The Combat is Too 'rushy'

[Otleaz]

It is way too easy for the enemy to rush you. They just run straight at you, lobbing grenades or going in to melee you and despite getting shot full of holes they keep on trucking. This would be fine if you weren't massively out numbered every fight, leaving the majority of your men in melee combat while getting shot in the back.

I'm not saying it is too difficult, but I think changing the flow of combat would help make it more interesting. I think the best way to do that would be to make all characters take substantially more damage if they are not behind cover. That might be overpowered if you were to remove all cover from the outside of your base, but if you give the raiders deployable cover to plant and then hide behind before fighting, it could make it more difficult while at the same time lessening the frustration of those clusterfuck battles you get so often. This also has the added benefit of making preemptive attacks on the raiders worthwhile.

[CodyRex123]

i kinda understand what you mean, but its a pretty nice combat system, am kinda tired of all the slice that and shoot that kind of thing, i like games where you can control a good amount of things to destroy things, muhahaha

[Adil]

What troubles me more is the way they charge in room filled with armed colonist and start running all over the place like scared deer in a bus while your guys are still aiming the shots.

The combat needs something like overwatch mode so that a person that enters it spends some time preparing but the next shot in a specified direction costs him quarter of it's usual time.
The AI would need to be updated not to rush in blindly then, though.
This also could help somewhat with the initial rush since snipers could get more than a single shot at charging enemies.

That and some eventual balncing of weapons should be fine.

[spacemarine658]

I agree it makes it more realistic raiders wouldn't just rush to their deaths especially if they see others die

[Insubordination]

I'd like to see the raiders have vehicles of some sort. From what I've seen in the alpha we're going to have missle silos and artillery guns in our base because of the ammo types you can buy from traders. The main reason I think they need vehicles is cause they're gonna need wall busters or something to get past waffles and other methods of delicious breakfast defenses. Perhaps waffles will get fixed later though.

Once we get the ability to modify weapons with mod tools I'll probably make most of the weapons shoot faster and do a little less damage. I'd like to see bullets flying everywhere instead of slow musket reload style engagements. Weapons that fire faster would cull the grenade spamming horror we witness too. Now if grenades could be flung over walls with no roof that would be something.

The only thing that bothers me about the combat is when they won't listen to commands and they're not in panic. Maybe it's a bug idk.

[lt_halle]

How about this:

Similarly to how colonists and enemies currently have a chance to get incapacitated when they drop below a certain HP threshold (40, I believe), every single time a unit takes decent damage (not any damage, of course, since a squirrel isn't gonna break your leg or tear your carotid - let's say ~10 damage from a hit or more) they have a scaling chance of becoming Wounded. This chance scales exponentially with damage, so the difference between 30 and 20 damage in terms of chance of wounding is a lot bigger than the difference between 20 and 10.
Wounded units move at approximately half speed, deal half damage in melee and have a lowered accuracy at range. Perhaps they would also start a slow bleed which could cause them to drop into incapacitated state if not tended to fast enough. Similarly to incapacitated units, they could be ordered to be picked up by an allied unit and taken to bed, and when off duty they would go to bed and rest as their highest priority, recovering from the status once they've healed, let's say, HP equal to the damage that initially wounded them (So if they took 25 damage from an explosion and were wounded, then took 15 more damage, they'd recover from their wounds at 85 HP). The Raider AI would be adjusted so that wounded enemies would stop their charge and immediately seek out cover.
I figure this would solve the problem in that, instead of having to fight twenty raiders that break your lines at 50 HP each despite being riddled with bullets, there's a high chance that many of them would have been wounded in the charge and limped away to the nearest unoccupied wall to hold their guts in and take meager excuses for potshots at your fortifications.
Plus, this game doesn't exactly have a very realistic combat system and I feel like it should, and this would help. I'm not asking for a full-blown DF combat style (The flying =Plasma Bolt= strikes Jennings, Colonist in the upper body, searing the flesh and tearing the heart! Jennings, Colonist has bled to death.), but it would be nice to have some sort of recognizable damage between "Fully combat-ready" and "Unconscious and bleeding out".
I also think that some sort of suppressive fire mechanic would work well here, similar to that of many THQ games. Suppressed units can't fire as often or as accurately, and if they're in the open they get torn apart until they get in cover. If you can spare the firepower of two or three colonists to cut down the entire charge with the rest of them while they're crawling towards your emplacements at a snail's pace, it would give a lot more survivability and depth to raids.
Of course, I can assume that Tynan is working or will be working on improvements to AI as well as more specialized enemies (eventually I would assume that most raiders stay in the back line while specialized melee troops rush your fortifications with heavy armor). It'll probably all be worked out soon (TM) someway or another.

[Galileus]

It_halle - check out this awesome suggestion by Lazerlight

[lt_halle]

It_halle - check out this awesome suggestion by Lazerlight

That idea seems well thought out. I like it.

However, I was more looking for "if you take huge damage you might get injured pretty bad" kind of thing. Assuming everyone is wearing some sort of baseline kind of armor or padding so shots aren't just bullets on flesh, a single shot from a 9mm isn't going to stop most people dead in their tracks unless it's a killshot. Heavy caliber weapons, though, do more than just inflict pain - they cause heavy structural damage to the muscles and bones even if they strike limbs. Hell, .50 caliber rounds have been known to tear off extremities on direct hits.
I think a structured wounding system isn't really right for a roguelike or game like this in general. One of my favorite parts about the combat system is the variance; a weak-willed soldier might pass out at 40 HP, but one who doesn't go down easy has his finger on the trigger until he's good and dead. Similarly, I wouldn't like a system where you say "Oh, my colonist is under X HP, I guess they're useless for combat now".
Think of my suggestion as similar to DnD, if you've ever played it. The version I play includes "shock" rules, in which characters undergo a number of random adverse effects if somethings deals more than half their total health pool in one strike. There's a huge difference between getting a few gashes from a sword and having a greataxe assist you to a personal showcase of your digestive tract. Similarly, there's a huge difference in the modern (and future) world between a conglomeration of grazes and shrapnel wounds and taking a heavy caliber to the chest.