An Engineer's Elegant End to Killboxes

[Faestre]

I did not buy this game. A friend payed $30 to buy it for me under the stipulation that I pay him back however much I think it was worth.
I will be buying him the next $50 release that thrills me this much. The way that stories develop and the attachment you feel to your first colonists... The hardcore gameplay that punishes mistakes, rewards insight, and lets you fail even if it means death... The -strategy- element that lets a new player win on their first playthrough, while remaining threatenning to veterans... Incredible.


With that said, currently we are plagued by a really annoying problem. The AI has an easily exploitable vulnerability wherein a player can leave a single entrance to their fortress, build a long zig-zaggy tunnel filled with traps and turrets, and watch as wave after wave of enemies crowd into it to be annihilated without a fight, belying the great care that has gone into giving them self preservation instincts and into defeating the 'invincible champions' model of player character so prevalent elsewhere.

The current solution hasn't worked so well. Ramping up enemy numbers and frequency exponentially and without limit over time destroys fortresses without killboxes, melts players' real world computers, and utterly fails to inconvenience anyone with a single hallway of death set up.

Some people say that this is inherent to the game's mechanics. Any serious analysis of the following killbox example disproves this theory.

http://i.imgur.com/2WLgoxe.png

Any halfway competent human being could breach the displayed defense with a half dozen men and few to no casualties. Simply mining the walls on either side or blowing open a wider door would allow them to slaughter the colonists without a fight.

The problem is not inherent to the mechanics, it is an AI limitation. There is a better way, and I intend to outline the beginnings of a potential solution below.

Step 1: Do away with colossal hordes.

As long as we make enemies strong enough to overwhelm non-killbox forts, we will get no data on how to balance them once the problem is removed. We aren't going to breach a single killbox by strength of numbers anyway, so why bother pretending?

Step 2: Extend Enemy Caution

Enemies already give up and run away when they feel outmatched, and I understand they attempt to report traps when they make it home. This is good, but it's not enough. If an enemy force is defeated while being given little to no contact or chance to effectively fight back, the next attack should -assume- they will meet the same resistance.

2A: Enemy settlements whose previous waves have been no-sold, defeated without having colonists or defenses in their weapon LoS for a certain cumulative time, should switch from 'raid' to 'siege' mentality, utilizing a different set of tactics, which should be alternated either at random or according to encountered threats.

2B: A simple strategy which would easily defeat the current set of killboxes is to use 3 alternating tactics with 3 execution styles and 3 force employment methods. For simplicity sake, let's say these are chosen on all attacks with three separate rand(3) operations. The key is to stick with the chosen strategy for a given time or until a certain % loss in force effectiveness, rather than readily switching in response to player action.

Tactics: [Deny Assets, Deny Personnel, Force Entry]
Styles: [Point Attack, Area Attack, Stand Off Attack]
FEM: [Point Man, Bounding, Overrun]

Deny Assets: Enemy focuses on exposed 'key' structures, such as outdoor powerplants, conduits, followed by secondary structures such as doors, heat vents, and visible turrets. Obviously they will still engage things that are threatening them first, but they will maneuver as if only the structures matter.
Deny Personnel: Enemy focuses on harming player personnel. They scout the map to find colonists and kill them. This should only be allowed in probe mode, and should end if they do not come under attack for a certain time interval after reaching a preset 'kill limit'
Force Entry: Enemy focuses on getting into structures and reaching stockpiles, attacking whatever is in their way. The current strategy and a good 'default' if raids have not detected symptoms of killboxing (or being outclassed).

Point Attack:The current method. AI paths to their objectives and engages anything along the way. If previous attacks did not succeed in at least engaging colonists, the pathing engine should treat walls as 1/10th speed rather than preferring to avoid them, cutting through or using explosives.
Area Attack: The AI refuses to consider openings smaller than 1d10 (chosen at start of raid) in its pathing, considering only player made walls and rock.
Stand Off: AI prefers not to path to objective, instead holding position within range of first player items, structures, or bots and maintaining fire until at least [100% bots, 30% structures] have been removed from their range by destruction or displacement, and then moving forwards a set distance to repeat.

Point Man: Single 'feeler' takes point and moves to objective. If they arrive or succeed in engaging and are not outnumbered, the rest follow.
Bounding: Enemy divides into two groups which remain on the edge of range for their smallest projectile weapons. One group advances at a time towards the edge of the next group's range whether they have made contact or not. If engaged, the first group to make contact should fight like normal, while the second group moves around to positions at 90 degrees to one side of the player's engaging group. If unable to path there while maintaining minimum engagement range, they should treat walls as 1/10th speed.
Overrun: Current setting. AI moves as a group. If engaged, they blob towards the target.

Step 3: Enhance enemy survival instinct. Make them detect deadfall traps before setting them off a majority of the time unless under duress (like being shot at) and have them automatically pull back and flag a tile as a trap if they come into LoS of too many turrets, colonist snipers, or traps. Annihilating the enemy stronghold brick by brick is never optimum in real life, but that is because real strongholds are built with the knowledge that enemies -would- if it -was-.

tl;dr: Just read step 1 and 3. It'll do good enough.

