Melee combat - diagnosing the problems

[b0rsuk]

Before we go into specific suggestions, it's important to correctly diagnose what - if anything - is wrong with melee combat. Then we can debate what should be done about each point.

Playing a melee only colony is REALLY enlightening. My last two colonies (one in progress) were melee colonies. Melee and Shooting are nominally in the same league. Character generation algorithms seem to value both skills equally, and neurotrainers have the same price. But Shoting-only colonies are perfectly viable. Melee only colonies feel much, much harder. I realize bringing a sword to a gunfight should be a disadvantage, but...

0. At no point you wish you had more Melee characters.
A low skill character with a shotgun, LMG or Machine Pistol is much easier to take care of and at least avoid injuries. If Melee shouldn't be equally useful to Shooting, there should be a niche where it's definitely better. I don't think there is one. Even for incapacitating, multi projectile weapons with low damage like machine pistol or assault rifle work fine, and ultimately storyteller and colony size determines if a pawn survives or not.

1. Melee combat is hit based
This has the following sub problems:

    1.1 Melee colonies use huge amounts of medicine
    It can be several dozens if you have several war bears, or have a melee only colony. I think I used around 80 herbal medicine from my first year. You need a BIG hospital. My hospital in melee colony is twice as big (bed counts). I regularly have two doctors treating, otherwise mood may drop too low or war beasts may bleed out. GOOD LUCK playing melee only on ice sheet. You'd need a full hydroponic sunlamp of herbal medicine. Edit: Heavens help you if Blight hits. You can work around food shortages, you can live without that devilstrand, you can craft from leather. Maybe your psychoid addict can survive if your psychoid fields are nuked. But there is NO substitute for big amount of medicine melee combat needs and everything in the game is balanced around ranged combat, not melee. This means traders sell a couple, and non-herbal medicine doesn't heal more wounds.

    1.2 Melee combat causes many lost limbs, fingers, and scars
    It can be pretty ridiculous, for example 3 colonists + war beasts escorting them, surrounding a wolf and attacking him simultaneously. BAM, wolf bites your thumb off in first hit, permanent -10% Manipulation and pain.
    There is a separate thread arguing reliance on permanent injuries is not fun.

    1.3 You can do very little to avoid injuries in melee. There are no mechanics equivalent to cover.
    It feels like equipping your colonist then throwing dice. Some games go to the extreme, for example classic Heroes of Might and Magic has a combat system where it's common to defeat an army of the same size (or bigger) with zero damage. Classic HOMM relies heavily on first strike rule. Defender only gets to retaliate if he survives. While it's not realistic, it's fun to play and refine your tactics, and the game gives you many, many possibilities. Rimworld gives you none. Melee can be more interesting if you mix them with shooting, but even then they're like mobile walls.
    Mechanoids have the silver bullet in the form of EMP weakness, but mechanoids are currently the easiest raid type to deal with if you have the right equipment.  Scythers can be ganged on and killed in melee pretty quickly, you may lose a jaw or a hand though. You can work around that suplementing your fighters with war beasts. But centipedes - centipedes are terrifying in melee, not so much their damage as their toughness. If you don't have EMP or a horde of animals, you're better off building deadfalls in their path and praying! (I had a centipede die to 3rd deadfall trap in current game. Head: destroyed (36 HP)).
     
        1.3.1 Early game defensive equipment is especially bad.
        Melee combatants have no equipment available in early game that would significantly boost their toughness or survival rate. You must loot personal shields from pirates (maybe you keep getting tribal raids ?) or purchase them, and they're not common. You do start with synthread which is nice, and a good idea is to craft cloth apparel and wear that instead, saving especially synthread jackets for later. You need to kill at least several animals of the same type to get enough leather for a single duster. Kevlar vests and kevlar helmet dramatically improve survival rates - you may lose non-essential organs, but you're very hard to kill outright. But kevlar equipment requires costly Machining research. Tribes in particular are left on ice. The earliest you can get Devilstrand in temperate zone is premature harvest at the start of winter (plants die at -10*C). I got 453 the last time, and it was from rich soil.

2. Melee combat is not dynamic at all.
Two pawns stand next to each other and trade hits. There are only two things to consider: DPS and toughness. Melee doesn't allow for repositioning, flanking, or anything like that. You just try to pull them away if a ranged enemy intervenes.
   
    2.1 Melee combat is boring to watch

3. There's very little diversity among melee weapons.
They really boil down to DPS (damage per second). One quirk is that blunt weapons are relatively good against armor, and don't cause bleeding wounds. The end.

4. Personal Shield is used for anything BUT melee combat
Personal Shield is merely average at letting melee fighters engage with ranged combatants. What it excels at is abusing raider AI, and serving as a decoy (in cover) in prolonged shootouts. In particular, Personal Shield transforms the most brutal enemies in the game into the easiest!

5. Fall back to melee options are extremely limited.
There is one: Power Claw. You need a loooot of silver and some luck to pull that off. Only then you can wield a good gun and still have a good backup weapon in melee.

[travin]

"what - if anything - is wrong with melee combat."

Interesting statement as you seem to have very strong feelings against the practice.

