I really hate needless friendly fire deaths

[eadras]

A16 added a "hold fire" button between the draft pawn and manual attack buttons.  This button is your friend.  I hear you though, friendly fire accidents are very frustrating.  If you aren't the type of player who micromanages combat frame by frame, it happens all too often.

Wait, there's another way of doing combat in this game?

There's the way certain youtubers (and I suspect many others) do Rimworld combat.  Mass draft colonists and have them stand in a clump, fast forward through the battle and fail to notice that your pawns are getting limbs blasted off by friendly fire.  Then continue to fast forward through triage, failing to tend to your colonists or clean the hospital, then wondering why they are dying of infection a few days later.   

[The Man with No Name]

Here's a couple of examples. Not the worst I've seen, but I have screenshots of them.

An attack by 27 tribespeople has penetrated the base, and the raiders are attacking down the corridor in the top right, while three colonists and a muffalo defend the one square-wide door to the corridor.

I summon a couple of colonists from elsewhere as reinforcements.

First, Maymay arrives on the left and immediately opens fire with her shotgun at the doorway, with no concern for the four colonists who are much more likely to get hit.



Then Ali arrives in the bottom right and immediately opens fire with her Heavy SMG at the doorway.



I'm not for removing friendly fire deaths from the game, just eliminating or minimizing the really stupid instances that are completely unrealistic, have major irreversible negative consequences and that, in my opinion, spoil the game in a big way.

[SpaceDorf]

A16 added a "hold fire" button between the draft pawn and manual attack buttons.  This button is your friend.  I hear you though, friendly fire accidents are very frustrating.  If you aren't the type of player who micromanages combat frame by frame, it happens all too often.

Wait, there's another way of doing combat in this game?

Yeah, two other ways.
Killbox and Losing .. and the OP just described why.

Those accidents were player faults.

These Situations are what the Hold Fire Option was made.

Go there. Don't Shoot.

Ali at least was placed in cover.
Had MayMay been placed elsewhere, like the doorway of the smoking lounge she would never had a line of fire in the first place.
The same goes for Ali.
One step to the right, in the doorway and nothing would have happened.

Then a ordered retreat.

Grill would stay behind Susi,
Eridani in the doorway beneath the hospital
and Phytes in the dining room.

This would leave Grill three lines of retreat once Susi is dead and split the Tribals, while everybody still had a clean line of fire .. ..

[The Man with No Name]

When I ordered Maymay and Ali to those locations, the fighting was further up the corridor and the other colonists had just retreated to where they were, so enemies were well out of view.

Rimworld is an immersive story that can take hundreds of hours of time investment in a single game. These really stupid non sequitur friendly fire incidents are so completely implausible that they break the magic and the storytelling.

[The Man with No Name]

I've also noticed that sometimes colonists will continue to open fire even after they have been manually told to hold fire.

Here is a screenshot. I had ordered Pig, highlighted, to stop firing. A few seconds later, I noticed she was shooting her LMG and so I checked the Allow Firing status which was switched off, as shown.

[cultist]

If you take away the need for tactical placement, there's not much player involvement in combat at all. That will definitely reduce the only viable defence to killbox, which just isn't that fun. Indoors fighting is a mess, avoid it at all cost unless you design your base for it. Sun Tzu said it better, but essentially your best advantage is choosing the battleground.

[Britnoth]

For me, finding a solution to this issue is No. 1 priority on the list of fixes and improvements to the game.

This is not an issue. This is a game feature. You may as well say "finding a solution to having all these raiders keep showing trying to kill me is the number one thing needing fixed"

[The Man with No Name]

This is not an issue. This is a game feature. You may as well say "finding a solution to having all these raiders keep showing trying to kill me is the number one thing needing fixed"

There's no equivalence there whatsoever. Raiders trying to attack one's base for material gain is entirely plausible. A colonist randomly shooting another colonist in the head and killing them for no reason is entirely implausible. Suggesting that this is a "game feature" is utterly ludicrous.

