Medieval Factions

[JimmyAgnt007]

I think the Medieval Euro Knights and Peasants type armies should replace the natives as far as tactics go.  Some new weapons like catapults, crossbows, and that kinda stuff, we could throw some neat Roman Empire stuff in there as well for flavor.

The natives on the other hand should be more stealthy like trying to sneak up and ambush colonists while they are out hunting or recovering drop pods.  Rather than launching outright raids.

Either side, though most likely the Medieval, should be able to use fire arrows for setting stuff ablaze just to tick you off.  Natives could just start fires without you knowing and dont even appear on the map until after they have launched their attack.

Ambush events would force us as players to actually have dedicated soldiers and patrols/guards like so many of suggested before.  Its not needed at all right now but would be in this case. 

[Limdood]

Natives could just start fires without you knowing and dont even appear on the map until after they have launched their attack.

Ambush events would force us as players to actually have dedicated soldiers and patrols/guards like so many of suggested before.  Its not needed at all right now but would be in this case.

NO!  no stealth!  we're not members of the colony, we're fellow storytellers.  We work with the AI storyteller to tell a rich story.  We're not colony members, colony managers, or God.  No stealth is something i VERY much agree with Tynan on.

...fire arrows are a nifty idea though.

crossbows aren't really useful...the bows in game already simulate crossbows fairly well.  They already do ludicrously high damage.  Crossbows had shorter range, worse accuracy, slightly longer reload times, but more power.  Since more power isn't really very feasible considering the current power of bows, adding a WORSE bow into the game for more advanced troops would be a bit silly.  If anything, rename and retexture the great bow into a crossbow (reduce the range) and add in a new bow with long range, faster shooting, and about half the damage.

The problem with adding in "full plate" as an in between from armor and power armor is that it would have to be horribly unwieldy...There's a reason those guys were mounted.  Their mobility was utter crap on foot.

Finally, while i would love to see the medieval raids with different behaviors, such as i mentioned in my last post, It currently can't be done...the AI doesn't allow for that...yet.  If the combat AI improves (and there's no reason to think it won't....just not for a while), then new factions with unique combat tactics are quite feasible (and, in fact, almost guaranteed to happen).

[JimmyAgnt007]

A right, I forgot about the no stealth thing.  Honestly I didnt like the idea of dedicated guards and such.  I just wanted a way to make raids from the more primitive natives to be more in line with something other than a direct assault.  Maybe we can still have ambushes from the map edge or something.  Or wandering visitors are the ones to decide to attack if they think they can get away with it.  Poison would be good still.

[Austupaio]

The problem with adding in "full plate" as an in between from armor and power armor is that it would have to be horribly unwieldy...There's a reason those guys were mounted.  Their mobility was utter crap on foot.

That's a myth, if mobility was so bad in full harness, it would not have been considered the pinnacle of infantry kit. Foot knights were not uncommon, and again, if they had to be mounted to be effective, it would not have been the case that bodyguards and retainers that were around for fighting indoors would wear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz7naZ08Jd4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCvOC2VwDc

In both examples, the wearers have far less experience at wearing the harness and fighting in it than a soldier of the time would have, and on top of that, the harness is not perfectly fitted to them, as a knight's would have been.

[A Friend]

Metal armor too heavy.

It's a video game. We can bend a few rules here and there as long as it's fun and fits appropriately in the game world.

Edit: In other words, make the armored knights have reasonable speed from a gameplay perspective.
A skinny little pawn can already transport a mythical furry blue giraffe from about a mile or something away with their bare hands so why is wearing a metal box an issue?

[cultist]

So I've been thinking about something... would a medieval society in the future even exist very long? Any society is bound to have some kind of technological progress, and since this is in many cases a matter of rediscovering technologies rather than creating them from scratch, you'd think medieval planets would be able to skip over the whole plate-and-horse part pretty quickly and get to gunpowder weapons.

There's also the matter of how technological progress in the actual middle ages on Earth was stunted because of several factors such as religion and the fall of the Roman empire and the political and cultural shockwaves this caused. Things (probably) wouldn't happen like that on a different planet in a different time.

Maybe I'm overthinking this.

[REMworlder]

I think it's important to not get too distracted by specifics and reality. We know from lore and from character histories that all sorts of levels of sociotechnological development exist. There's also no one RimWorld, so lots of variants exist; this is canon as well. Here's what the lore says about medieval worlds:

Medieval worlds - Similar to Earth in the 17th century down to the agricultural revolution. Dominated be [sic] feudalism and social backwardness. Planets can stay in this state for millennia.

