I want to hear about exploit strategies!

[b0rsuk]

Shooting siegers with a sniper rifle would be nicely countered if they had fast guard dogs with them. As soon as a sniper shot is fired, they unleash 2-3 dogs at him.
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Grenades work through walls. If there's an enemy on the other side of a wall, throw a grenade there. Works very well with stone walls and raw stone. I mean the explosion hurts through a wall.

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Reconnect abuse - instead of building a switch, place a disconnected circuit next to the turret you want to power. Then manually press Reconnect and you save pawn time and components.

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IED exploit - place one IED as a trigger, scatter and forbid more shells as the payload. Not sure if it's a real exploit. You can cancel construction of other IED to get one shell per square, then forbid the shell. Works best indoors so shells don't deteriorate.

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Effective but cheesy - place several IED traps around a crashed ship part, far away enough to not go off in a chain reaction. Poke and run away. I'm not sure this is an exploit, but it would make sense if some mechanoids were on guard and just wouldn't allow me to spend a lot of time constructing stuff around them.


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Unroof building when stuff is on fire. Don't hold doors open, don't build firefoam, don't plan ahead. Works everywhere except under mountains.

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Use harmless decoy colonists to draw enemy fire. Make him wear Personal Shield and as much armour as you can afford, and put him in cover in first line of defense. Enemies will focus on shooting him and do very little damage, while your real damage dealers have fun.

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Give a pawn a crappy inaccurate weapon and make him hunt to train Shooting skill.

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Order a pawn to craft expensive items or art, then cancel construction when it's about to end. This trains crafting skill with no material used. Related - make people construct stone chess tables for obscene amount of Construction xp and very little resources used.

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I like to build my open colonies like this. But I realized it feels exploit-ish for a couple of reasons. Basically grab as much land as you can, because roofs are essentially free in Rimworld.

1. Outer perimeter walls confuse the hell out of sappers. They treat a wall as THE objective, and only seem to consider how to breach the outer wall. They have no idea what their goal is or where to go to cause lots of damage.

2. This lets you turn your entire colony including fields into one huge "workshop" room, like on the left. You start getting bonuses for Spacious and other room bonuses if you do it carefully. Actually it happened accidentally to me. It might be a bit dirty, but it's invariably luxurious and extremely spacious. I suppose the beauty can be fixed with planting dandellions everywhere.

3. You leave a few doors open, then when wargs come you just close those doors and they bark outside. Your fields and everything inside is safe. Even if sappers come they tend to be attacked by wargs. But even on Randy it's extremely rare to have a raid during a manhunter event.

4. Outer perimeter wall makes toxic fallout trivial. While it may look like it takes a long to build, it's not so if you initially use wood.

[Vaporisor]

Shooting siegers with a sniper rifle would be nicely countered if they had fast guard dogs with them. As soon as a sniper shot is fired, they unleash 2-3 dogs at him.

Wonder if they can make guards during sieges.  Snipe and running isn't a bad tactic, is smart and a bit roleplay, but have some snipers or similar of their own set specifically to respond?  release the hounds would be cool.

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Grenades work through walls. If there's an enemy on the other side of a wall, throw a grenade there. Works very well with stone walls and raw stone. I mean the explosion hurts through a wall.

Yeah, I hate it when a grenade flies through the wall

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Reconnect abuse - instead of building a switch, place a disconnected circuit next to the turret you want to power. Then manually press Reconnect and you save pawn time and components.

Wonder if they can make connecting, reconnecting a manual feature.  So build it, then you gotta tell it where to connect instead of the auto.  Pawn comes to hook up?

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IED exploit - place one IED as a trigger, scatter and forbid more shells as the payload. Not sure if it's a real exploit. You can cancel construction of other IED to get one shell per square, then forbid the shell. Works best indoors so shells don't deteriorate.

Nah, that isn't an exploit.  That is clever tactics.  I mean it is an explosive being detonated by an explosion.

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Effective but cheesy - place several IED traps around a crashed ship part, far away enough to not go off in a chain reaction. Poke and run away. I'm not sure this is an exploit, but it would make sense if some mechanoids were on guard and just wouldn't allow me to spend a lot of time constructing stuff around them.

