Backstabbing

[Listy]

So I've been thinking about this for the last week. After the raid is over, and the enemy assault has broken, obviously you give pursuit (or at least I do). I normally have one guy who is ideally a Joger with a pair of bionic legs and some Melee skill.

But what to arm him with? At the two ends of the spectrum you have the Shiv and the Longsword. If both made of plasteel and legendary quality they should have roughly similar damage output (I think). The Shiv has lots of small cuts, the longsword one giant slice.

But in the pursuit of the fleeing enemy which is better? My current thinking is the Shiv as the low cooldown time allows for the pursuer to keep up with the fleeing pack of raiders. That said Lopping off a limb with the longsword does mean less attacks needed.

So what are your thoughts?

[Adamiks]

For me the best weapons are:
Longsword - for "Tower Defence"
Gladius - something like knife and like longsword
Knife - for "backstabbing"

Some blunt weapons are even better because most guys have less blunt armor, and blunt weapons have better chance to down enemy and not kill him, but.... i like stabbing!

[Negocromn]

Well, melee combat is just not smooth enough for low cooldown weapons to be used at their maximum efficiency, even if you take 5 minutes microing with pause-play a 10 second pursuit you're probably going to be far from perfect. Longswords are far more forgiving, as it is really easy to tell who is on cooldown and who is yet to strike, with most hits crippling or killing the enemy.
Maybe with one guy you won't really experience this, but start adding more brawlers and will you definitely feel what I'm saying.

Anyway, since the longsword is vastly superior to all the other melee weapons in all the other areas, there's little reason to use anything else to begin with.

[keylocke]

i think longsword is still best since you could chop off their legs on the first strike if you're lucky, it also has high base damage so it's better at getting it's damage through enemy armor. (i think)

if you give it to a bionic brawler with a high enough melee skill, you can kill most humanoids in around 5 strikes. (usually less) [mileage may vary, thnx to RNG]

also, not sure if i can discuss this yet, but i've figured out a way to "exploit" one of the A11 events to train my brawlers. i'll share it when it's released (i'm not sure if it's considered an "exploit" though)

[Boboid]

Pawns can't move after completing a melee attack until their weapon is off cooldown. Even if you manually order them to do so.
Ignoring material modifiers that means if you're using a longsword in order to chase someone down your pawn will have to stand around for a full 2.5 seconds after swinging before it can move again and attempt to catch up.

This is fairly important since after being struck in melee combat pawns *must* stand still for a short period of time which makes knives a lot better at keeping opponents from fleeing, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're more likely to kill them before they reach the edge of the map if you're only using a single person to chase. Keep in mind other colonists benefit from the hit-stun effect of knives.

(Shivs are pieces of crap by the way - strictly worse than knives, so stick to knives.)

Long story short - Knives are about 80% of the dps of longswords and swing about 66% faster which effectively means that pawns armed with longswords have to spend 66% more time running between hits. ( Not accounting for the hit-stun effect which the knives benefit more from. )

Ignoring the nature of wounds I'd say that Knives look like they've got the edge in this respect as your Longsword armed colonist would have to be significantly faster than the fleeing pawn in order to compensate for all that extra run time in order to maximize the Longsword dps which would bring the average kill time to below the knife's.

That said, a lucky longsword hit might remove a limb or instantly kill the fleeing pawn whereas an optimal knife hit is probably only going to slow them down.

Over long chases knives will be more consistent and will minimize the average distance a fleeing pawn covers, but they're less likely to spontaneously kill an opponent over the course of a chase that was so short that the knife couldn't have output the requisite dps.



Really what you want to do is have more than 1 pawn chasing down each raider, preferably one armed with a Knife and the other with a Longsword. The Knife will consistently hit-stun the target and weaken every hit-location, the longsword as a result will be able to more quickly catch targets and maximize its own dps while also being more likely to completely remove pre-wounded locations.

[keylocke]

i think the level of equipment should also be considered. since better swords + higher melee skills + bionics = higher chance of incapacitation/instakill per hit, multiplied by number of swordsmen.

besides, i've often seen knife attacks get deflected by power armor (though i might just be imagining things).

[Boboid]

i think the level of equipment should also be considered. since better swords + higher melee skills + bionics = higher chance of incapacitation/instakill per hit, multiplied by number of swordsmen.

Well to a degree - I'm comparing weapons of equal quality to determine the merits of the weapon types.
Higher quality weapons will do more damage but if they're of equal quality the %'s I listed are correct.
Higher melee skill isn't biased towards either weapon type in the long term.
There's a slightly counterintuitive scenario whereby a low accuracy colonist is probably more suited to having a Longsword since the average distance covered when wielding a knife is likely too far to be practical, so you're essentially just hoping for a lucky hit with a sword at that point. That aside it's fairly irrelevant.

Bionics don't increase the damage per swing of melee strikes, only the manipulation of the pawn and by extension their accuracy. So, see above.

besides, i've often seen knife attacks get deflected by power armor (though i might just be imagining things).

Fairly sure you're imagining things. Rimworld mitigation isn't flat armor which prevents X points of damage, it's % based damage reduction.

[keylocke]

i dunno, i think a legendary plasteel sword still has better chances for a instakill/incapacitate per hit than a legendary plasteel knife. this usually means you get higher chance for instakill/incapacitate on the first strike when using multiple swordsmen compared to the same number of knife wielders.

so if you're planning on ganging up multiple brawlers against a fleeing enemy, might as well just use longswords.

hit-kill-move-on.

as for the deflection. perhaps the only reason why i notice knives getting deflected more often is coz they have to hit more times before downing an opponent compared to longswords. (hence, more chances of seeing it get deflected)

edit : what i meant by "deflected" is when the attack hits, but instead damaging the target, it just emits a spark. as compared to a "miss" which doesn't actually hit anything.

[Negocromn]

I can see Boboid's point, and it makes sense for the most part.

But it doesn't translate that well into the game. The problem is the enemy pawns don't have a health pool, but various single parts with individual health, so even if in theory the knife does 80% of the longsword damage, in practice it's not even close to close to close. Every single longsword hit cripples or instakills pretty much any human enemy, while the knife... let's just say it's not on the same level.

In the game this means that a 4 longswordsmen squad (or multiple 4 lgswdsmen sqds) are very efficient at killing or disabling enemies, as usually you won't even need all 4 attacks per enemy pawn and can easily and consistently butcher multiple enemies, while any other squad composition won't be near as good and certainly not as easy to micro. If I had the patience (and the game installed atm) I would test this extensively lol. I'd bet anything that, besides really low brawler counts where there's no consistent stopping power, adding a swordsman will always beat adding another kind of brawler.