Best weapon for downing pawns for capturing?

[The Man with No Name]

What's the best weapon to use for downing pawns for capturing, such as escaped prisoners, berserk colonists or raiders, that has the best chance of both winning the fight and also downing the hostile pawn without killing/maiming them? An Awful quality wooden club at 10% condition? Bare fists?

[ArguedPiano]

Ideally you want as fast an attacking weapon with the lowest damage possible. Fists would be the winner here as they do not cut. I have heard tell of people using wood logs but they are all but useless in a heated fight.

[khearn]

Getting someone to go down means putting them in enough pain that they go into shock without doing enough damage to actually kill them. So you want to maximize pain/damage. According to the wiki, pain is calculated like this:

Pain = Number of Injuries ÷ [80.0 × Max Pain Level Multiplier[1] × Health Scale[2] + Extra Pain ÷ (80.0 × Max Pain Level Multiplier)]

That's not completely clear to me, but it certainly looks like total pain is directly proportional to the number of injuries. So you want lots of little injuries. And you want to do them as quickly as possible. So you want something that has lots of quick little attacks. Kind of like death by a thousand cuts, only we don't really want the death part. Somehow, "shock due to pain by a thousand cuts" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. :-/

Maybe weapons aren't the best way to do this. Let's trying thinking outside the weapons rack for a few moments.

Squrrels have 3 attacks, each doing a maximum of 4 damage. Bunnies (hares, actually) only do 3 damage per attack, but only have one attack (chickens too, but you can't train attack chickens and you can train attack bunnies). It sounds like squrrels may be the most nibble per second. Squirrels also move slightly faster than bunnies (6 vs 5.5), so they'll get to their victims a little quicker.

So the best method may well be to just breed dozens of squirrels and train them to be released upon your hapless foes. Yeah, you'll lose some on the way. But they're small targets, and if you have a lot of them, plenty will still make it to your foes. And if the bad guys are shooting at your army of killer^H^H^H^H^H^H pain-inducing squirrels, they aren't shooting at your colonists. They're like ablative armor that  nibbles your enemies into submission.

Taming and breeding all those squirrels will, however take a little time. They have a gestation period of 10 days, and produce 1-5 offspring per litter, so they do reproduce fairly quickly. You should be able to produce a reasonable sized pack of attack squirrels in just a few seasons.

It's really too bad chickens can't be attack trained, the reproduce really quickly. And I do like the mental image of raiders going down, pecked into submission by a flock of attack chickens.

Of course, I haven't actually tried this strategy, so I may be completely wrong. But weaponizing the wildlife does have a certain appeal.

[The Man with No Name]

I can't find the figures for fists, but the Wiki has info for clubs on the weapons and clubs pages, which as a truncheon-like weapon would seem to fit the bill. If the value we are looking for for a fast attack is "Cooldown speed factor", then it would appear that a Plasteel club is the quickest at 0.80, while wood is second at 0.90. However, plasteel does 11 damage, while wood does only 9 and perhaps one might want to use something that does less damage.

So I'm guessing it might depend on the situation. Capturing someone half-incapacitated might best be done with fists, while someone fit and healthy, like an escaped prisoner, might best be tackled with a wooden or plasteel club.

ETA: Squirrels would also be an interesting way of doing it!

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2nd post (since I've been disallowed from making consecutive posts):

So what about quality and condition?

Looking at the Wiki, weapon quality has an effect on the "Base Damage Modifier". So, presumably, an Awful quality club would be better for this task than a high quality one? I'm not sure how condition affects clubs. Might it hypothetically be best to get one's worst craftsman to make awful wooden clubs and then leave them to deteriorate for a few months outside to create the perfect soft decaying piece of wood for capturing purposes? 

[Shurp]

It's really too bad chickens can't be attack trained, the reproduce really quickly. And I do like the mental image of raiders going down, pecked into submission by a flock of attack chickens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxjuROiAuT8

[faltonico]

Even if you manage to down them with extreme pain, you have to take it into account that there is always a chance that the pawn automatically dies even if it hasn't had a fatal wound.

[makkenhoff]

To be perfectly honest, I've found that using clubs to be the least effective means of capturing pawns alive. Too often, a few torso hits are enough to kill them outright - even with a wooden club. I've found pistols to be my preferred way to capture. It's a pretty complex breakdown between the two though.

I usually need quite a bit of herbal medicine and quality beds to get people back up and on their feet, but it sure beats burying them in the ground.

I do think having the ability to tell our pawns where to strike (even if they fail to connect or hit a different area) would be very helpful for disabling pawns without killing them outright as often.

[Canute]

If you want use mod's, try Mellee rebalance, then your fighter get the option "capture", high chance to incap. the target instead to kill him.

[The Man with No Name]

Here's the weapons stats for fist, equipped wood, wooden club (normal) and wooden club (awful), the last of which I have calculated (Damage: 9 multiplied by "Awful" Base Damage Modifier: 0.40):

Weapon               / Cooldown  / Damage / Damage Per Second

Fist                 / 1.83 secs / 6      / 3.28
Wood                 / 2.2 secs  / 8      / 3.64
Wooden club (normal) / 2.16 secs / 9      / 4.167

Wooden club (awful)  / 2.16 secs / 3.6    / 1.66

[faltonico]

If you are willing to try mods, you can use Mazacik's no RNG in death, and a non lethal weapon for downing pawns 100% of the times. I am currently using an unofficial update of the stun gun.

[khearn]

I just thought I'd add a report regarding using attack squirrels. I tried to get a troop of them set up in my current game over the weekend. The issue I've run into is that they're pretty hard to tame/train. I have a pawn with animal handling at 20 (godlike), and he still has only a 10% change of taming a squirrel, and only abut a 40% chance (I think - I don't have the game in front of me as I type this) of training one. So getting that first breeding pair took a lot of pawn-hours. Once I had a pair, the numbers started going up pretty nicely, but then you end up with your animal handler spending a lot of time training them all. After almost a game year, I have almost 20 squirrels, but only one has actually completed release training. So I still can't report on how effective they are in combat.

Now, I should also mention that I have a dozen or so dogs of various flavors, plus a similar niumber of wild boars, so my animal handler's time is diluted a lot by training all of them. Plus, I use Fluffy's "Hunt for Me" mod, which means an extra 7 levels of training going to the dogs and boars to train them to hunt. So the animal handling time is even more diluted. If you focused more on the squirrels, you could probably get a decent number ready for combat within a year.

Oh yeah, and female squirrels seem to be the most popular prey for my dogs to hunt. I've lost count on how many dead squirrels have shown up in my animal corpse stockpile, and for a while the only squirrels I could find alive to try and tame were all male. That slowed down the breeding program a bit, too.

I've started a new tribal game and I'll keep the dog numbers down and avoid boars completely and see if I can get a viable squirrel force set up this time.