[Aristocat]

    1.2 Melee combat causes many lost limbs, fingers, and scars
    It can be pretty ridiculous, for example 3 colonists + war beasts escorting them, surrounding a wolf and attacking him simultaneously. BAM, wolf bites your thumb off in first hit, permanent -10% Manipulation and pain.
    There is a separate thread arguing reliance on permanent injuries is not fun.

I'm playing with my VE-CO mods and I lost only single thumb 3 year in, with mostly short range guns and melees.

Problem in vanilla is that each toe and fingers has around 0.5% chance to hit, it doesn't look big except a) They have only 7 hp, so practically any attack destroys it. b) 0.5% x20 is 10%, so basically every time a pawn gets attacked it has 10% chance to suffer permanent injury.

Limbs being ridiculously weak is another problem, and even ranged suffers for it.

Also people of rimworld feel too little pain, and they fight to death. Realistically stabbed by knife or getting shot 5 times and bleeding from organs will disable pretty much everyone unless a) They are armored. b) Or they use drugs, such as go-juice.

So my solution: Increase hit point of limbs.

decrease hit chance of toes, fingers and eyes.

Increase pain each wound cause so pawns that attacked drops down quicker, instead of fighting to death. This also increase survival rate of colonist since they'll just drop and no longer aggro attack.

[PotatoeTater]

    1.2 Melee combat causes many lost limbs, fingers, and scars
    It can be pretty ridiculous, for example 3 colonists + war beasts escorting them, surrounding a wolf and attacking him simultaneously. BAM, wolf bites your thumb off in first hit, permanent -10% Manipulation and pain.
    There is a separate thread arguing reliance on permanent injuries is not fun.

I'm playing with my VE-CO mods and I lost only single thumb 3 year in, with mostly short range guns and melees.

Problem in vanilla is that each toe and fingers has around 0.5% chance to hit, it doesn't look big except a) They have only 7 hp, so practically any attack destroys it. b) 0.5% x20 is 10%, so basically every time a pawn gets attacked it has 10% chance to suffer permanent injury.

Limbs being ridiculously weak is another problem, and even ranged suffers for it.

Also people of rimworld take pain too little, and they fight to death. Realistically stabbed by knife or getting shot 5 times and bleeding from organs will disable pretty much everyone unless a) They are armored. b) Or they use drugs, such as go-juice.

So my solution: Increase hit point of limbs.

decrease hit chance of toes, fingers and eyes.

Increase pain each wound cause so pawns that attacked drops down quicker, instead of fighting to death. This also increase survival rate of colonist since they'll just drop and no longer aggro attack.

Hand injuries are very common in real life tho. My dad is missing 3 fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident. Our bodies maybe resilient, but in real life you are more likely to lose fingers than to die from a gunshot wound to the chest. Also eyes are very squishy and can easily be damage in real life.

[Aristocat]

Hand injuries are very common in real life tho. My dad is missing 3 fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident. Our bodies maybe resilient, but in real life you are more likely to lose fingers than to die from a gunshot wound to the chest. Also eyes are very squishy and can easily be damage in real life.

Well game doesn't have to be perfectly realistic does it? And realistically missing 3 finger doesn't mean losing 30% manipulation, which is basically same effect of losing 60% of a limb.

[SpaceDorf]

Another thing to consider is that there is no Armor for Hands.
Even Power Armor does not protect the Hands. So every hit, that hits a Hand or Finger is the loss of an appendage. I am not sure if its the same for the Feet, but I guess so.

Also how many years did your father work there until he lost his fingers ?
And how old is he now ?

But the most compelling argument B0rsuk makes is, that Melee is boring and not worth the effort and danger your Colonists are in.

The main problem I have with combat in general is the one Aristocat allready spoke off.
The Fight to the death .. and the most immersion breaking thing .. the common personal goal in a fight is not to kill as many as I can before I go out ..
The common goal is : Not to die.

I have no problem with Melee taking a lot longer than Gunfighting ..
Because thats a real thing.
Compare a Gun Duel with a Sword Duel ... if there are equally skilled fighters
a Gun Duel takes about 2 minutes .. a Sword Fight on the other hand can take a lot longer.

[travin]

Planting and Harvesting crops, milking Muffalos, cooking food, etc, they're all boring to watch but we wouldn't want those activities removed, so boring isn't a criteria.

Instead, it's tedious for reasons Aristocrat mentioned. A pawn can be slashed numerous times with a plasteel Katana, profusely bleeding,  but can somehow manage to keep fighting and then walk themself to get treatment?

[Derp]

I've noticed that pawns can never be forced into melee, as is common in other games which balance ranged and melee combat.  They can always shoot at someone attacking them, with lethal accuracy due to the short range.  Nor does melee damage seem to cancel aiming attempts - even if they do switch to melee, the shot they're preparing is first going to get unloaded in your pawn's face.  That alone makes melee unviable, since it's only a matter of time until a trigger happy pirate gets a grenade off before you can down him.

[Aristocat]

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/5wmtud/typical_tuesday_suggestion_thread_february_28_2017/debd3i9/

I think biggest problem with melee and game in general, is that shooting doesn't really have priority and just unload onto nearest target they can find.