Really what's more important is how the faction slots into gameplay. The most realistic and logical faction might not be good to put in the game simply because it's not Fun.

Here are three questions I ask when I think about factions:
1. What is the simplest way to make the faction unique to the player?
2. How are raids different? How do player tactics change?
3. What is the minimum amount of new content and work needed? Adding in 20 new medieval siege engines, weapons, and armor sets might be cool until the next alpha is delayed a month because of the additional coding and bug squashing needed.

I'd also consider areas of the game that haven't been explored much yet. No factions currently use attack animals, for example.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Of course its a lot of work to do any of this, but working out the details now may make a decision for Tynan easier down the line if he ever thinks about it.    Your 3 points are an excellent set of questions to ask for any faction addition.

About Medieval worlds/factions.  Once a society is at this stage, its hard to break out but even if it only takes a few hundred years we could have just landed in the middle of it and we wont be playing the game (that specific colony) for the few hundred years it takes them to break out of it.  Assuming it would only take them that long.  My point is that there could easily be a Medieval faction on that random world at the moment we crash.  So now we got to deal with it.

Now to answer those questions.
1. Appearance and apparel.  Weapons.  Since those things are the ones you will see first.
2. I would see Medieval troops come in formations surrounding a Knight.  On foot at first then maybe mounted later on.  They would make camp and build some siege weapons before attacking.  I think they would have a lot of archers firing barrages of arrows (maybe fire) as an area attack instead of one unit attacking a specific other unit.  Then sending in the men at arms to soalk up the bullets before the Knights move in to engage once all the colonist gunmen are in melee.  Might be difficult to program but this is my theory.  Siege weapons would be launching stuff the whole time.
3. 20 new asset pieces might be a little low but something like that I could see Tynan outsourcing to some modders who want to offer their asset work to the game.  There are a lot of good looking stuff in the mods and im sure many would be happy to see it incorporated into vanilla.  That way Tynan can focus on the programming.

As for the other areas in the game I totally agree should come first.  This is just a discussion of "if he does it, how would he do it?".  Rather than if he should do it next.

[Toggle]

Tynan doesn't really outsource code. There's the people who help, like in credits, but not the modders. As for coding time, he's said in previous posts it's more about priority. He could of added 100 new weapons, or create a new faction, or spend the time on stuff such as the relationship system. In order to make the medieval faction differ from tribals he'd have to spend some time to code the way they work the raids and the things they use, which is lower priority probably then current things.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Im not saying outsourcing the code, just the artwork for the additional assets like the armor and outfits.

Also I know the whole thing isnt a priority, just if and when he decides to do it, what should he do?  Thats the point here. 

[kingtyris]

I would support adding medievals to the game, even so far as to add Ish's artwork from her medieval mod.

As for the argument that a medieval faction wouldn't be functionally very different from a tribal faction, you do have a point there. And my rebuttal is.... So what? It would add flavor and variety to a game that, lets face it, gets VERY repetitive. Wouldn't you rather fight off 5 waves of tribals and 5 waves of medievals than just 10 waves of tribals?

[Toggle]

I would support adding medievals to the game, even so far as to add Ish's artwork from her medieval mod.

As for the argument that a medieval faction wouldn't be functionally very different from a tribal faction, you do have a point there. And my rebuttal is.... So what? It would add flavor and variety to a game that, lets face it, gets VERY repetitive. Wouldn't you rather fight off 5 waves of tribals and 5 waves of medievals than just 10 waves of tribals?

As I said, priority. It's likely Tynan would never really code this in if it was tribals with a few different pieces of armour and weapons, or even a few different backstories. It doesn't contribute enough to the game as other updates could.

[kingtyris]

As I said, priority. It's likely Tynan would never really code this in if it was tribals with a few different pieces of armour and weapons, or even a few different backstories. It doesn't contribute enough to the game as other updates could.

I realize such an update wouldn't be high priority, I'm just voicing my support for it. It honestly would be about as low effort as a piece of an update could get; Tynan has integrated art from the community before, and there are already medieval backstories. We really have no idea what Tynans exact road map is. I know this kind of update isn't as likely as others but its not unrealistic by any stretch.

[Toggle]

Yeah, but my point was, he won't spend time on something that days 2 hours when he could spend 8 hours coding on a more important update for the game. He's said before he could make several new factions and weapons in some hours or add the new social update.