[A16] [WIP] Pirate Raids Overhaul

[Madman666]

So you've assembled the collection of really cool mods with tons of fancy weapons, turrets, armors, but pirates never bring them to attack you? Are you tired of mopping the floor with elite pirate mercenaries, that can't do a thing to your mighty advanced turrets, embrasures, concrete walls, moats and barbed wires? Challenge is gone... Why, oh why those silly pirates don't come wearing new shiny Rimsenal armor? Can't they bring that scary new shard rifle?

Well, now they can. Welcome to

The Idea:

If you ever wondered, why those pirates don't use all of new weapons, that are introduced with mods or why they never show up in full power armor even crazy late game, when all of your colonists already have one - here's an answer for you - they just don't have the money for it. That's right - each pirate type (drifter, scavenger, thrasher) has different fixed range of money available to generate gear they have. Since most of mod's new weapons are usually good and expensive for balancing purposes, pirates just can't afford to generate them. That also true for power armor.

However simply adding tons of money to each pirate type will just break the game completely with pirates coming at you packed in power suits wielding rocket launcher at day 6ish. Also changing vanilla pirates will likely cause a lot of problems compatibility-wise. Thats why I introduce you tiered pirate class system:

Tier 1 includes vanilla pirate types with atrociously crappy gear - drifter, scavengers, thrashers, pirates.
Tier 2 includes vanilla mercenary types that come mid-late game with gear range from stupidly awful to actually good - grenadiers, gunners, heavies, snipers, slashers, pirate bosses and elites (they can even have 1 piece of usually crappy power armor, wow!)

And here we come to new tiers added by this mod, that will be able come at different stages of the game, they'll have prespecified weapon types, gear quality, drugs, bionics (yep, late game bionic Arni will come say hi from time to time) etc.

For now I have planned and coded Tier 3 of Space Pirate Forces:

Mainly consists of more or less lucky thugs and bandits, smart enough to loot or buy some basic armor first and a good weapon in working condition next. While their combat ability and firepower is inferior to mercenaries, they are certainly superior to most pirates and have some survivability. Will come mid to late game.

Tier traits:

• Average quality of equipment: Good
• Armor: Armor Vest
• Chance to have combat drugs ready: 30%
• Average gear condition: 0.8 to 1.2
• Recruitment difficulty: 70%

Pirate rusher
Those types like it nice and close, but still prefer to have at least some distance between them and their target. Rushers are fast lightly armored units armed with shotguns and while their effective range is somewhat low, they make up for it with decent firepower.

Restricted weapon type: shotguns
Chance to have combat drugs ready increased to 50%

Pirate support unit
Supporters mostly are trigger-happy maniacs, who just like to hear their toys go loud. What can be more satisfying then to spray deadly lead everywhere you can see someone moving? They are supposed to cover for crazies, who are going in for some melee fun, but usually it ends up with them making some new holes in their buddie's backs. Their armor is light, their range is low or medium and their atrocious accuracy and damage are compensated only by extremely high rate of fire.

Restricted weapon type: SMGs

Pirate gunslinger
Usually pirate gunslingers are highly skilled with the use of various sidearms from conventional pistols to advanced compact chargeshot devices. You still can encounter some foolish wannabes only pretending to know which side shoots, but that's an exception, not a rule. Probably.
Gunslingers are properly armored close-mid range fighters. They lack fire rate, but pistols being cheap allows them to have a really high quality accurate weapons at their disposal.

Average gear quality: excellent
Restricted weapon type: pistols
Always has a kevlar helmet.

Pirate butcher
Remember those crazies, that like melee fun and are always getting shot in the bum by supporters? Well, that's them – butchers. Mental diseases coupled with long-term drug abuse and repeated head trauma leave them with absolutely no sense of self-preservation, which leads to them mindlessly charging everything their more sane friends point their fingers on. Lightly armored, no head gear, melee range and always high on some chemical crap. Crazy, I tell you.

Restricted weapon type: Melee
Always has some combat drugs
Always has addictions.

Planned features for now:

• 2-3 more tiers of pawn classes with different fixed loadouts
• Raids by elite pirate corps (smaller count, but much better equipment, bionic enhancements)
• Compatibility with main popular mods, that add more weapons and armor

For now Tier 3 seems to work just fine, without any errors, but until I add 1-2 more tiers, I don't plan to post unfinished stuff here or on Steam. The most complicated thing for now is balancing it so that it won't be a gamekiller in early game and also won't be a drag (never showing up mysterious classes...) late game. What I can say about balance for now is that it will definitely be meant to use with several popular mods, that add a lot of powerful defense measures to Rimworld. Compatibility with most popular gear and faction-oriented will be added.

I started this for my own runs, because I wanted more challenge from pirates, but no one really answered mod request. So my goal creating this thread for now is first: to find out, how interested people will be in having a mod like that and second - to gather ideas of pirate classes, names, loadouts, enhancements and etc, which will help me a lot with planning, while also maybe letting other players encounter space villains planned and named by themselves.

I very much welcome and appreciate any ideas and suggestions from everyone, who is interested in mod's development, so feel free to pitch in. The limiting factors: my non-existent coding skills, as I mostly use parts of vanilla codes I understand and also my free time which is is also quite limited.

P.S. If my English or grammatics partly crap - I am sorry, since its not my native language.

[Fafn1r]

It's about time someone started chewing on raiders code. Good job

Can we have boss fights with pirate bionic brawler with two scyther blades and a painstopper?

Speaking of popular mods, there's on in particular khem CR khem, that is due some raider AI improvements. By far the biggest issue is increased weapon range that is taken advantage of by players, but not by raiders.