Well, as it stands, that is a pretty clever tactic.  The building of them might not be hostile hence the mechanoids not activating to defend their bit of ship?

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Unroof building when stuff is on fire. Don't hold doors open, don't build firefoam, don't plan ahead. Works everywhere except under mountains.

Will poke at this at the end.

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Use harmless decoy colonists to draw enemy fire. Make him wear Personal Shield and as much armour as you can afford, and put him in cover in first line of defense. Enemies will focus on shooting him and do very little damage, while your real damage dealers have fun.

Hrm.  Is a bit of an AI issue.  Perhaps one way is that shooters focus on main threat within range so they keep shooting at your shooters and melee just run right by if not a threat.  The threat rating set by the equipped weapon. compared to defence.  So weapon up threats, armor drops threat.  Result is a range of influence for triggering aggro?  Therefore if you have an unarmored with a legendary minigun firing, he is going to priority over everything else regardless of where he stands?

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Give a pawn a crappy inaccurate weapon and make him hunt to train Shooting skill.

That isn't exploit.  It really is learning to shoot.  Put it into real life perspective.  you are trying to learn to shoot and given a crappy terribad gun that doesn't really hurt the animals.  You will learn how to compensate for aim misalignments and where to aim for.  Over time, you will be able to make that crappy gun shoot not too bad.  Suddenly you are given a high power, high accuracy precision weapon?

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Order a pawn to craft expensive items or art, then cancel construction when it's about to end. This trains crafting skill with no material used. Related - make people construct stone chess tables for obscene amount of Construction xp and very little resources used.

Hrm... I guess it is somewhat exploity.   Perhaps a reduction in cancel yield per percentage done?  Every 10%, lose 2% of material return?  This means it stays on similar par to if you just built it and deconstructed?

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I like to build my open colonies like this. But I realized it feels exploit-ish for a couple of reasons. Basically grab as much land as you can, because roofs are essentially free in Rimworld.


1. Outer perimeter walls confuse the hell out of sappers. They treat a wall as THE objective, and only seem to consider how to breach the outer wall. They have no idea what their goal is or where to go to cause lots of damage.

2. This lets you turn your entire colony including fields into one huge "workshop" room, like on the left. You start getting bonuses for Spacious and other room bonuses if you do it carefully. Actually it happened accidentally to me. It might be a bit dirty, but it's invariably luxurious and extremely spacious. I suppose the beauty can be fixed with planting dandellions everywhere.

3. You leave a few doors open, then when wargs come you just close those doors and they bark outside. Your fields and everything inside is safe. Even if sappers come they tend to be attacked by wargs. But even on Randy it's extremely rare to have a raid during a manhunter event.

4. Outer perimeter wall makes toxic fallout trivial. While it may look like it takes a long to build, it's not so if you initially use wood.

The wall one is interesting.  Isn't that unheard of.  The bonus for spacious and beauty if you grow and home zone?  Well I consider that like having a beautiful or big front yard.  Stepping outside and seeing a massive expance of land all yours would put me in a mood.  Is fair.

The roofs though...  This is something I read a few times for the intant on, instant off.  On page one he said that a roof could be set to be buildable.  Maybe that is the answer?  Make a new visual toggle in the bottom right to toggle roof on/off.  An on roof having some transparency to it perhaps?  This way you have to build a roof and the roof can catch fire.

[Agent00Soul]

The worst exploit in the game is shooting through jammed open doors. You can shoot them, they can't shoot you..

[Thane]

Deep water spawning right next to mountains. Makes for a bit of a janky embrasure if you construct around it right. Enemy pawns don't seem to know what to do, don't even fire with ranged weapons since there is no path. I exploited this to no end on my last world.

Other exploity tactics. Hmmmm... Insect hives don't seem to spawn outside the room where they spawn. Unless the insects break out into a new room. This means you can make a 12x12, or so, room, put turrets around the periphery and farm it for lots of meat and jelly. Just have to clear out a few of the extra hives every week, to prevent turret losses. This sort of farm pretty much fed that same colony with the deep water embrasure.

