Probably should not let raiders have charge guns and power armor

[Lightzy]

Never had to actually MAKE that ultra-expensive stuff. Every raid into mid-lategame comes with a good number of varying quality of charge rifles and power armor I can add to my stocks..
Also, they come long before I can actually research and make that stuff myself.

I feel that's a bit too much reward for no investment.

[John_Bigless]

Never had to actually MAKE that ultra-expensive stuff. Every raid into mid-lategame comes with a good number of varying quality of charge rifles and power armor.
Also, they come long before I can actually research and make that stuff myself.

I feel that's a bit too much reward for no investment.

Apparently, you have "somehow" tricked the game into using "stronger" troops and began to made profit out of it.

[Shurp]

You could try researching faster.  Don't forget that you can build multiple benches and have multiple researchers simultaneously.

[ThiIsMe007]

Never had to actually MAKE that ultra-expensive stuff. Every raid into mid-lategame comes with a good number of varying quality of charge rifles and power armor.
Also, they come long before I can actually research and make that stuff myself.

I feel that's a bit too much reward for no investment.

I agree with this (I've also experienced it).

This supposes however that there was a better AI than we currently have in-game.

AI raiders wouldn't need to be better equipped if they had sound tactics. As of now, I'm pretty sure that 50+% of the damage that my colonists endure... happens because of friendly fire.

[cultist]

Depends on your play style I guess. I usually have a pawn locked to a research bench from day 1 if I can afford i. I rarely see raiders with advanced weapons until the very late stages of the game. It's not very hard to have most of the research done by year 2 or even before.

[pdxsean]

Interesting. I never seem to get power armor or charge rifles from raiders anymore, playing on Cassandra Challenge. Even when I get late into the game (5 years is late, right?) and have long since researched the tech. Plenty of charge rifles tho. I have a well-developed base and could definitely stand up to an armored attack. I play in vanilla if that matters.

[zandadoum]

I never ever need to build any of that stuff , even tho researched.
Precisely due raiders being well equipped and dumb.

No raid can win vs my 150 turkeys

[ThiIsMe007]

No raid can win vs my 150 turkeys

I definitely need to try that tactic one day.

The game gifted me with those 8 (I believe ?) terriers through an event yesterday, and I had the surprise to notice that they didn't need the slightest push on my side to start feeding on the corpses of my foes.

Never look in a gift horse mouth, as they say, eh ?

[Lightzy]

I don't find the tactical AI retarded like some people.
It does what it can. It stands behind cover to shoot usually, it rushes you with melee fighters. The AI is just fine.
The problem is that the pawns the "storyteller" AI sends are usually "shooting skill 2, melee skill 0" armed with a charge rifle.. etc.

Dunno how you get to the point where you research charge rifles before you already have a dozen of them in a big pile... Well, maybe I do, but point is, you don't need to research it and definitely don't need to build it. You get it as gifts.
Same with other weapons actually.


Perhaps if weapons suffered serious degradation on anything other than headshots, so your looted stuff is usually damaged?
Also, there has to be a way to repair items/weapons in the game.

[ThiIsMe007]

I don't find the tactical AI retarded like some people.
It does what it can. It stands behind cover to shoot usually, it rushes you with melee fighters. The AI is just fine.
The problem is that the pawns the "storyteller" AI sends are usually "shooting skill 2, melee skill 0" armed with a charge rifle.. etc.

First, I will not pretend being capable of coding a better combat AI in any foreseeable future. Rimworld's combat AI is in quality about the same as many other equivalent games. Feedback on the topic should also always be moderated by the tremendous complexity of creating a "human-like" AI, and the technical limitations of current hardware of most gamers.

This being said, I still would like to add that in Rimworld a14 :

1/ A lone colonist can snipe out whole sieging raider teams, or lure only a handful of raiders out of a group to kill them while the rest continues to have nice socializing chit-chats. Not the sign of the most reactive combat AI to me.

2/ Grenadier raiders don't see any issue with throwing their explosives at a lone colonist brawler charging a whole group of raiders into melee. My brawler might die (not a given with a proper shield), but it's quite probable for the casualities to be much higher on the raiders' side. Since the strength of the raiders pretty much always relies on their numerical superiority, it's a pretty good trade-off for the human player. The AI shouldn't waste its resources like that.

3/ More generally speaking any "friendly fire" happening in-game, which hurts the AI more than a human. A decent player is able to place a minigun-wielding colonist on a tactical sound position, for example, where it deals a maximum of damage to raiders with a minimum of damage to allies, the existing AI seemingly not so.

4/ Killboxes. They exist, they work, with crippling efficiency. They shouldn't against a good combat AI.

I also agree with your observations about the discrepancy about raider's roles and their skills. I suspect that either it doesn't matter that much (because of the heavy influence of the RNG in shots connecting with their target), or the AI "cheats" (I routinely see ranged raiders with terrible gear and a very low skill, like brawlers who should probably come equipped with melee weapons, still managing to damage my well-armored and well-protected colonists).

Right now, the game bypasses more or less these limitations by brute force : scythers that can outsnipe and single-shoot anything else, small animals like foxes that can kill "human" traders in melee, throwing x times more raiders than there are colonists and the next time double that number, etc.

It remains a very entertaining game to me, mind you, but I can't credit it with a good combat AI, like Jagged Alliance 2 (modded) has for example, in which my mercs can get ambushed, encircled, suppressed and quickly killed if my attention falters.