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There is indeed no such thing as an expendable pawn.  You can melee without taking friendly fire, or even enemy fire.

Gunplay gains advantage as you add more shooters and more of the game's mechanics.  It's true that automated hunting is still very dangerous compared to drafting though, where with the latter it's going to be routinely 0 : 5 in pawn favor with 5x the shooters and lack of immediate predator aggro, and this is before getting into bullet intercept in manhunter scenarios.

^ ranged has the advantage of not taking return fire until melee closes though, and there are still ways to guarantee the melee can't.

Also was the autopistol nerfed since 1.0 started?  If it is still consistent with the wiki it has the unique property of being capable of shooting and moving in < 80 ticks, no other weapon can do this in < 100 (machine pistol burst eats too much time).  That gives the weapon a unique niche in that only fast weapons can contest their mobility with cover.  I haven't tested it in the most current update yet, but if it's still sub-80 it's a solid weapon for urban engagements now for its pure mobility.

If you do think I made a mistake, give a concrete example of what it is. Here you're just saying I'm thinking these foolish internal thoughts (pure assumption) and the only evidence seems to be that the melee system doesn't have a ton of complex internal variation like toxic attacks or bleed attacks - which is a feature that  I don't ever recall even being discussed here. It's not like it used to have this and I removed it.

I'm PRETTY sure there are bleed attacks right now, given the amount of "clean blood x5" that tends to show up when someone takes a nice neck shot or a knife to the lung .

Unless I've been lucky this still seems to bypass the "kill on down" check when used vs raiders too, though it's kind of hard to make it happen since they can get incapped by pain or take one too many hits to something that isn't survivable to lose.

You actually did add something to it recently too - the blunt stun procs, in addition to the dodge rate introduced in the late betas.  Sand in eye is new too, though kind of egregious in terms of delay.  Blunt stun in particular could get pretty crazy with more likelihood.

Door micro is still with us btw, but needs to force raiders to attempt cover now to buy enough time to avoid return fire.  Might be enough, effective DPS down from it makes alternatives more attractive when possible.  It might be time to dust off that filtering contraption I was using early B18 to bait a couple raiders into an area and close door behind --> force melee.

Giving melee warm-up would be interesting, but it might make the disengage from melee more easily accomplished unless the slow comes before swing...but doing that results in a similar problem to now (plus being hit from apparently further away).

I thought it was melee cooldown that was normalized?  I didn't have a chance to play with that yet, so don't want to comment on the long thread.  Given cooldown is a significant aspect of DPS it becomes harder to make melee weapons unique this way.

My impression when reading that was that gun cooldowns wouldn't be changed...logically since doing something like giving snipers and pistols the same after-shot move cooldown would be an enormous balance change and one that takes some of the ability for micromanagement skill to alter outcomes out of the game.

While some of the complaints are aesthetic and balancing dominant/weak stuff makes sense, I don't like the idea of less variance between good play and bad play.  I've had a hard time keeping up with playing around with the changes lately.  I guess I'll see for myself soon enough.

But I can. I do it in my current game  right now — my hunter is healthy, fast, has high accuracy, good quality weapon and one-two husky companions.

That's not what "solo" means .  And cleaning is similar - it's a routine task that becomes necessary intermittently.  If you don't do it, you run the risk of bad consequences (from mood hit, a significant risk on highest difficulties where you're a full -8 compared to default at all times).  The game does it automatically and you're not at risk of pawn death from not optimizing this...but what if you were?  What if you HAD to manually clean, or you'd lose people significantly more frequently?  That's early 1.0 and earlier predators.

You distinguish hunting from draft fighting - but here's the thing.  Hunting is dangerous, by design.  A single hunter can draw pack aggro or miss a few shots vs angry predator and get into big trouble/die, especially when you don't have animals to cover for you.  If you draft hunt decently...that outcome is basically impossible.  The cost/benefit and risk are disproportionately in favor of "draft hunting".

Suggestion: On a side note, I'd like to be able to designate a cleaning area.  Auto-creation of home area forces a lot of zoning micro.  Some stuff doesn't need to be cleaned routinely.

Well, in my experience, it is already a thing. I've already tried to feed wild bears and wargs with raider corpses and they always preferred corpses in my case.

Definitely not.  I don't have recorded footage like I have for a significant portion of the rest of my comments on this thread, but I have witnessed a wolf ignore a fresh animal corpse to the point of running past it to attack a pawn.  I have also been "hunted" by predators multiple times despite having recently defended a raid (numerous raider corpses still on the ground, not rotted due to winter). 