[schnivelbiv]

I am not sure why this exploit is not more common on these forums. Rather than a kill box I use a Gratuitous Ganking Gauntlet!

http://imgur.com/QIRC6Sc

Nearly all baddies will ignore the colonists as they hobble through the sandbag filled hallway while they get stabbed over and over through the corners. This base entrance can kill hordes of attackers using melee attacks with very little danger of retaliation. Even melee raiders/tribals/robots do not fight back even though they could.

It only stops working vs mad animals (because they just target the closest person) and when something in the hallway actually gets line of sight on something it wants to kill. Then it starts looking for targets and fighting back. When this happens I just move the attacked pawn back a square to get rid of agro and the attacker goes back to limping through the gauntlet.

On the one hand, I don't want you to fix this because I love using murder holes like this. On the other hand, I think this is clearly an exploit and it is very powerful.

[Chibiabos]

Sorry if someone else addressed this, but ... yeah siege raiders could use an AI tweak.  They'll often have a sniper among them with a sniper rifle, but often enough the sniper will build and when they are building, they aren't protecting their teammates.  I don't think sniping siegers is an exploit though the snipers among the siegers should ALWAYS be on guard duty and should never build.

I have not yet deployed them, but I'm currently attempting something that might be considered an exploit -- taming boomrats and boomalopes and giving all of them 'release' training.  Basically free self-guiding incendiary grenades

I dunno if this is considered an exploit or not, but when getting hit with raiders, I will look to see if there are any cougars or bears near the raiders.  I'd hit the cougar/bear with my sniper to put it into a frenzy, and they'll go after the nearest people -- since I sniped from a distance and made sure to target one near the raiders, that's the raiders that'll get attacked.  I also look out for boomrats/boomalopes, particularly if they are waiting before attacking or building siege as that will start a firestorm near where the raiders are that can really help me.

[BlazingAngel665]

Bug farming can be done by creating a door with a chunk in it. The bugs will treat the door as closed while the colonist will fire through it. This behavior is obviously not intended.

[Chibiabos]

You can grab loot from land traders without actually killing them -- I found out accidentally the trader muffalos will drink themselves to incapacitation if there is beer nearby, and if they become incapacitated they instantly dump their entire inventory.

[keylocke]

I am not sure why this exploit is not more common on these forums. Rather than a kill box I use a Gratuitous Ganking Gauntlet!

http://imgur.com/QIRC6Sc

Nearly all baddies will ignore the colonists as they hobble through the sandbag filled hallway while they get stabbed over and over through the corners. This base entrance can kill hordes of attackers using melee attacks with very little danger of retaliation. Even melee raiders/tribals/robots do not fight back even though they could.

It only stops working vs mad animals (because they just target the closest person) and when something in the hallway actually gets line of sight on something it wants to kill. Then it starts looking for targets and fighting back. When this happens I just move the attacked pawn back a square to get rid of agro and the attacker goes back to limping through the gauntlet.

On the one hand, I don't want you to fix this because I love using murder holes like this. On the other hand, I think this is clearly an exploit and it is very powerful.

omg. i just learned something. 

[zandadoum]

@Tynan

how is shooting siegers with a sniper an exploit? most of the time they have snipers too and shoot back.
what's next, using mortars is an exploit too?

if you want to hunt REAL exploits, how about roof collapsing on evil/poison ships?

[Mathenaut]

Gimmicky solutions to gimmicky strategies won't plug a perceived exploit, it will just carve room for a new exploit. Putting dogs in a raider camp doesn't stop me from sniping the camp, it just means the dogs get shot first. Thanks for the meat I guess.

You're not really going to fix this without completely revamping sieges, because anything in an open field like that is vulnerable to snipers and counter-mortar fire. Those sieges are mincemeat vs anyone prepared to handle them the second they show up.

I think we're well and off of the bar set for an exploit in the first few pages by now, though..

[Cimm0]

When mechs with miniguns attack, shielded pawns can stand up to them for a long time due to the minigun spread.

Move a shielded pawn up first, until they become targeted. A shield can withstand a single minigun often forever, while non-shielded pawns get plenty of time to shoot from another direction.

The exploit here would be that the mech doesn't detect that the shielded pawn is not a threat, while the multiple pawns with rifles are.
Perhaps a threat/aggro mechanic would be helpful here.

This!