[Dante King]

TAKE MY YES PLEASE.

[Pax_Empyrean]

I like that you have made specific suggestions regarding AI target priorities and pathing to produce the desired behavior. Great stuff all around.

[NalyKalZul]

not to mention that trowing larger and larger numbers at the player simple forces the player to have specific trait's on there pawns to deal with the horrendous de-buffs a large battlefield gives.
it's a shame raiders aren't effect by this anymore, it would be nice to lower there morale ahead of time.

i hope at some point lines of sight actually becomes a map information factor. so eventually raiders need to scout in order to find the players ever expanding base sections.
granted they know a player on the map in general due your crashed ship lighting up the sky, but otherwise they should have no magical foresight on what your base looks like, how many people you have and your current tech and gear is.

i would not mind seeing a radar installation and different communication technology's be implemented, for giving both the player and other factions means to keep information flowing on whats going on in the world map in general.

and on the other hand i would love to get my hands on that cloning tech raiders are using to spawn forth there infinite numbers, as some factions clearly state they are nearly unable to build ,produce and feed themselves outside raiding.
how many other non-existing phantom villages are being raided ever minute to keep a year 2 raid going?

lastly the game really needs to have planet wide interaction to fix some of its current conflicting storytelling immersion.
and some new mechanics to make raiders more balanced and potentially deadly, have them strike at very bad times if they get the intelligence they need, not just appearing at random al the times went the game rolls the dice.
eg during a toxic fallout, i take it that kind of weather is easily tractable with tech from the year 5500.
al they need is gas masks and suits that protects them from said toxic fallout.

[falconbunker]

Yes to everything basically

[Pax_Empyrean]

If previous attacks did not succeed in at least engaging colonists, the pathing engine should treat walls as 1/10th speed rather than preferring to avoid them, cutting through or using explosives.

I'd set it as a greater speed penalty than that. While we don't want the AI to be easily funneled into killzones by walking all the way around your base instead of going through a single tile wall, it also shouldn't prefer going through the wall rather than walking around a building. Calculating it as 1/20 or even slower would probably produce a better compromise between the AI blasting in on a direct course from their spawn position and the AI circling your entire base to find the killbox.

On the other hand, it might be good to introduce a style of attack that actively targets your walls. "Hostile sappers are approaching!" You'd need to go out and engage them in the field instead of just hanging around behind your effectively-invulnerable static defenses.

[Lightzy]

Confusing. Lots of words but you didn't write anything new?
Aren't those things already in the game?

In my game there are already sieges. They come and bombard you.
Not that it helps because you always mountain-base
* Improvement: If you mountainbase they look for outside targets, if any, like solar/wind etc.

Also they dig through the wall when they have sappers and avoid your killboxes already. Sometimes they don't have sappers but only a guy with grenades so he grenades walls until he's in.
No real improvement necessary there. I had 2 different entryways with trap killboxes and they still dug a 3rd way in. lost a couple of bears

Also if you leave some infrastructure outside (like wind turbines) they'll attack those, and set fire to your fields if you didn't wall them.

So...
Not really seeing the big problem I guess.
If you build good traps then you should be rewarded by having attackers killed by them. There are already many ways around the traps.

[b0rsuk]

Confusing. Lots of words but you didn't write anything new?

I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling this way. I think the OP is very unspecific and full of wishful thinking. Computer programs don't use vague high level concepts.

Note a new type of raid has been added in Alpha14: "unusually clever tactics", I've seen tribal raiders doing this. It means they're trying to avoid traps and turrets. I played an open base at that time so I can't say how well this works when there's only one entrance to the base anyway.

============
While we're discussing AI, I feel that EMP mortars have huge potential. They are currently not used by sieges. I think the reason is they require coordinated attacks: better AI.

EMP mortars shut down personal shields, stun mechanoids and other mortars for 40 seconds. The blast radius is larger than sunlamp radius. They stun mortars, so I bet they stun improvised turrets too (I haven't tested).

I imagine basic EMP siege strategy like this:
1. Deploy mortars while the rest tries to protect builders.
2. Once mortars are done, operators start firing at turrets and the rest attacks.

Naturally a number of optimizations can be made. The assault team doesn't need to wait at mortar construction zone.

On larger maps, the assault team could immediately go and camp outside turret radius. They should try to intercept enemy snipers along the way. Upon arriving at desination, they would use the nearest cover, ideally outside range of survival rifles and assault rifles (sniper rifles may be too hard to avoid and they're too slow against targets in cover anyway). Then once the first EMP shell hits a turret, they begin their attack.

On smaller maps, it may be preferable for the assault team to wait at mortars for extra protection. How to define smaller maps ? I'd define it as "fewer than 40 seconds travel time from siege camp to turrets". 40 seconds because that's how long EMP mortar stun lasts.

Of course EMP mortars are completely useless if player builds his killbox underground.