For me the biggest downside to caravans is quite simple. Caravans are always inefficient. While there are exceptions (hunting bionics in vanilla) as a general rule you will never need to use caravans for anything. In the early game they require too much of a resource investment and can't carry enough to be worthwhile compared to gathering resources from the map, plus you risk losing precious colonists and resources to ambushes. Past that though, it's easier, safer, and more profitable to request caravans come to you since it means the other guy is assuming all the risk. Silver isn't likely to be an issue if you have any kind of industrial capacity and you'll likely make your silver back and then some by offloading things. You're not spending time or resources feeding your own caravaners and their animals (because you need animals to transport a reasonable amount of anything), you're not exposing your colonists to ambushes, you're not compromising your security by having important colonists unavailable for raids. And there's really no reason to pursue trade with a settlement as their selection isn't much bigger and they don't have much more silver than a regular caravan.
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#16
General Discussion / Re: wich are your most thumb down about caravan?
August 08, 2017, 07:15:02 AM #17
Ideas / Re: Prevent stuff from being dropped in doorways
August 08, 2017, 03:06:44 AM
I once had a massive prison break occur because someone dropped a meal in the front door of the prison. The fact they dropped it because I'd drafted them to fight a raid should tell you how interesting things got after that.
#18
General Discussion / Re: Toxic Fallout
August 04, 2017, 09:26:21 PM
The issue with tribals is that the toxic fallout, if it hits early, can easily consume your entire growing season. Assume a 30-day growing season. You plant crops on Day 1. Toxic fallout strikes on Day 4, before even rice can finish growing. You might get to harvest some of it, but not enough to survive on. You grab up all the meat, but you're a tribe, you don't have refrigeration so it all goes bad in a few days. And this toxic fallout can easily last an entire season, so let's say it lasts 22 days. You're now on Day 26 of your growing season... and that rice isn't gonna finish before the growing season ends. You're now almost entirely without food for an entire year. Combine this with a cold snap for extra fatality since that can easily lock out your whole season.
#19
General Discussion / Re: A17b Weapon Data Spreadsheet - Vanilla + Popular Mods!
August 04, 2017, 04:22:38 PM
Thank you for figuring out that some of RT's guns don't have proper accuracy. It drove me mad when I was experimenting with the pack seeing that some guns severely underperformed and I couldn't tell why, until I figured out that despite their stated accuracy they just weren't ever hitting anything. But now I've come to the Way of the Honey Badger (Great bargain for the materials and research, plus shorter aim time than LVOA-C means more hitting and running) and none of that is ever a concern anymore.
#20
General Discussion / Re: Dedicated Supporter in Danger of Losing Interest
July 31, 2017, 01:34:45 PM
There always comes a certain point where you essentially win. Nothing the game throws at you is going to challenge you anymore. Mods can help forestall this time period, but eventually you'll always get there and the game becomes boring, since even with constant raids (my favored scenario has a guaranteed raid every 7 days) you will generally smash them without lifting a finger and venturing out to attack enemy bases becomes more trouble than it's worth.
This is when mods (especially ones like EdB Prepare Carefully), the scenario designer, and a healthy appetite for creativity become your friends. Make mods and design scenarios to challenge you in interesting ways. Come up with a story and play it out, specifying the amount of success or disaster you're likely to experience and try to make it work anyway. Start a colony where everyone has Chemical Fascination and make a drug empire to watch the chaos unfold! Make a whole planet of Bloodthirsty Psychopathic Cannibals and subsist entirely on human meat supplied by periodic mandatory raids! Grab Set-Up Camp and start with a few muffalo to make an entirely nomadic tribe! Grab one of the tech-level mods like Medieval Times or Rimsenal or Glitter Tech and focus on it, making your own feudal empire or late-game supercolony!
There's a lot of potential to keep things interesting once you move past the base game experience. Take a look and see what you can do!
This is when mods (especially ones like EdB Prepare Carefully), the scenario designer, and a healthy appetite for creativity become your friends. Make mods and design scenarios to challenge you in interesting ways. Come up with a story and play it out, specifying the amount of success or disaster you're likely to experience and try to make it work anyway. Start a colony where everyone has Chemical Fascination and make a drug empire to watch the chaos unfold! Make a whole planet of Bloodthirsty Psychopathic Cannibals and subsist entirely on human meat supplied by periodic mandatory raids! Grab Set-Up Camp and start with a few muffalo to make an entirely nomadic tribe! Grab one of the tech-level mods like Medieval Times or Rimsenal or Glitter Tech and focus on it, making your own feudal empire or late-game supercolony!