This means a) Your melees will drop like flies as the enemy will shoot at whatever is closest, which guaranteed overkill one of your colonist that ran 0.1 c/s faster than others.

b) Your gunners will kill one enemy at a time. Example : If 5 megaspiders, 5 small and faster insects charge at your direction. Your gunners will unload everything onto small bugs, even though one colonist will be enough to kill it. You can reduce this effect somewhat by having difference guns but it's limited.

c) Worse, they start shooting at themselves because they don't consider friendly fire. This is even more troublesome if you're melee since raiders will drop everything onto themselves to kill yours while your gunners will do same.

And this is 10x worse with mechanoids because: Scythers have lots of firepower per unit which makes focused fire 100% death to anybody. Centipedes become useless because you can distract them with one shielder in front and just have lots of other people stand out of cover and shoot. Centipede will never attack anything else than shielder.

Solution : Make pawns shoot targets based on factors.

If a target is targeted by more than x allies, change target. X scales to target health, so creatures like thrumbos get focus fired while small bugs targeted by only one colonist.

If shooting at target might hit allies, change target or don't shoot.

If the gun loses significant accuracy, change target.

4. Personal Shield is used for anything BUT melee combat
Personal Shield is merely average at letting melee fighters engage with ranged combatants. What it excels at is abusing raider AI, and serving as a decoy (in cover) in prolonged shootouts. In particular, Personal Shield transforms the most brutal enemies in the game into the easiest!.

I think this will be solved if priority AI is fixed. If your personal shielder is behind a cover raiders will search for difference target as there is no merit for shooting at a target with no threat and no way to breaking the shield. If 10 personal shield soldiers start charge raiders will distribute their fires in an attempt to prevent overkill.

[PotatoeTater]

Hand injuries are very common in real life tho. My dad is missing 3 fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident. Our bodies maybe resilient, but in real life you are more likely to lose fingers than to die from a gunshot wound to the chest. Also eyes are very squishy and can easily be damage in real life.

Well game doesn't have to be perfectly realistic does it? And realistically missing 3 finger doesn't mean losing 30% manipulation, which is basically same effect of losing 60% of a limb.

You can ask my dad, he lost 90% of all manipulation in his right hand when it first happened. It took him almost a decade before he had back partial use. Also, unlike him having therapy to help and skilled doctors, in the Rim, you don't have much rehab chance lol.

[travin]

Maybe we're not really addressing melee so much as we are voicing frustration with the insanely stupid thing pawns do, completely oblivious to localized conditions.

Really? We're in the middle of a firefight and passive-pansy-pawn decides then is a good time to walk into the middle of it to finally haul that slag chunk you requested 20 cycles ago?

[PotatoeTater]

Also how many years did your father work there until he lost his fingers ?
And how old is he now ?

He had worked there for about 8 years when it happened. They usually had someone lose a limb or have another extreme injury at least once a year. (He worked for Exon making wire twine for hay bales and other shipping.) The person before him had her entire arm taken off by one of the baling machines.

He's 56 now and this happened 14 years ago. He had years of rehab and work to gain back manipulation. Now he can work almost like he has his whole hand and still has an engineering job, just with a different company and industry.

[Derp]

Another problem that's mentioned fairly often but bears repeating: melee attacks do not get appreciably better with increasing melee skill.  The only thing that changes, afaict, is accuracy, which is pretty good regardless, and outmoded entirely by the brawler skill.

Ideally it should be something like mining and greatly affect speed, where a high-skilled practitioner can just plow through material while a novice would be very slow, whereas brawlers (regardless of skill) would be better off with a damage multiplier instead of better accuracy.

[GiantSpaceHamster]

I think you (OP) are looking at the scenario wrong. You're trying to compare balance between things that were never meant to be balanced. RimWorld is not a game with balanced sub-systems. It's all about understanding the imbalances and trying to come up with a risk mitigation strategy to increase the odds of survival. So from that perspective, nothing has to be balanced against each other, it must simply have a purpose (and that purpose does not have to provide a benefit, it could be a penalty, or a mix).

I would never compare melee and shooting for balance. If you consider shooting better, I would ask "If I get a character with a high melee skill and 0 shooting skill, would I make use of them as a melee character?" If the answer is always no, then maybe that's a reason to re-evaluate melee combat, but I certainly do not think that answer is "no".

[Shurp]

A significant part of the problem with melee is that there is no defensive complexity.  I have a spear. You have a knife.  With equally skilled opponents this should be a non-contest -- I keep poking you and hold you at a safe distance until you bleed out. But now if you have a shield things change; you can block with the shield and then try to stab with the knife.  And if two combatants have shields and swords they can block and parry and...

A few simple additions to Rimworld's melee combat system would make it far more rewarding.  Having gloves and boots to protect the extremities would also be really nice.  Additional methods to limit ranged attacks would also help; why not an area effect "shield" which prevents all ranged fire into or out of an area?  One guy with a personal shield could brave the shooting gallery, run up to a spot, drop it and turn it on, and then run back to hide behind the approaching myrmidons...