I have no idea what the predator targeting algorithm does or what it's supposed to do, but I can 100% verify that predators do not consistently target fresh meat that can't fight back over pawns.  I have not tested this with butchered meat, but it's definitely the case for corpses.

Armor was certainly not nerfed.

Player-VS-environment and immersion. Because if wargs are peacefull to the point they rather starve to death than attack a human - something they were engineered for from their description, then why have them present at all?

You could make a similar case about manual cleaning and how that adds immersion.

Really though I just don't want to see more rote micromanagement in the game.  I'm not opposed to predators being dangerous or hunting pawns, there's plenty of stuff that can kill pawns after all.  The issue prior to recently was how dangerous this interaction was when compared against the notification + micro requirement.  For an example of how asymmetric threat vs notification really can be, compare this to the fact that you get an event warning for the presence of beavers :p.

If we hold that tactics like "path abuse thrumbo over long time" and "door peek vs manhunter events" are degenerate/uninteresting due to the time it takes to do these things, manually hunting for predators is in the same boat.  Even with wildlife tab, you can't safely hunt them solo. 

Draft hunting is nearly 100% safe, but given the comparative frequency this is literally more of a grind than if you kill every thrumbo that ever enters the map with nothing but pistols.  The latter takes less IRL time and is more forgiving for mistakes.

Another useful counterplay measure would be if predators actually targeted meat/fresh corpses over pawns.  I've seen people claim they do in the past, and it would be a nice mechanic if it worked, but that's not how Rimworld has functioned wrt predator targeting, while leaving some caribou meat out would be a nice failsafe on those otherwise small-game sparse Tundra maps.

Predator attacks are more an annoyance than anything else. I think they should have wild animals as high priority, then if there are none, go for your animals, then if there are none, go for your pawns.

But if there are plenty of wild animals, leave us alone. As I said, they add nothing, just a random inevitable attack that you couldnt see until it was too late. And even if we had a warning, it would be a hassle to draft 2-3 pawns to kill it.

However, if we talk about a bear, it might still make sense... Just make sure that at least foxes, wolves and wargs at least attack us and our animals the last. I dont mind drafting 2-3 pawns to defend ourselves from a bear sometimes, but a fox every day... No.

Historically, they're threatening for the wrong reasons.  They kill a pawn more surely than raiders, with much less warning.  On balance, they're also very easy to kill.  The issue is the heavy micromanagement - with no notification the only counterplay w/o mods prior to 1.0 was manually panning the map.  Doing so frequently enough to guarantee against predators took more IRL time than some of the most degenerate micromanagement tricks Rimworld has had. 

Wildlife tab alleviated that to a degree, but still required constant manual checking every few days.  The end result of such an implementation is similar to a requirement that you manually order pawns to eat, or they collapse from starvation.  Like fighting predators, micromanaging pawns to eat would be easy.  It also wouldn't add any real thought process to the game.  All the same arguments about predators apply here too (IRL, if you don't eat you starve).  But in mechanical terms this would do nothing but make Rimworld more annoying to play.

Other than turning it off entirely, options like hunt alert or an alert for "predators have no wild food available" could be implemented.  The main question remains: aside from rote micromanagement to upkeep something, what does this add to the game?  It's similar in principle to forcing manual cleaning/eating/cooking/etc.  It's unique in that it's a very high pawn threat despite that it's literally the only external threat in the game with no notification whatsoever.

This game is drama generator. That's why a lot of logical things are not here - they would give players tools to deal with problems without drama. WM SFS cuts out:
- Animals binging drugs
- Cattle eating your crops
- Kibble management (you can just store kibble and hay in barn and animals would only eat it when they have no access to grass)
- Hauling animals (who for the obvious reason usually have access to storage) eating good food when they can find a cheap one
- Artifical nutrient dispenser limitations (you can feed animals with nutrient paste which is much more efficient than hay, for larger animals at least)
- Animal handlers feeding sick animals with lavish meals

A lot of this is in 1.0 (and earlier in most cases).  For example zoning (I like the merged zones in 1.0 btw) cattle off crops is trivial, and while micro intensive you can spam out nutrient paste meals w/o mods.

Animals consuming drugs that are outside their zones has always been a degenerate implementation, more micro nuisance than a mechanic that offers interesting decisions or difficult execution...but it has long been possible to block this entirely.  The problem with these mods is that they're not pure QoL; they alter the tradeoffs of some of the game's mechanics too.  Hauler animal food consumption is an example, that effectively buffs them via mod.

Mortars start being useful for their cost vs those 50+ man raids later on.  Otherwise they're largely just anti-siege, and awkwardly better at that on high difficulties compared to middle/low.

