Wood weapons are not used, longer paced game, levels gained too fast

[wbonxx]

I have the feeling there is something being skipped at the beginning of each game.

All the plants can already be seeded. Weaponized (rifles/turrets) defence is already there.
The crafting spot on the ground is never used, apart from building up the crafting skill by crafting weapons that are never to be used.

Everything jumps quite fast to crafting rifles and snipers and using advanced weapons found.
Turrets for defence are a must.

I believe would be much more enjoyable to have the beginning of the game with less weapons to use. Less things to build and plants to seed (see the other topic, expand the research tree).
I can imagine defending only with wooden maces and bows at the beginning and for the first year. Eating only potatoes. A lot of body body fights.
Maybe there could be even and earliest face where one has to survive the nature. Eating potatoes. Fighting only against animals and building simple defences made of wood.

I have the same accelerated feeling when it comes to food.
From the beginning I have just to seed as much as possible, harvest and I'm more or less done for the rest of the game.

Would be much more interesting having this early face, where colonist rely mostly on butchered creature cooked on a camp fire. harvested berries. Maybe chickens.

I have almost finished the game at the extreme level with perma death.
So this are more or less some final thoughts. Maybe I will open another topic on the enemy AI... or start another game from scratch

[b0rsuk]

As for wood, I think wooden blunt weapons should deal as much damage as all other weapons. Clubs and maces are really simple weapons. Wooden ones should just degrade much faster (weapons don't currently degrade).

The game is getting there. Previous alpha had NO components (but also no crafting of guns and armor). There was one research table and you were able to immediately research everything.

My personal annoyance is that players immediately jump to keeping all food in fridge. Earlier alphas advised players to stockpile food for winter, however it's much easier to just build a sunlamp in a roofed room plus some power generators. It might be because saving so much food takes an immense amount of storage space.

By the way you would probably love the survival board game "Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island" by Ignacy Trzewiczek. It's a really hard survival game that has what you want from a survival game. A desperate struggle where you must battle weather, injuries, bad luck, wild beasts, construct shelter and various upgrades (ideas) and still complete one of scenario objectives on a randomized board.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/121921/robinson-crusoe-adventures-cursed-island

There are many things to do, and most of them feel important. Each turn is a puzzle.

One of the fun parts is that even the research tree is randomized. It relies on a random selection of "ideas", and to make them work you need resources from specific kinds of terrain you might or might not discover. For example to make a knife you need mountains, presumably to get some flint.

[Boston]

Pretty much.

In real life, wooden weapons, like clubs and such, are very lethal. Getting a wooden club upside the head will kill you. Wooden spears and arrows are easy to make.

Really, there shouldn't be a difference between weapons made of different materials. Arrows and spears made from stone will penetrate just as deep as projectiles made of steel. The skill of the user should determine effectiveness, not material.

The Aztecs successfully fought off steel-and-gun-wielding Spaniards using stone weapons, after all.

[Songleaves]

A wooden club does not hurt nearly as much as a stone club. A wooden club may kill someone if struck to the head depending on the strength of the wielder, a granite club, however, will obliterate their skull. And let's not start pretending that Spanish tactics and weaponry weren't far superior to the Aztecs, the Aztecs fought off the Spanish and their allies for only two years before surrendering and had only huge numbers for an advantage.

[Boston]

Native American weapons disagree.

Contrary to popular opinion, wooden clubs aren't just heavy sticks. And stone clubs weren't humongous heavy monstrosities.

A wooden club is as directly lethal as a stone one. They work in, quite literally, the same fashion. You can crack ribs and shatter skulls with a wooden ball club just as easily as with a stone club. In all actuality, wooden clubs tend to be "better" than stone ones, as they tend to be better balanced.

How do I know? I make them

Also, I am not talking about tactics. A stone-bladed macuahuitl could decapitate a horse, and remove limbs and the like. The Spanish won through use of "divide and conquer", by allying and riling up subjigated tribes, not because their 200-or-so steel breastplates and smoothbore matchlocks muskets were so OPplsnerf.

[Songleaves]

It is universally acknowledged that the Spanish had superior equipment, and despite the common belief that they conquered so much of the New World due just to political alliances and disease it is also the case that their superior equipment, and the tactics that work in tandem with them, play a significant role. Here's a passage from "The Military Revolution: Origins and First Tests Abroad," The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, Clifford J. Rogers, ed. (Boulder, Colorado; Westview Press, 1995), pp. 299-333. http://www.angelfire.com/ga4/guilmartin.com/Revolution.html

Latin Americanists, perceiving the shortfall between tactical reality and earlier hypotheses, have correctly pointed out the importance of Amerindian allies to the conquistadors.68 Beyond doubt, neither Cortés nor Pizarro could have succeeded without the aid of numerous and well-motivated indigenous allies. But the ethnohistorians recognize that their explanation, though far more satisfying than previous hypotheses, is incomplete,69 for the Spanish acquired allies willing to fight alongside them only after they had demonstrated their overwhelming tactical superiority in the field.70 On what, then, did that superiority depend?

