBeam on August 31, 2018, 05:11:41 PM
i think the new trap systems allows for interesting situational plays
the building time makes it possible (for skilled builders) to set up the traps near the enemy, luring them in, retreating and killing off the slowed down meele fighters
if they prepare before the attack thats easy to set up
if they attack immediately and are further away its possible near the base
this allows very interesting gameplays early and mid-game by using the map
You can actually reinstall traps, so just build them in your base and move them into the line of attack when you need 'em.
huh.. yeah you are right!
makes it almost too easy :D
i mean rushing towards the enemy and build traps feels kind of sneaky and exciting
throwing down pre-made traps is "too" easy
Quote from: JimBeam on September 01, 2018, 03:51:00 AM
throwing down pre-made traps is "too" easy
I agree, the cheap trap costs have sucked most of the fun out of strategic laying of traps. I have advocated increasing the upfront cost of traps and reducing their maintenance costs, which would encourage a more strategic playstyle and also move the burden of deciding how many traps you can support to your current number of resources and not the rate at which you accumulate them, the former of which is a much more visible and reliable figure.
Edit: Oops, I missed the 'pre-made' part of your comment. I actually quite like being able to move them about. If this was coupled with a more significant upfront cost it would make strategic deployment more important, adding a nice layer of forethought to the process.
It's actually not that bad. I set a grow zone for wood, and if I run out of wood, I'll just rely on the turrets. I build the traps whenever I get enough wood.
Quote from: vampiresoap on September 02, 2018, 10:32:34 AM
It's actually not that bad. I set a grow zone for wood, and if I run out of wood, I'll just rely on the turrets. I build the traps whenever I get enough wood.
In my boreal forest playthrough I found this strategy hampered by the long growing times, long planting times and the short, 20-day, growing season of my biome. It is year 4 now and I have only just harvested my first tree farm. In the very long term I could probably expand out my production to cover expenses but it would require a serious time investment and by that point I will have long-ago had to switch to more powerful traps or IEDs as even now the raider's armor usually allows them to trigger 2, 3 or more traps before they are brought down. I finally have deep drilling so I'm going to see what kind of rate I can pull up stone blocks.
Quote from: giltirn on September 02, 2018, 03:03:53 PM
Quote from: vampiresoap on September 02, 2018, 10:32:34 AM
It's actually not that bad. I set a grow zone for wood, and if I run out of wood, I'll just rely on the turrets. I build the traps whenever I get enough wood.
In my boreal forest playthrough I found this strategy hampered by the long growing times, long planting times and the short, 20-day, growing season of my biome. It is year 4 now and I have only just harvested my first tree farm. In the very long term I could probably expand out my production to cover expenses but it would require a serious time investment and by that point I will have long-ago had to switch to more powerful traps or IEDs as even now the raider's armor usually allows them to trigger 2, 3 or more traps before they are brought down. I finally have deep drilling so I'm going to see what kind of rate I can pull up stone blocks.
Yeah, the traps are only there to soften them anyways. You shouldn't rely on them too much. It's nice to have them, but it's not the end of the world if you don't. Also, I wouldn't recommend stone traps if you have a choice (not living in extreme biomes) because it takes a super long time to build stone traps. Like 10 times as long as building wooden traps, and the damage difference is not that far apart.
For anyone interested, FrozenSnowFox has released a nice looking mod "[FSF] Better Spike Traps" that reduces build cost by 2x and removes the distance limitation. This seems a lot better balanced to me.