Yeah you can't just immediately run from ambushes.  It's worth sending pawns that can do violence on raids, and carrying more than one weapon to use based on situation (you can drop switch with gear).

Putting a wall around the base is going to remain very competitive because of its cost : utility, even if you do still need measures against sappers + drop pods.  With alterations to sappers these actually play pretty similarly, you want to be able to defeat in detail inside the walls.

I suspect Taynan wants to demolish the outer walls in the sense of "Sniper Turret", "Plate Armor" and "Open Base".

It's like an outpost of a pirate.

It's not going to happen with present AI logic and manhunters.  Unless those change I can't picture a statistical alteration to present options that would accomplish it without breaking the game completely.

Movement control is central to defeating larger numbers based on the present raid types.  To an extent this is even true for drop pod raids, they simply demand that whatever you put inside your base still has some flexibility in that regard.

^ You might want to tighten the proc range on ambushes, right now after some trial and error it's possible to flee from ambushes with a 1 man squad pretty consistently if you get your spacing right, and my impression is that this is not intended to be risk-free for one person.

Turrets and batteries can both be repositioned, pretty quickly too.

Only micro ones.

Of course, but when sappers breach you they're creating a choke, in a spot you can anticipate prior to breach.  If you actually have turret tech (with tribal starts it would be years 2-3 at earliest for me) you can definitely slap a miniturret positioned on a way that will cause raiders with guns to want to stop in the breached wall.  Depending on the 1.0 iteration this will literally cause a raider to block other raiders and minimize firing potential.

I do think movement in 1.0 needs to be fixed though.  It's kind of janky that you get green circles that don't consistently represent where the pawn will actually stop.  How much pawns and raiders are allowed to path over each other was a *significant* change to 1.0 and I don't know what the intended functionality is.  Since the stuff is inconsistent and stacking is still technically possible I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that how it is right now is still not completely WAD.

Regarding doors, I think this was just to nerf cheesing thrumbos and manhunters early game.  Would this really affect their use against raids?  Watching videos on people using door peekaboo against raiders I never saw a case where hp actually made a difference, although I don't have huge experience with door tactics myself (a little, though).

HP didn't make a difference, and not against thrumbos either because as long as it has a "valid path to what it's attacking" when you shut the door it will attempt to use that path.  Then you simply open the door and shoot it again, repeating until it bleeds out.  Making it aggro the door regardless means repair door briefly while shooting it from another door --> still free hits.  It's not an easy AI issue to solve.

Raiders that lose path to their target historically pick a new target randomly, after which you can open the doors again and pop them, shutting before their AI latches on again.  Problem with making them concentrate on the door in question in dedicated fashion is that doing so opens up new abuses of AI.

Basically all raids I'm heving in current version are sappers, sieges and drop pods - all of them created to avoid all types of defence player can have. New update also makes enemies learn where traps are, so they would become useless after several raids too.

Sieges ate the nerf bat though since they don't have year 1 massed sniper rifles.  As soon as you have a few mortars, you'll basically always force the siege to attack before it builds + fires its mortars (I play on extreme, so probably have enough raider density to hit some more consistently).  The other two raid types are more problematic and essentially require micro tricks to handle reliably on higher difficulties. 

Some of these have been arbitrarily labeled as "cheese".  While that discussion was off-topic in the 1.0 thread, it's worth pointing out that this is still a sore point from a balance perspective and goes against the "balance process" thread.  I'm not assuming thought processes, but rather going off what was stated to be the thought process in writing.

For words to have real meaning in the English language, they must *constrain anticipation*.  I've seen people describe killboxes as cheesy and be okay with micromanagement based on doors.  I've seen people describe the opposite.  Both of these have real tradeoffs in the game...is the wealth + meat from a thrumbo really worth a full game day micromanaging to kill it?  Sometimes pretty obviously yes (you're starving on sea ice), sometimes pretty obviously no (you're at risk of being raided, have enough food, and are delaying defenses and other productive tasks needlessly).

As another illustration: try to differentiate "door cheese" from "cover cheese"...letting the AI seek cover and simply leaving LoS when it does, only to return to LoS and fire once they leave cover to repeat the loop.  Unless the enemy overruns you with melee, you can do this as long as your hunger/rest bars hold up and consistently hit raiders w/o return fire.

Unless the risk from taking damage gets reduced and trading damage taken for much faster defeats of raids becomes more viable, the meta will remain on "pick whatever option defeats raids with the least damage taken, and between similar performers pick the less expensive one".

Putting a wall around the base is going to remain very competitive because of its cost : utility, even if you do still need measures against sappers + drop pods.  With alterations to sappers these actually play pretty similarly, you want to be able to defeat in detail inside the walls.