Sheer technological advantage was a crucial part of the answer. Probably the most important single Spanish advantage lay in the superiority of steel swords over hand‑held Amerindian, weapons. The macahuitl was a slashing weapon of awesome power, but to be effective required a time‑consuming full swing, giving an alert Spanish swordsman or mounted lancer the opportunity to deliver a quick thrust and recover. Andean stone‑headed clubs and spears were at an even greater disadvantage. Horses were essential to Spanish success, a fact reflected in the enormous value the conquistadors placed on the animals and the pains to which they went to care for them. Steel armor magnified the advantages of Spanish slashing and thrusting weapons and permitted greater aggressiveness in close combat. Except for helmets, however, the conquistadors mostly abandoned steel armor in favor of quilted protective garments of canvas or cotton in imitation of Amerindian practice and armor was not itself a major factor.

Also are the stone clubs you make short, or wooden clubs with stone mounted on their ends? I am discussing stone clubs as I imagine them in Rimworld, being identical to wooden clubs except for material, and that is what my argument are concerning.

[Boston]

This is the problem with Rimworld. The weapons are entirely unrealistic, as I have already laid out.

In "reality", very few items are made entirely from one material. Sure, there are clubs made entirely from stone in real life, but in 99.999% of cases, the handle is going to be made from wood.

A club made of stone longer than a foot or so would be too heavy to swing, if not lift. The "clubs" made entirely of stone were not swung, but thrusted

Oh, and using a document from 20+ years ago as proof? Basically obsolete. Look for a more recent dissertation, please.

While technology certainly had an effect in singular combat, that ultimately doesn't really matter due to sheer logistics. The number of conquistadors was between 2-5% of the number of Aztecs. At that level, what each soldier is equipped with doesn't really matter.

"Quantity has a quality all on its own"

[Songleaves]

And why do you think they fitted stone ends onto wooden clubs? Because it increases the damage that they can do.

And criticizing something from the 90s as obsolete is laughable in historical fields of study, but if you want something more recent then here is an excerpt from Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) by a well respected expert in the area, Matthew Restall:

The one weapon, then, whose efficacy is indubitable was the steel sword. It alone was worth more than a horse, a gun, and a mastiff put together. Because a steel sword was longer and less brittle than the obsidian weapons of Mesoamerican warriors, and longer and sharper than Andean clubbing weapons or copper-tipped axes, a Spaniard could fight for hours and receive light flesh wounds and bruises while killing many natives. Spanish swords were just the right length for reaching an enemy who lacked a similar weapon. Pizarro preferred to fight on foot so he could better manipulate his sword. Descriptions of battles in which Spanish swordplay caused terrible slaughter among native forces pepper the Conquest accounts of Cieza de León, Cortés, Díaz, Gómara, Jerez, Oviedo y Baños, Zárate, and others. Military historian John Guilmartin deftly summarizes the point: "While Spanish success in combat cannot be attributed to a single factor, it is clear that the other elements of Spanish superiority took effect within a tactical matrix established by the effectiveness of Spanish hand-held slashing and piercing weapons."

This trilogy of factors—disease, native disunity, and Spanish steel—goes most of the way toward explaining the Conquest's outcome. Remove just one and the likelihood of the failure of expeditions under Cortés, Pizarro, and others would have been very high.

[Boston]

And why do you think they fitted stone ends onto wooden clubs? Because it increases the damage that they can do.

And criticizing something from the 90s as obsolete is laughable in historical fields of study, but if you want something more recent then here is an excerpt from Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) by a well respected expert in the area, Matthew Restall:

The one weapon, then, whose efficacy is indubitable was the steel sword. It alone was worth more than a horse, a gun, and a mastiff put together. Because a steel sword was longer and less brittle than the obsidian weapons of Mesoamerican warriors, and longer and sharper than Andean clubbing weapons or copper-tipped axes, a Spaniard could fight for hours and receive light flesh wounds and bruises while killing many natives. Spanish swords were just the right length for reaching an enemy who lacked a similar weapon. Pizarro preferred to fight on foot so he could better manipulate his sword. Descriptions of battles in which Spanish swordplay caused terrible slaughter among native forces pepper the Conquest accounts of Cieza de León, Cortés, Díaz, Gómara, Jerez, Oviedo y Baños, Zárate, and others. Military historian John Guilmartin deftly summarizes the point: "While Spanish success in combat cannot be attributed to a single factor, it is clear that the other elements of Spanish superiority took effect within a tactical matrix established by the effectiveness of Spanish hand-held slashing and piercing weapons."

This trilogy of factors—disease, native disunity, and Spanish steel—goes most of the way toward explaining the Conquest's outcome. Remove just one and the likelihood of the failure of expeditions under Cortés, Pizarro, and others would have been very high.