Add 2-3 shielded pawns behind rocks (I usually use the ones who can't fight for backstory reasons) and you can rotate them if one of them loses the shield.

Meanwhile, snipers prioritize fire at mechanoids that use incendiary weapons or charge lance.

[b0rsuk]

Shooting siegers with a sniper rifle would be nicely countered if they had fast guard dogs with them. As soon as a sniper shot is fired, they unleash 2-3 dogs at him.

Wonder if they can make guards during sieges.  Snipe and running isn't a bad tactic, is smart and a bit roleplay, but have some snipers or similar of their own set specifically to respond?  release the hounds would be cool.

Real snipers typically fire several shots and immediately hide somewhere else, because the usual response is to hunt them down. What they do is essentially an ambush, and whatever happens no one is going to just stay there and let be sniped. And if a sniper shoots from very far away  - say 1 km and more - it's enough to simply stand up and walk away before the round arrives. That's why snipers don't use laser pointers, and hardly anyone else does.
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Grenades work through walls. If there's an enemy on the other side of a wall, throw a grenade there. Works very well with stone walls and raw stone. I mean the explosion hurts through a wall.

Yeah, I hate it when a grenade flies through the wall

No, no I don't meant it FLYING through a wall which I guess is possible but will obviously be fixed. I mean you're on one side, enemy is on the other side, you throw a grenade as close as possible at the wall, and explosion deals damage despite exploding on your side.

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Reconnect abuse - instead of building a switch, place a disconnected circuit next to the turret you want to power. Then manually press Reconnect and you save pawn time and components.

Also works with two batteries. If you have a remote machine like a smelter near frontline, keep one charged battery and one empty. Press 'reconnect' to connect to the empty battery when you're done smelting.

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Order a pawn to craft expensive items or art, then cancel construction when it's about to end. This trains crafting skill with no material used. Related - make people construct stone chess tables for obscene amount of Construction xp and very little resources used.

Hrm... I guess it is somewhat exploity.   Perhaps a reduction in cancel yield per percentage done?  Every 10%, lose 2% of material return?  This means it stays on similar par to if you just built it and deconstructed?

Or award xp once the work is finished, proportionally to the commitment. I played a free team-based FPS/RTS "Tremulous", which is about aliens versus humans, both building bases end upgrading their equipment. Credits for weapon and gear are gained by killing enemies. Each type of enemy is worth a certain number of points, say 600 for a smaller alien. If two marines kill it, one dealing 200 and another 400 damage, one of them gets 200 credits and another 400 (plus a small bonus for the finishing blow). They get nothing at all until the alien is killed.

The wall one is interesting.  Isn't that unheard of.  The bonus for spacious and beauty if you grow and home zone?  Well I consider that like having a beautiful or big front yard.  Stepping outside and seeing a massive expance of land all yours would put me in a mood.  Is fair.

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Something related occured to me - you can put a stockpile in a room with another purpose and it will be a big boost to its impresiveness. So you can make a plasteel, gold, jade, uranium, silver stockpile in dining room to cheer everyone up. Or put it in someone's room to satisfy a greedy colonist. It's really an exploit because the silver or plasteel is not his, and it's not there forever, but they get a mood boost. I think at least greedy colonists should get an extra mood penalty when a room impresiveness goes down by a lot.

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Enemies will outrange your turrets ? Turn power off with a switch or uninstalling a battery. Wait until they are in range of turrets. Turn the power back on. I used this against 3 scyther raid in first year.

I think the solution could be enemies sniping even unpowered turrets if they don't risk anything to do that. Scythers deal high damage and have high range, turrets are relatively expensive and fragile. Wargs and other manhunters is another story.

[rawr161]

For the bug problem I use explosives. RPGs work great, nades are a little riskier because you have to get closer.

[b0rsuk]

Drafting a colonist doesn't disturb sleep. If you know a colonist will enter a room of another colonist, draft the sleeper. It only has side effects when the sleeper is highly rested - he will go out of bed without getting full rest benefits. But if the sleeper is barely rested, he will go back to bed without any mood loss.

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People keep saying you hit more with minigun if you target a square next to the target, instead of shooting it directly. Because of miss radius. I can't verify, I haven't used it.