Mech Cluster Quest Feedback

[codyo]

Clusters have way too much strength and power. Mainly, way too many facilities that instantly apply a huge malus to your colony.
Like the psychic suppressor that puts every colonist at 50% consciousness. A EMP generator. A climate change machine. A toxic spewer(this is the most insane to have to deal with). I managed to get all of these from one 3-star quest to protect prisoners. All of these clusters have mortar shields, 1-2 mech spawners, and a ton of extra reinforcements to call in when woken. I want to use mortars but EMP shells are super expensive and it's uninspiring to use mortars when their accuracy is extremely unreliable.

Quests with Mech Clusters are just frustrating to deal with. They're not enjoyable when they all require micromanagement of setting smoke screens, snipers and emp grenadiers.

I think cluster quests could be improved by
* Having mech assemblers build mechs every 2+ days instead. Or limit how much they can spawn in the end. I'm being attacked by so many mechs I have hallway of a dozen of their corpses that fills with more every 12 hours.
* Auto-mortars should fire a set maximum amount of shells per day, compared to what they have now with an infinite ammo supply they can fire every 60 seconds.
* Clusters with Facilities should only spawn once per mission in some kind of "super cluster". One that's a bit bigger and has more defenses than usual. Every other normal cluster can still get their mech spawners, mortars, turrets. Small clusters still have the threat of blocking resources and having a lot of troops to attack your colony with, even if they don't come with these malus buildings.
* edit: Increase miss-radius / decrease accuracy for turrets shooting further than a 30 tile range.

These quests could work by just having one main huge cluster drop on your map with a few smaller secondary clusters you could choose to deal with first. Then nothing else drops after that. Having a one-time cluster event would be much more enjoyable than a constant spam of mini bases on the map for the entire mission.


And in my current mission the shuttle finally arrived... but on the other side of 3 mech clusters out of the 5 currently on my map. I can't do anything about them with the constant feed of mechs they spawn and their perfect high range, high accuracy defense turrets. It would be nice if you could choose where shuttles land.

[carbon]

It's kind of hard to judge this situation with only half the context.

What is your colony wealth, pawn count and storyteller?

Over what time period did these accumulate? Was there there no realistic chance to deal with each individually?

You accepted the quest, what is the compensation for all this trouble?

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It should be noted that if you really hate mech clusters they can be disabled using a custom scenario. Not sure if that applies to quests, but you can just decline those.

[ShadowKatt]

it seems to me that the mech clusters were not terribly well balanced before they rolled out. Several balance changes have already been made to them and I'd be shocked if there weren't more ahead. Just tough it out for now, i expect things to change in the future.

[codyo]

It's kind of hard to judge this situation with only half the context.

What is your colony wealth, pawn count and storyteller?

Over what time period did these accumulate? Was there there no realistic chance to deal with each individually?

You accepted the quest, what is the compensation for all this trouble?

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It should be noted that if you really hate mech clusters they can be disabled using a custom scenario. Not sure if that applies to quests, but you can just decline those.

I had around 160k of wealth I believe. With 12 colonists. Rough Cassandra.

It was a five day quest. After a little bit I started getting 2 clusters or so a day. I ended up with 6, the final having a building with a massive psychic drone that gave a -30 mood debuff to every male colonist instantly. I was able to take out the first cluster somewhat. It was hard with the -50% consciousness brain wave  that made all of my colonists move like turtles and handle their weapons terribly. It was also awkward taking it out since it had a really convenient placement of a Bullet Shield. When I attacked the cluster a handful of more mechs came out of pods or came out of the sky as reinforcements. The fight went a little poorly and I made a few mistakes, coming out with wounded colonists. While waiting for them to recover, I had even more clusters drop in. I wanted to fight them, but they had auto-mortars so baiting them would invite those to attack back indefinitely as well as their own reinforcements which I wasn't quite ready for yet.

I could have eventually handled it all, but then the toxic spewer and psychic drone were putting my colonists into fits and I've started losing some. In the end there were 8 assemblers spawning mechs every day. On top of the reinforcement waves that got baited to my colony. The result was 20 some mech corpses piled up in a single hallway. My colonists were whittling down due to stress, losing spouses and whatever. I had 6 colonists left at the end of the quest and most were wounded. I decided to call it quits on that colony since there was no hope for the situation alleviating even after completing the quest.

The reward was 30 advanced components and an AI implant. $9000~ of goods. So it was a pretty good offer.
The lesson I learned though was to bait mechs into extreme close quarters and don't expect much out of turrets anymore.

it seems to me that the mech clusters were not terribly well balanced before they rolled out. Several balance changes have already been made to them and I'd be shocked if there weren't more ahead. Just tough it out for now, i expect things to change in the future.

Yeah this is why I'm leaving feedback about something that needs balanced.

[carbon]

Thanks for the above description. It's gives a much clearer insight into what you were facing.