If a stone-headed club and a wooden ball club weigh the same and have the same sized and shaped striking surface, they will do the same damage. #physics

As for the Aztec/Spanish argument, we are getting off topic. Regardless, stone weapons were used to kill people, and in the short term, does it really matter if you get your kidney/artery perforated by a steel weapon or a flint one? You are going to die regardless.

[Hyena]

I don't think the game is 'skipping' anything, really. You're playing as ship-wrecked members of a vastly technologically advanced people. Yeah the options for primitive weapons are there if you're in a pinch, but keep in mind that the projectile weapons in the game are largely described as being basically 'primitive' by the standards of the glitter worlds. They have tools and technologies that would make us blush, presumably.

I'm not necessarily against dragging out the 'primitive' period and getting more use out of those options, but I'm not sure I agree that there's some problem with the way the game is set up. It's not Minecraft, it's supposed to be a wild-west thing. People have guns. That's sort of the theme of the game and it makes sense in the context of the game.

I would like to see seeds turned into an item though, and only starting with a small 'survival pack' that you must get by with.

[Songleaves]

If a stone-headed club and a wooden ball club weigh the same and have the same sized and shaped striking surface, they will do the same damage. #physics

The distribution of that mass is an important facet that is commonly ignored. For instance, if I had two balls of equal mass and volume, but one was hollow and the other solid, then the solid ball would roll down a hill much faster than the hollow ball. This is due to the hollow ball having a much greater moment of inertia. Additionally, let's say there's a wall at the bottom of the hill that stops the balls. The balls would transfer the exact same amount of energy to the wall (purely due to conservation of energy) even though the solid ball was rolling faster. It follows then that if you equalize the speed of the two balls, then the hollow ball will transfer more energy upon impact than the solid ball.

We can apply this to the clubs. With a greater moment of inertia, the more top-heavy stone clubs will hit a lot harder if they are traveling at the same speed as the wooden clubs. So if I was to simply let gravity supply all the force of the swing, ensuring the clubs moving at a roughly equal speed, then the stone club would hit a lot harder. This is why tools like sledgehammers that really primarily on gravity to power the swings rather than muscle are so top heavy. But if I am primarily relying on my own strength to swing the club then if the difference in the speed in which I swing the two clubs is great enough then I can impart more force with the wooden club. This is why baseball bats aren't top heavy (amongst other factors like needing to be able to swing fast enough to hit the ball). So there's a balance that you must strike for optimizing the maximum force outputted by the club. However, since the clubs are not designed to take all of your strength to swing it would make sense that these clubs are not being swung at the maximum speeds that their wielders can muster, meaning that they should fall on the side of the balance where increases in the moment of inertia will increase their striking force. Therefore since the stone clubs have a greater moment of inertia they should hit harder.

There are other factors at play as well, such as how much of the impact is absorbed by the sponginess of the wood compared to the much more rigid stone. But those are not as significant.

[wbonxx]

Let's go back on topic please. Maybe open another one to discuss wood against iron (I still think it doesn't make sense, the weapon is also made to parry, try blocking a hit from an heavy iron axe with a wooden sword/mace).

I believe it could be fun to make slightly slower the beginning, increasing the research time, rising the energy request from the research bench. Taking off rifles/guns as starting objects. Delaying the raid with weapons.

Would be beautiful defending for the first months a little camp, witha  camp fire were to cook, bows as defence weapons, few seeds to grow potatoes and cloths made of leather from hunting.
Wooden traps and wooden defences could fit int his context.

[Boston]

I've done it, it really isn't that hard.

First thing first; you don't "block" a blow from a melee weapon, that is, try to stop the blow, you "parry" it, aka direct the force of the blow away from you.

When parrying, the material the weapon is made from doesn't really matter. You aren't using the edge to parry, either. You parry with the flat or the side of the weapon.

[Songleaves]

Apologies for delving so off-topic. I support lengthening the starting game, but feel that should mostly be done by fleshing out the starting game with more content (adding ways of preserving food without refrigeration, for example), rather than slowing down the rate at which the current content is encountered. Although I do support removing the starting guns because I feel they are overpowered and make early encounters a breeze, after which you gain better access to weapons which leads to a snowballing effect that ultimately ends in combat never being challenging or satisfying.

[Admiral Obvious]

I'm going to have to agree with the above, and support the removal of having weapons on hand during "splash down". Partially because the Survival Rifle on its own is a very decent starting weapon, which can take down Rhinos single handedly, with a competent shooter. As well as the fact that no "survival equipment" short of wartime equipment  (which I don't think is the cause for splash down, but we'll probably never know) included full caliber rifles. Occasionally a pistol may have been stored, or carried on the person, since they do work for signaling but never a rifle.

I'd be all right with removing the rifle, but allowing the pistol, as it's generally a mediocre weapon anyways, but it would offer something of a "solid" early/starting game weapon, while the player either makes bows/shivs/knives.