A simple fix that would work well in vanilla too is to change lategame sappers to use rocket launchers to blast doors, walls and defenses from afar, THEN a wave of raiders would start attacking.

[Metalsoul212]

This sounds awesome!! Always wanted a mod that improved raiders to be a little more intelligent and dangerous with their logos and strategies! I hope you can deliver!

[Madman666]

@Fafn1r
While it won't exactly be boss fights, I can add pirate raids consisting from only one type of raider with chosen equipment (aside from clothing materials, which I didn't find a way to restrict) and also you can specify how many threat points that unit will have (and as such - how many units wave will have). That means I can create a boss-like unit that will have insanely good gear, will ignore pain, will have specified bionic enhancements etc. So yes, with some tinkering there will be bosses in an "elite raid" incident. With bionics, painstoppers and power armors, I believe it will be a challenge to take them down. Unless you're lucky enough to land 2-3 sniper shots to the heart\brain.

I never played with CR before, because most faction mods doesn't support it. Eventually I will try looking in to it, but it probably contains heaps of codes I'll have to learn from zero. As for raider AI - i doubt I can really tamper with it. All I can for now is to assign a pattern (vanilla present one) to behaviour, like mechanoids way of never looking for cover and just firing, or like Federation pawns from Rimsenal never fleeing. Increased weapons range is also one of reasons I avoided CR and 20th Century Weapons mod.

The Idea of lategame suppers with launchers are good, but requires custom weapons, because they are one-use. I can try to assign sapper role for a pawn with launchers, but I don't know if it will work as intended. I've seen them foolishly use grenades and launcher while standing like 1 tile before a wall, blowing themselves and their buddies to hell. Don't know if I can fix that.

@Metalsoul212
They will be much more dangerous yes and also the more mods like RT's Weapons and EPOE you'll have - the more dangerous they will be with added availability of new weapons once patches are ready. I can't promise much in the way of their combat behaviour though - I am not experienced enough to reliably fix their stupidity, like attacking blindly closes thing they see (khm. rocket launchers on chickens. khm...). I will try to make them go for your colonists from the start instead of going for buildings and only switching to combat when hit by something.

For now it will mostly be new tiers of units, compatiblity patches and elite raids.

[TerrorThomasCao]

Not really sure what to do but you have my approval at the very least, maybe link this from reddit? The community's really active there.

[Madman666]

@TerrorThomasCao
Unfortunately I don't have an account on reddit. Maybe I'll register later and start a topic to draw a bit of attention, to help with class designs, but for now, I'll start here and later on steam when there is something solid ready to upload as a fucntional mod.

[TerrorThomasCao]

Don't mistake my intentions as to steal you mod or credit, but if you wouldn't mind I could always throw up a quick post for you? Just say no and I won't, just looking to see if I ant help some mods along, a lot of coders just quitted apparently so I'll be nice for some mod to come into fruitation. Also shameless ad, but if you are looking for someone to help out Robotics: A New Era is a pretty flushed out mod with nothing to flush out. The intentions are there just no code...

[Madman666]

Don't mistake my intentions as to steal you mod or credit, but if you wouldn't mind I could always throw up a quick post for you? Just say no and I won't, just looking to see if I ant help some mods along, a lot of coders just quitted apparently so I'll be nice for some mod to come into fruitation. Also shameless ad, but if you are looking for someone to help out Robotics: A New Era is a pretty flushed out mod with nothing to flush out. The intentions are there just no code...

Yeah I am watching that thread - its very interesting concept, untouched neither in game nor in mods. Unfortunately my knowledge of Rimworld coding consist of rather simple XML manipulation and from what there is in description of robotics mod - they need a coder at least Skullywag's (he actually offered to pick up at least ready art and he seems to be assembling some kind of robot mod himself) or Psychology's level - one that can actually compile right dlls and knows c#. Totally beyond my level, unfortunately.

As for reddit - you're free to post about this mod or even offer your own with basicly same idea - I don't really mind, since I am mostly making this mod to play with it myself And if you redirect some attention here I'll be grateful.

[TerrorThomasCao]

Okay I send out a quick post after this. It sucks that the development has apparently hit a stand still at this point but not everyone knows how to fully mod, including me, thanks for replying though.

[agiber]

Any progress there?

[Madman666]

Any progress there?

Yeah, still going at it, but at much slower progress than I'd wanted. Too many things to do, too little time to spare. Also I've hit rather annoying problem - the mod works nice with vanilla and simple weapon additions, but if some other mod adds new slots for clothing for example or fiddles which pieces of armor can be equipped together (Medieval Times, Apparello etc.) - equipment distribution on raiders goes crazy launching way too geared up guys at you way too early in the game. Trying to figure it out now.

[Wishmaster]

Would like to try the mod but so far, I don't see the interest of gunslinger and support units.
Usually having a colonist with SMG and crap accuracy will rarely hit anything.
And pistols are extremely weak too.

[Madman666]

Would like to try the mod but so far, I don't see the interest of gunslinger and support units.
Usually having a colonist with SMG and crap accuracy will rarely hit anything.
And pistols are extremely weak too.

They will hit something, as long as they have good quality on a weapon (and pirates usually have crappy ones) and also decent shooting. Staying alive and firing longer makes them more dangerous too, hence more armored pirates and combat drugs. In my first tests armored supporter units with smgs can cause a lot of pain, unless they have cataracts, eye shot out and etc. Besides mod will be meant to play with RT's Weapon pack, which has new extremely dangerous SMG type weapons, that tear turrets to shreds with one-two lucky bursts. So they will be quite a lot more dangerous than vanilla pirates.

Making their loadouts work right and balancing their quantity dependant on wealth-time spent is problematic though.