There's a lot of potential to keep things interesting once you move past the base game experience. Take a look and see what you can do!
#21
General Discussion / Re: Happy Families: This is becoming silly now.
July 27, 2017, 07:13:45 PM
Looking forward to this being rebalanced. It's been one of my more common gripes that as the game goes on and raids get larger even if my colony doesn't, it's frequent for a raid to contain several family members. This leads to my colonists getting mood penalties due to automated defenses, killboxes, and high explosives not being especially picky and a more direct approach being suicidal due to the volume of raiders. I remember one poor colonist who had three relatives show up in the same raid.
#22
General Discussion / Re: Are smokepop belts worth it?
July 17, 2017, 12:44:48 AM
They help your ranged guys out a bit - A layer of defense on top of all the other layers of defense a good fortification can provide melee guys can make them nearly unhittable. For melee you're better off with shield belts, but for ranged guys smokepop belts are nice.
#23
General Discussion / Re: Addressing Melee
July 13, 2017, 09:04:52 PMQuote from: Jibbles on July 13, 2017, 06:25:08 PMThis is all well and good, but I believe the problem people have with melee isn't that it's ineffective, it's that it's more work for less effectiveness compared to ranged. There are higher gear requirements, more strategic thought involved, and a whole, whole lot more micro demanded if you want to go heavy into melee, and you wind up with something that just doesn't work as well in as many situations as if you'd put those same resources, planning, and effort into a gun line or killbox.
I personally like melee. With the right gear and weapons they're very lethal. My main issue is armor and shield belts. Since they degrade while equipped regardless of being in combat or not it's expensive to have them equipped the whole time. It's tedious and sometimes not possible to gear up when that raid arrives if they aren't already equipped. Maybe not have the tattered apparel debuff when it comes to armor may help out some as well.
Melees involve micro managing in combat if you want to be effective and I like it that way. You start thinking of strategies such as breaking the raid apart so you can pick them off. They aren't effective in some areas, manhunter packs, mechanoids etc and that's when I equip those pawns with stuff like grenades and shotguns, or just throw them on mortars if you want to go that route.
Remember, a good melee fighter doesn't just need a good melee weapon, he also needs good armor and a shield belt. Properly handled, a gun line only needs a good weapon - They can get by with cheap or even no armor because there are a lot of ways to reduce the odds of them getting hit (and they can't use shield belts anyway). Then once you get into a fight you need to use tactics and planning in order to get the raid to split up so your melee guys have a chance, while a gun line can often just directly engage them or wait for the raid to come to them. Then after that you need to micro the melee fighters, while the ranged guys will shoot on their own and don't need a whole lot of supervision. By the time it's over, your melee guys will come out on top but will inevitably get hurt (no armor stops 100% of an attack) and have wounds that need tending, which is extra downtime. Your gun line on the other hand, if you've built the defenses right, probably has minimal damage and you just need to repair a few things.
And this is just for average raids. Once you get a big, wealthy colony and start seeing raids with over a hundred enemies (as I have in modded games) then you can forget about melee altogether. Nothing short of divine intervention will save them then.
#24
Ideas / Re: "rot" speed
July 06, 2017, 01:04:26 AM
There's a difference between condition and rot. The meat's not actually rotting, it's losing condition. This doesn't have any impact on its usability, just its sale price - Condition only really matters for armor and weapons. Cook away!
#25
General Discussion / Re: Mortars: any good?
July 05, 2017, 03:05:45 PMQuote from: MrEprize on July 05, 2017, 11:32:25 AMWhite phosphorous is an incendiary projectile, so it would be the opposite of a firefoam popper. That said, an actual firefoam round would be neat so my colonists can put fires out from the comforts of their own home.
White phosphorus (based on Firefoam Poppers?)
