Melee combat - diagnosing the problems

[zeidrich]

Melee is strong, except in one situation - when the attackers outnumber you numerically severely.

The real problem is the frequency that this is the case.

If you remove other targets, and develop your base with corners and edges rather than wide open spaces, a melee user can close with a ranged attacker pretty easily.  It doesn't matter if they have a sniper rifle, or a charge rifle, or an incendiary launcher.  If you can close to melee with them and you have a long sword, you're going to win the fight.  In the interim, that guy with the incendiary launcher is not lighting your colonists on fire to wander off to their deaths.

The issue is that this works great when you're on a battle that's like 5 v 5. or 7 v 7.  But the way that the game scales raids, you're going to soon be 7 v 30. In that case melee is useless.

[b0rsuk]

Yes it does matter, unless your corridors are extremely twisty and narrow, in which case war beasts won't be able to use them. You will eat some shots.

On what basis do you claim that melee is strong ? Yes it potentially deals high damage. But damage output is only impressive in early game. Not even double scyther blades compare to late game charge rifle squad. Have you tried fighting manhunters in melee ? But you can fight a horde of wargs with 2-3 miniguns + some other rifles. Have you tried destroying a siege team in melee ? Your best bet is mortars. Now what about psychic ships ? Can you take them out without exploits like building stuff around the ship ? Also, with sappers, you can't go outside to intercept them, you must build your base as one huge maze so it doesn't matter where they break into. Over reliance on static defenses makes it hard to use melee in caravans or when you migrate. Plus, with melee it's very hard to focus attacks. Try hunting thrumbos in melee and you'll see. You run into the limit of 1 pawn per square, and 8 people hitting a thrumbo in melee is... not a lot.

[Aerial]

I'm not saying melee doesn't need some love because it does.  However, I don't think melee should be evaluated in a vacuum (or with examples based on a melee-only colony) because melee and ranged should be designed to be used together. 

Today, melee does have a useful place in mixed combat, particularly to help defend the ranged pawns who do the majority of the damage. Even if pawns could switch weapons, there are times when I'd still want my shooter to keep shooting and his buddy the brawler to keep him safe from the approaching swordsman while he did so.

[b0rsuk]

I play melee colonies recently because it highlights issues melee faces the best. Ranged-only colonies work and are easy to play, and they mix very well with turrets.

8. Friendly Fire
When you say mixed combat, do mention that Rimworld has very generous friendly fire. In particular, animal set to guard a sniper will often lose a paw. Melee combatants are especially susceptible to friendly fire. It doesn't bother enemy AI in the slightest, because all of its pawns are disposable and it can generate them out of nowhere. But you - you must switch targets once your melee warriors engage.

An idea I once posted is that 'careful shooters' should have greatly reduced chance of causing friendly fire.

[b0rsuk]

About mixing melee with ranged. I examined the weapon table carefully, and noticed there are 5 ranged weapons which have highest accuracy at "touch" range, which is up to 4 tiles. First number is 'touch' accuracy, second number is 'short' accuracy (at 15 tiles), for comparison.

Great Bow 93% 85%
Pistol 91% 71%
Pila 91% 71%
Short Bow 89% 64%
Heavy SMG 89% 64%

Heavy SMG is especially notable, as its damage per second becomes almost the same as charge rifle!

[Perq]

Parrying, block and shields (or anything similar, for that matter).     
A skill level 1 melee character should not have easy time hitting level 15 melee character. This would solve problem of melee being banged up all the time. :@
One thing that melee is good at is going for ranged raiders and locking them in melee, so they don't use their ranged weapons. They will not do a lot of damage with their fists, but you will have to heal your melees anyways....

But overall, this is pretty much true. The purpose of melee is somewhat visible, but it has a lot of problems. I also hate the fact that melee characters cannot be set to auto-move to neatest enemy and attack it. You have to pretty much set them to attack, one by one, every time... If you don't, they will just stand around and be useless.

[SpaceDorf]

Standing around useless translates into getting shot.

