Why do they keep tripping their own traps

[FlayedOne]

I don't use traps precisely because of the micromanagement I need to engage in to keep my pawns from triggering them. I don't think it adds anything to the game.

Wouldn't it be better to make the relevant tiles impassable for allied pawns (and tamed animals)?

[stigma]

You can remove these tiles from the allowed zone.

Great idea. Still unnecessarily micro-intensive for something that really ought to be automatic.
Maybe pawns should just treat traps as impassable tiles.

-Stigma

[Britnoth]

You can remove these tiles from the allowed zone.

Great idea. Still unnecessarily micro-intensive for something that really ought to be automatic.
Maybe pawns should just treat traps as impassable tiles.

-Stigma

How do they rearm a trap if they do not have permission to interact with it?

Traps work fine, if you take enough care to not have pawns rearming the trap before hauling the loot away first. If anything they are too good.

[Lightzy]

I made the default area for all my pawns, called "safe", without any trap tiles.
But it seems stupid that you'd have to tell them not to trip their own traps.

Ideally the game should just not have your pawns trip traps at all.


Shame though about traps, they're so insanely effecient at killing endless hordes of anything.. and can pretty much never be avoided by the AI in assault

[stigma]

I made the default area for all my pawns, called "safe", without any trap tiles.
But it seems stupid that you'd have to tell them not to trip their own traps.

Ideally the game should just not have your pawns trip traps at all.


Shame though about traps, they're so insanely effecient at killing endless hordes of anything.. and can pretty much never be avoided by the AI in assault

That's not so hard to intelligently nerf in a sensible way though. Just make it so that any enemy who sees an ally activate a trap gains a say... 70-80% chance to detect and avoid stepping on other traps in a short radius around the one that just activated, but also incurs a fairly significant movement debuff. Basically that enemy goes "Holy shit! Jim is down! This area is clearly boobytrapped and I need to step carefully!". But of course, even being careful, he might still miss one and get hit himself - but at least he won't just ignore the threat and charge ahead into a minefield where he saw 5 of buddies JUST get killed by traps.

In terms of gameplay this would heavily nerf cheeze-tactics like long corridors of traps, or other methods employing mass amounts of traps in chokepoints. The first guy goes in and gets trapped and now his buddies understand the threat and are much less likely to fall victim themselves.

On the other hand it would not nerf more appropriate and "natural" use of traps. A trap here and there to wound incoming enemies will still take them off-guard, you just can't rely on 20 traps all in one area to take them all out. Also they should be quite efficient in "minefields" - not so much to do massive damage, but to "scare" the attackers and slow them down when they realize they need to step carefully.

It also makes more expensive traps more worthwhile - as it allows you to pack more of a punch in a single hit now that spacing them out is more important, so steel traps would be ideal for trying to significantly wound the enemy, but lots of simple wooden ones would be great for a deterrent minefield where you rely on the deterrence more so than the damage they do.

-Stigma