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Out of curiosity, did you get a chance to test whether psychic foil helmets can block the psychic suppressor (or whatever the 50% consciousness engine is called)? I haven't encountered it yet, but I do generally try to keep some foil helmets on hand for really bad psychic drones.

[Boboid]

Out of curiosity, did you get a chance to test whether psychic foil helmets can block the psychic suppressor

I went ahead and tested this - Psychic sensitivity has no affect on the psychic suppressor.
Probably because if it did it would cause psychically sensitive pawns ( Including those wearing the psy-gear ) to just fall dead on the spot if their psychic sensitivity reached +100% (which is very doable).
So foil helmets don't help, but psyfocus gear won't kill you either.
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As to the balance of mech cluster quests in particular - I agree that they're pretty brutal and often considerably more difficult than their standard raid equivalents because many of the mech cluster buildings are force multipliers with one another.
That said anything marked with 3 stars is listed as "Extreme" difficulty. Maybe an additional "Are you sure" would be useful for mech cluster quests in particular.

Which is not to say that I haven't made the mistake of accepting a quest I couldn't handle, I still haven't forgiven Healthcliff the Camel that I was supposed to guard for 4 days. And I killed him to stop the clusters dropping! Still haven't forgiven him! After eating him and wearing his skin!
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As to the concerns regarding the efficacy of mortars - It's important to remember that you only need 1 EMP shell for every volley of mortar shells fired.
If you have 2 mortars half the shells you fire are going to need to be EMP, if you have 5 mortars only 1/5th and so on. If you want to conserve components be sure to use more mortars and therefore fewer EMP shells.
Additionally larger volleys are more likely to cause incidental damage on mechanoids which would otherwise be running at your base after the first shot.

Also EMP shells only need to hit the mortar shield, not the physical shield generator itself. They'll always disable the shield it's just a question of hitting the generator -with a standard shell- which is itself quite flimsy. You don't need to hit it directly.
In fact in your screen shot it looks as though the unstable power cores are close enough to the mortar shields that hitting any of those would cause the mortar shields to be destroyed. Seems to be true of all 3 mortar shields.. which makes it considerably more likely to land a crippling shot.
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I agree that it would be nice to be able to designate a shuttle landing location, it's particularly annoying on mountain maps which typically have more choke points and longer paths.

By the way - mech assemblers are very useful sources of components, steel, and plasteel. Since Pikemen and Lancers aren't dangerous in small numbers to melee colonists I've taken to farming them for as long as is feasible. You just have to remember to beat the mechs down manually, preferably with 3-4 melee colonists to shorten the fight and reduce damage taken.
They're a good source of melee skill too. Just be prepared to lose some fingers/toes in the short term since you can't armor those.

[codyo]

After playing some more I'd like to add that maybe decreasing the accuracy of turrets at their 30-46 tile range even further would be good balance. To allow colonists to approach without getting hit so much. I started a new colony, and we're still at low tech. I had a mech cluster drop near a paved road at the edge of the map. One heavy blaster turret, four mini-sluggers, and a pikeman have been decimating visitors, new colonists and whoever else that walks in from that angle. Every caravan that arrives gets hit and flees in terror. It's making for a good trap I suppose and one day I'll be able to get all the loot there. Maybe if I can craft a good shield belt I'll have a colonist pick up any treasure and leave the cluster there to kill more travellers :^)

As to the balance of mech cluster quests in particular - I agree that they're pretty brutal and often considerably more difficult than their standard raid equivalents because many of the mech cluster buildings are force multipliers with one another.
That said anything marked with 3 stars is listed as "Extreme" difficulty. Maybe an additional "Are you sure" would be useful for mech cluster quests in particular.

I haven't looked at what the difficulties there are, but I thought the quests went off a typical 5 star system. With 3 being the average .

[Aponace]

I have no words on how to descrive this topic.

Lets break it down:
turret = like 70 tiles of range (longer than any sniper rifle in game and in any mod), 50+ damage/shot (charge blast), 20 bullets/sec (minigun), 90%+ accuracy. Just to be clear here... 1 turret took out 3 of my colonists in 1 spray and yes I was trying to move them closer so they get in range for the EMP launcher...
mortar = unlimited ammo, shoots every ~30s.
mortar shield = really? even when i had it in "vanilla expended security" mod I didn't use it since it was too OP and now it's just a poor mans mortar shield compared to the mortar shields the mech have.

Here is a typical cluster:
4 mortars, 1-2 mortar shields, 10 mech (including capsules), 1 random disaster (solar, toxic, poison, etc...), 4-6 turrets, 2 mech spawners (spawns ~2 new mechs each day).

Now multiply it by 5 freaking clusters and good luck. By the time you finish fighting one with 70% of your colonists severely injured you have 2 more spawned with random disasters ruining the map forcing you to do something.

Never have I ever handled something so OP in my 600 hours of gameplay. What i did after 10 hours of trying to resolved this scenario I just opened dev tools and destroyed everything including the rewards because I'm so unbelievably exhausted. It's like it was designed to be handled by a mountain base with a killbox or am I missing something?