This could be fixed by combat stances .. equal to the undrafted reactions.
Aggressive,  Defensive, Hold Ground

A looks for nearest enemy to attack
D looks for cover
H standing around. Being shieldbait

[TrashMan]

1.) There is a shield mod that adds actual hand-held shields. They soak up damage until destroyed (but you can't use two-handed weapons with them).

2.) Melee skill should tie to be a defense skill, allowing a pawn to parry a blow

3.) Armor that actually does what it should

4.) flanking and attacks from the back actually matters

[zeidrich]

On what basis do you claim that melee is strong ? Yes it potentially deals high damage. But damage output is only impressive in early game.

It's not the damage output that makes it strong.  It is that if you are in melee combat with an opponent they can not shoot you.  They will instead punch with their fists. 

If you have 5 guys with longswords or even clubs, and they have 5 guys with SMGs or charge rifles, and you can force them to get into near range you will win.  The guys with the SMGs will now just punch the guys with clubs, and clubs are better than fists.

The problem, as I said, is that it's not long into the game that you will stop ever having 5 guys versus 5 guys.  When you have 5 guys and they have 20 guys, well, now the fact that 5 of their guys can't use their guns doesn't matter, because the other 15 are blowing the crap out of your other 5.  However, if you have 5 guys with guns versus 20 guys with mixed weapons, you can use traps, turrets, terrain, darkness, kiting etc. all to your advantage and kill both the melee and the ranged guys, and you only need to get some of them before they start to run away.

I play a lot of tribal extreme, and so my weapon choices, especially early game, are very limited.  But when I have 5 colonists with the choice between a shortbow and a club, and the pirates come with sniper rifles, LMGs and assault rifles, I choose clubs every time. 

Even later in the game, if there's a colonist that has an incendiary launcher in range of forces there's a reasonable chance I'll send someone with a sniper rifle in to melee him if I can edge in around a corner just to stop him from setting my guys on fire rather than have the sniper sit and take a few rounds trying to right out kill him, because being able to light pawns on fire is very dangerous, and the worst damage I'm going to take in melee from someone with an incendiary launcher is a few bruises from his fists.

But when it gets to endgame and you have static defenses and a killbox set up, you stop worrying about that sort of thing and just want whatever keeps your pawns as far away as possible from the giant hordes that come after you.

I really think that the biggest problem with melee combat isn't melee combat, it's the "difficulty" scaling.  Melee works pretty well against humanoids when you can be defensive and engage ranged attackers with melee.  Melee works terribly when you are outnumbered, whether you are much stronger than your opponents or much weaker. If I have scyther blades and power armor and shield, and I have to have 5 guys go up against 25 longbowmen, I'm going to expect casualties.  On the other hand, if I have 5 tribals naked with steel spears go up against 4 guys with power armor and charge rifles, there's a reasonable chance I can win, assuming 4 of them make it.  Similarly, if I have 5 guys with power armor, sandbags, and sniper rifles or assault rifles or charge rifles, I'm not really worried about 25 naked longbow men.   But if I had 5 tribals with longbows go against 4 guys with power armor and charge rifles, I'd be screwed.

Melee is alright when the opponent doesn't have a numerical advantage and is using ranged weapons. 

The problem is that the game very aggressively and unrealistically (imagine how much food these raiding parties would need) scales up raid sizes based on your wealth, and wealth can quickly grow out of control, so you need ways for few colonists to kill large numbers of raiders with bad AI.  Melee can't do that. Ranged can.

To fix melee, first improve AI and reduce raid sizes.  Ranged attackers will sit and plink at your ranged defenders in a dark bunker behind rows of sandbags with a 0.2% chance to hit at their maximum range.  They will "find cover" behind a bush.  They'll stay like this until they're dead. It's easy to exploit the AI with ranged weapons. 

For melee, you need to exploit them in a different way, and it can be more annoying, and they can blow up your buildings in the meantime.  They actually act a bit more intelligently against melee because their standard behavior is to stay at long range, and are less likely to just happily follow you around a corner, they're more likely to go melee attack a sarcophagus or something.

I'm not saying that improving AI and reducing raid sizes would "fix melee". I'm saying that it's necessary to first do that.   As long as you have enemies outnumbering you, melee is always going to be bad.