#26
General Discussion / Re: Addressing Melee
July 03, 2017, 05:53:54 PMQuote from: Elixiar on July 03, 2017, 04:24:11 PMThis is already generally true. A high-level brawler who gets in melee range of a ranged attacker -will- kill them. The problem is that while they are killing them they will generally either get surrounded by enemy melee fighters, shot to death by their target's friends, or shot to death by their own allies trying to shoot the same guy or someone close to them.
Agree with this. There needs to be a big change to the way melee combat works.
If a high level brawler get into range of gun users, they should be dead. Honestly melee should have a much much lower cooldown period between attacks since a person should be carved into slices before a pawn can aim and unload an M16 into said melee user.
#27
General Discussion / Re: Addressing Melee
July 03, 2017, 02:22:31 PMQuote from: Bozobub on July 03, 2017, 02:29:32 AMOff-topic: Even if a Jedi could reliably block or deflect bullets, the ultimate counters to a Jedi with a lightsaber would be shotguns (multiple simultaneous projectiles, you can't block all of them) and flamethrowers (a lightsaber will actually make this worse due to providing an extra ignition source). Inaccurate but fast-firing weapons would also be dangerous.
[offtopic]Interestingly enough, slug-throwing weapons are actually the bane of Jedi in the Star Wars universe.
- They have a much faster rate of fire than blasters; Jedi are badass, sure, but still have limits.
- Blaster projectiles are slow, unlike bullets. You can SEE blaster shots move.
- Bullets are harder to see than slow, glowing blaster shots..
- Unlike blaster shots, bullets vaporize when they hit the saber's "blade"; they can't be deflected to other targets.[/offtpic]
This Google search on the subject is pretty amusing reading. Another good one is the "Ewok Apocalypse". Man, the Rebels are assholes![/offtopic]
On-topic: Melee still falls over even with a lot of buffs because of the inherent weaknesses of close combat and combined arms. I have a suite of mods installed in my current game that should make melee incredible. Better shield belts, melee weapons that do incredible damage at insane speeds, even better armor, higher move speed to close combat distances better, you name it, it's all there. All without any significant buffs to ranged combat, or at least nothing that comes close to the bonuses melee gets. And you know what? I still find myself going ranged. It's due to the multitude of problems I listed above, and you know what, I'm even going to add a new one. I'll post it here and there.
6) Targeting. This is mainly a problem when trying to use melee offensively. Put simply, a ranged pawn will shoot at any pawn in their range. Melee pawns need to chase their targets, something drafted pawns will not do unless specifically told to. This essentially demotes them to roadblocks, since managing them in combat requires a great deal of micro as you constantly have to give them new targets. Frustratingly, the better they are the more this becomes a hassle since they will kill their target in a few swings then stand there doing nothing until assigned a new target. While I can always set them to aggressive then undraft them I prefer to avoid losing that control since they're just as prone to wander off as they are to fight. I'd love the option to 'release' them like I release hunting animals, to let them run around and hunt enemies down on their own once all the priority targets are dead.
#28
General Discussion / Re: Addressing Melee
June 30, 2017, 05:05:24 PM
There are a few problems with melee, I think.
1) They can't avoid taking damage. Being in a melee means they're likely to be hit, since even 20 melee skill only gives a 50% dodge chance and armor doesn't block everything. And that's just in a melee with another melee user. Even masterwork shields will only block the first volley of fire (if that) of a medium-sized raid and raiders don't care about shooting into a melee and killing their mate to kill your colonist.
2) The larger the raid gets the more outnumbered you are. Even a level 20 brawler with legendary power armor, legendary shield belt, and legendary plasteel longsword can get downed when he has to fight waves of tribals with spears while also being shot at.
3) They can't disengage. Once a melee fighter gets into a brawl they're stuck there until they run out of enemies because of the movement speed penalty inflicted by being attacked. Not even being hit, just being attacked. Ranged people can break off before melee get to them, but once you're in melee you're in trouble.
4) Friendly fire. You can position your ranged characters so they don't run the risk of shooting each other, but not so with melee guys - They will, due to scatter, always have a chance of getting shot by their allies if the allies decide to shoot at whoever they're fighting. Given there's no way to tell them who to target or who not to shoot...
5) Grenades. Any decent ranged character can avoid them by outranging them. Any melee character will have to face-tank them.
