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I'm more curious as to how laggy your game is 

Incredibly slow, snail's pace. Especially during raids.

Could you please tell which mod do you use to get such a huge colony?

No mods, vanilla Randy on second hardest difficulty.

I used to use combat animals more often, until A18, when boomalopes started making chemfuel. Now my grazing resources are taken up by fuel production. Still, I will use muffalo as my main combat defense in early game caravans. 1 pawn + 3-5 muffalo + bulk low-value trade items like leathers = small ambushes that can usually be fended off with muffalo alone. I have no major complaints about animal combat, but sure it can be improved and most of the suggestions here are pretty good.

Were these antimatter shells?

Regular explosive shells

Haha they are sleeping on the floor and eating raw potatos in the light of the torch, but the golden dining table is a must.

Yeah, reminds me of this story about Donald Trump on Rimworld

How many colonists do you have? What year are you on, and how is performance?

At the time it was year 7, and about 170 colonists. Super laggy.

So I got a quest alert for a bionic arm. Oh well, it's the one bionic part of which I have several extras, but I'll bite. After the raid, I find some hidden treasure:


Which turned out to be worth over 3x the quest item!

I even got to sell it to a peaceful caravan on the way home.
(And yes, I harvested those potatoes too)

Anyone ever get a similar boon?

This happened to me back in A16. Same biome, boreal. So I'm guessing it's part of the regular fauna. I remember it specifically because the husky in question was the same one I had sold to traders as a puppy. It wasn't the first time a sold animal had shown up later in the wild, but it was the first wild husky I'd seen.

My giant colony spawned a giant tribal raid, and I decided to document the results.


The first volley cut a wide swath, killing dozens outright and injuring about half the remainder.

Still, they pressed on.


The second volley scored some nice hits, tearing through fresh and injured ranks alike. After the first few explosions, the tribals decided they had prepared enough, and attacked.



Seconds later, they broke ranks.



The carnage was so concentrated, I was only able to save about 20 of them. Still, a good haul. The colony is always hiring.



Easy cleanup.

So far I have observed a family member in a raid exactly once in B18, over the course of 7 in-game years and with a large (100+) colony. So it can still happen, on very rare occasions.

I don't know if I'll ever see a better deal than 19x Pants for an Infinite Chemreactor. I didn't even know the thing existed.

I think beer misses the mark as a truly "social" drug. It touches on the point by increasing chance to start a social fight, but by the same token, it should lower social inhibitions and stimulate intimacy and camaraderie. Drinking beer around others should confer benefits beyond what you'd get from drinking alone, which would give it a niche that sets it apart, while more closely tying it to its real world counterpart. My suggestion? Drinking beer alongside other pawns gives an "attended a party" buff.

From the description it seems wargs are not weaponized attack dogs, but the feral descendants of such animals. Why would they retain all their engineered attributes after (presumably) centuries in the wild? I'm not seeing the lore disconnect

Turning all guns into clubs in melee was one of the best changes in B18, IMO (as someone who prefers realism over arbitrary diversity/parity). A long gun is closer to a club than it is to a fist. And a 13% damage advantage for swinging a mace vs a rifle in close quarters seems about right. I don't think gun melee DPS should be reduced significantly from what it is now (except for bows, which are not clubs).

Where I agree with you @granitecosmos are the prices involved. Especially in conjunction with threats scaling with wealth. Part of the problem is guns are too cheap and easy to come by. After the first serious raid I rarely find myself manufacturing weapons. Melee weapons could have a niche as a cheap stopgap to shore up a lack of guns, but the situation just doesn't come up.
The other part of the problem is that shield belts are easily worth the ~1200 silver when used in small doses, as bait to draw fire while your own shooters attack. You don't need more than a few belts for this purpose, and perhaps the belts were priced with this in mind. When used for their "intended purpose" (charging down shooters in 1:1 numbers) the loadout is prohibitively expensive. I wonder if the price could come down to something in the 200-500 range without breaking anything.

@spacedorf I like your ideas about damage dealt to the weapons themselves. This might be a very effective solution to the melee/ranged parity question. Namely, ranged weapons used in melee combat would take some extra % damage, while dedicated melee weapons would not. This way guns get to stay the tactically superior weapons, but carry additional economic/infrastructure costs, which approximates reality.

The problem with this would be programming the AI of pawns to actually fight at that range and try to stay there.

Maybe, but ranged pawns already start attacking at their maximum range. If a pawn has a range 2 spear, it shouldn't be that much different making him start attacking at range 2 rather than closing the extra distance.

That and some lengthy weapons (longswords, halberds) have techniques that make them just as dangerous at close range as at their optimal range, so that would need to be accounted for if you want to get into that whole mess.

Sure, that's not hard to implement. Some weapons are good in close range, some at longer range, some at both. Of course if we're going for realism uber alles, Lightzy has it right, a handgun should trump a sword at any range, and melee should be obsolete. If we're making combat varied and vibrant, realism is going to suffer.

Break weapons down into three groups, Blunt, Edged, and Stabbing.

We already have this, it's blunt vs sharp damage type.

Deposits are small and get depleted very fast anyway. So any changes to the scaner and drills would be irrelevant.

Yeah, I haven't built a drill since A16. There are more than enough above-ground resources just next door, in every direction. Drills/scanners are an expensive solution to a problem that no longer exists.

Pirate raids are usually pretty spicy. Sometimes it's head-on, sometimes they're sappers, sometimes it's a siege, and sometimes they drop right on top of you. Sometimes they're a horde of bubble-shielded brawlers, or have multiple rocket launchers in their ranks that demand attention. Each type of raid requires a different strategy.

And then there's tribals. An undifferentiated mass of unarmoured pawns with primitive weapons, every time. So, I propose we spice 'em up.

First, we know the tribes trade with other factions. How about non-primitive weapons and apparel? Not a lot of them, but here and there. Maybe 5% of the raiders are carrying second-hand firearms they acquired from traders. An assault rifle or LMG in the ranks of bowmen might be a higher-value target worth focusing down. You can expect the weapon would be well-worn and of poor quality, so you're not getting a huge loot bonus.

Second, trained combat animals. This would really distinguish tribals from pirates, and give them a little personality. Flavour wise it makes sense, they live in the wilderness and have an affinity for nature. And it would make the combat more varied. A couple elephants or bears, a small pack of wolves or cougars

Third, some different raid types. Pirates have sieges, sappers, and drop pods, so what could tribals do? Well, to build on the trained animal idea, combine a manhunter pack with a few tribal "beastmasters" that throw a wrench in the works. The manhunters wouldn't attack the beastmasters, but otherwise act like manhunters. If a colony normally shuts its doors on manhunters, the beastmasters would threaten to break down doors. To deal with them, you have to send someone outside, which aggros the manhunters. A new challenge.

A suggestion I saw somewhere on the forum was for a tribe to move in and NOT immediately attack. Instead, it would set up a temporary encampment, cut down trees, and hunt animals. Perhaps even start mining. Essentially, it would eat away at the map's resources until dealt with, prompting the colonists to leave their killbox and deal with a larger tribal army out in the open. This one might require a lot of work to implement but I thought it was a nice idea.

On lush biomes, how about the tribals just start a bunch of fires before attacking? Depending on fire preparedness, this may coax colonists out of their base.

Or a simple one, tribal sappers. They wouldn't have explosives, but they should be able to tunnel in just fine.

Thoughts, ideas?