Then there is the question of whether melee should ever really be "good".  There's the whole element of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Modern war certainly isn't waged with swords, and there's a reason for that.  At the same time, bayonets are still useful today.

But get the number of combatants that you fight against down, and strategic melee becomes more meaningful. It turns into putting someone out to disable a big threat like a incendiary launcher or a doomsday rocket launcher.

One thing that could be interesting would be a stealth drug.  Like go-juice, but take it and it would make you invisible for a short while until you attack or take damage. This would mean that your chance to actually engage that guy with the doomsday rocket launcher before he fires would be much higher.

But put a guy with a steel knife in the square next to a guy with any ranged weapon, and in a one on one fight the guy with the knife will always win, because now it's a fight between a knife and a fist.

[b0rsuk]

I'm not saying melee should be better or anything, I'm saying it should have a good use in the game.

Good AI ? Careful what you wish for ! The only reason you can take out a sniper in melee is because they're too stupid to run away. Even when you engage one in melee, one pawn is generally not enough to HOLD an enemy in place. He would move away, slowly at first, then faster. And all you accomplish is using a colonist to keep an raider busy running. It's like cavalry in vanilla Master of Magic. It has an advantage over swordsmen because AI is too stupid to make 1 step back and nullify your First Strike ability.

AI is not just bad when you're outnumbered, it's bad when YOU outnumber. Have you tried thrumbo hunting ? I normally don't save and reload, but I feel I still have much to learn about melee so I made an exception and I do. The last time I tried thrumbo hunting, he tore off several hands of my veteran melee team. And those people are wearing vests, helmets and devilstrand. It turns out the first time I hunted thrumbo in melee I was lucky.

With better AI, chances are ranged could be better even with equal numbers. Imagine a 10 vs 10 fight. If it happens in a 2 tile wide corridor, only 2 melee fighters can deal damage, while several shooters in the back can shoot. Melee can't focus fire nearly as easily. Okay, so maybe pure melee vs pure ranged was a bad idea... ? But if you bring only SOME melee to a gunfight, truly intelligent raiders would focus fire them. And once they have critical mass, they can kill an enemy with a single volley. So if you improve AI, raiders could start acting smarter and never go into twisty corridors, just methodically destroy your settlement while part of the gang is covering the rest.

9. Melee is very micromanagement intensive
Imagine that each time your shooter takes an enemy down, you have to manually click on another target. That's how using melee warriors feels in the game, except switching targets for shooters is easier because they don't have to leave cover.

[travin]

Why the hell would someone voluntarily hunt thrumbos melee style? Does somehow the risks outweigh experience gain?

I hunt and kill them a lot quite easily, often two at a time, and only the first time I got stomped by one did I try it in melee.

[b0rsuk]

I wanted to try just how hard it is. It's very hard, but easier than fighting a centipede without EMP.
Thrumbo horn is about as good as a poor plasteel longsword. Thrumbofur is the best duster material after hyperweave. On a scarce map, these are tempting. My flat map has no plasteel vein and I open ancient rooms to disassemble the guardians.

But typically someone loses a limb when meleeing a thrumbo, even if it's one of your wolves. And "Rare Thrumbos" event scales faster than melee colony can kill them. I could just about kill 2 thrumbos at a time, but now I have 3 of them and that's more than I can chew.

[b0rsuk]

I've noticed that pawns can never be forced into melee, as is common in other games which balance ranged and melee combat.  They can always shoot at someone attacking them, with lethal accuracy due to the short range.  Nor does melee damage seem to cancel aiming attempts - even if they do switch to melee, the shot they're preparing is first going to get unloaded in your pawn's face.  That alone makes melee unviable, since it's only a matter of time until a trigger happy pirate gets a grenade off before you can down him.

No kidding.


Someone above mentioned that melee has awkward micromanagement because you can't make them seek closest targets once they kill their current. They stand there for a few moments wasting time, "watching for targets". Well actually you CAN make them do it. Undraft them, click on the running person icon (threat response setting) until it's crossed swords. Now your melee attacker will chase nearby enemies.

The downside is animals assigned to him won't come into battle, and personal shield doesn't activate.