6) Targeting. This is mainly a problem when trying to use melee offensively. Put simply, a ranged pawn will shoot at any pawn in their range. Melee pawns need to chase their targets, something drafted pawns will not do unless specifically told to. This essentially demotes them to roadblocks, since managing them in combat requires a great deal of micro as you constantly have to give them new targets. Frustratingly, the better they are the more this becomes a hassle since they will kill their target in a few swings then stand there doing nothing until assigned a new target. While I can always set them to aggressive then undraft them I prefer to avoid losing that control since they're just as prone to wander off as they are to fight. I'd love the option to 'release' them like I release hunting animals, to let them run around and hunt enemies down on their own once all the priority targets are dead.
Even with mods that make the game a lot more melee-friendly - We're talking 90-damage weapons with a half-second swing time on pawns with 700% move speed - I find myself always going back to ranged weapons. Late-game raids turning into zerg rushes are always what kills my enthusiasm for melee - 10 maxed-out melee colonists can't do what 10 middling ranged colonists with decent weapons can do a lot quicker and safer.
1) They can't avoid taking damage. Being in a melee means they're likely to be hit, since even 20 melee skill only gives a 50% dodge chance and armor doesn't block everything. And that's just in a melee with another melee user. Even masterwork shields will only block the first volley of fire (if that) of a medium-sized raid and raiders don't care about shooting into a melee and killing their mate to kill your colonist.
2) The larger the raid gets the more outnumbered you are. Even a level 20 brawler with legendary power armor, legendary shield belt, and legendary plasteel longsword can get downed when he has to fight waves of tribals with spears while also being shot at.
3) They can't disengage. Once a melee fighter gets into a brawl they're stuck there until they run out of enemies because of the movement speed penalty inflicted by being attacked. Not even being hit, just being attacked. Ranged people can break off before melee get to them, but once you're in melee you're in trouble.
4) Friendly fire. You can position your ranged characters so they don't run the risk of shooting each other, but not so with melee guys - They will, due to scatter, always have a chance of getting shot by their allies if the allies decide to shoot at whoever they're fighting. Given there's no way to tell them who to target or who not to shoot...
5) Grenades. Any decent ranged character can avoid them by outranging them. Any melee character will have to face-tank them.
6) Targeting. This is mainly a problem when trying to use melee offensively. Put simply, a ranged pawn will shoot at any pawn in their range. Melee pawns need to chase their targets, something drafted pawns will not do unless specifically told to. This essentially demotes them to roadblocks, since managing them in combat requires a great deal of micro as you constantly have to give them new targets. Frustratingly, the better they are the more this becomes a hassle since they will kill their target in a few swings then stand there doing nothing until assigned a new target. While I can always set them to aggressive then undraft them I prefer to avoid losing that control since they're just as prone to wander off as they are to fight. I'd love the option to 'release' them like I release hunting animals, to let them run around and hunt enemies down on their own once all the priority targets are dead.
Even with mods that make the game a lot more melee-friendly - We're talking 90-damage weapons with a half-second swing time on pawns with 700% move speed - I find myself always going back to ranged weapons. Late-game raids turning into zerg rushes are always what kills my enthusiasm for melee - 10 maxed-out melee colonists can't do what 10 middling ranged colonists with decent weapons can do a lot quicker and safer.
#29
Mod bugs / [A17] The (Half)Dollar Store Traders
June 28, 2017, 10:20:08 PM
Important Mods: Mad Skills, EPoE, Glitter Tech
Problem: I have managed to get a colonist up to Social 20 and have fully augmented them to a ludicrous degree with the best available cybernetic and bionics in every slot. It was a long project! Now that I've done it, however, this character's Negotiation bonus has apparently become so high (+/- 127%) that the prices overflow and traders buy and sell almost everything for half a silver.
Problem: I have managed to get a colonist up to Social 20 and have fully augmented them to a ludicrous degree with the best available cybernetic and bionics in every slot. It was a long project! Now that I've done it, however, this character's Negotiation bonus has apparently become so high (+/- 127%) that the prices overflow and traders buy and sell almost everything for half a silver.
#30
Ideas / Re: Mark for smelting
June 28, 2017, 06:17:17 PM
+1. Sometimes I make a weapon and just decide I don't want it anymore but I can't smelt/disassemble it without risking going through my entire stockpile.