[khearn]

Friendly fire is extremely plausible. It happens on battlefields a lot. Even experienced troops struggle with maintaining good fire discipline, and we're mostly dealing with frightened civilians here. People tend to see a bad guy and shoot, without paying much attention to what is close to their target.

[The Man with No Name]

I have nothing against the concept of having friendly fire deaths in the game, and would vote against their outright removal from the game. As long as I can look at such situations and say "that could have happened", then I'm okay with it.

For example, a colonist is being melee attacked by a couple of hostiles. Shooting at the hostiles, at the risk of a friendly fire death, is reasonable in this situation, although I would prefer for the colonists not to automatically fire and for it to be a conscious decision by the player.

If four colonists are melee attacking a wounded enemy and there's someone with a gun some distance away, plus another colonist directly in the line of fire between them, then for that colonist to open fire and kill a friendly is just stupid. You can say that a colonist got frightened and opened fire, but 100% of colonists would open fire in that situation because that's the automatic process in the game. Maybe if they had the "trigger-happy" trait one could explain it, although even then it's a big reach.

[Aerial]

I would prefer for the colonists not to automatically fire and for it to be a conscious decision by the player.

This.  If the pawn has above an X% chance of hitting a friendly pawn from their current firing position they should hold fire until told to shoot by the player.  Except in the case of a trigger-happy pawn, who should go ahead and spray bullets everywhere 

[The Man with No Name]

Let's look at the practicalities of whether such a system could be implemented.

A colonist will not fire their weapon/will stop firing in the following circumstances:

a) At a hostile pawn if there is a chance of shooting a friendly colonist.

b) At a friendly pawn that has gone berserk.

c) At a prisoner who has gone berserk or is escaping.

Looking at the list I made earlier in the thread, b) and c) are simple to resolve, by just having the colonists not auto-fire against such targets. If necessary, they could be given an auto-flee order to a distance away from the berserker at the moment of berserkification for safety.

I'm guessing that a), which should also include things like hunting, would be more complicated to implement as the computer would have to calculate several things before firing:

a) Is a friendly in the direct line of fire of where the shooter wants to shoot?

b) Is a friendly in an adjacent square to the intended target of the shooter?

c) Is a friendly behind the intended target in the line of fire?

I'm presuming that to calculate these things would require some computer processing power, although it's beyond my capabilities to gauge how much.

[Wintersdark]

I would definitely like to see pawns NOT autofire at berserk colonists.  They should only attack colonists of any mental state when I direct them to. 

I'd like the "allow fire/hold fire" control to have three states: Free fire, Cautious Fire, Hold Fire; where "Cautious Fire" means to hold fire if there is any chance of hitting a colonist.  In a perfect world, a colonist in this state would show a thought bubble when holding fire for this reason.

I'm totally for friendly fire.  It's a very real part of combat, and absolutely belongs.  But the OP is correct in that pawn behavious tend to lead to idiotic completely unreasonable friendly fire accidents because you're not micromanaging swiftly enough.  While clearly this is ok for some players, I strongly dislike Rimworld shifting into twitchy gameplay.  This isn't Starcraft. 

With this toggle, you can tell your pawns whether you want them to just gun targets down, or to be more careful and hold their fire if friendlies could be hit.  This is self balancing: If you choose to use "Cautious Fire", your pawns will simply not fire in a lot of instances where they had good shots, but there was a remote chance of hitting a friendly; and thus inattention could still result in lots of pawns standing around doing nothing rather than fighting because things had closed into melee. 

It allows me to choose to err on the side of not gunning down my colonists (and instead maybe taking more casualties from the OpFor) but being much safer when I've already won a fight, or choose to err on the side of maximizing damage output. 

[The Man with No Name]

I'd like the "allow fire/hold fire" control to have three states: Free fire, Cautious Fire, Hold Fire; where "Cautious Fire" means to hold fire if there is any chance of hitting a colonist.

I was thinking about this. The game uses toggle on/toggle off for lots of the controls, so it might be best keeping the "hold fire"/"Allow Firing" toggle, which the game currently uses, as a separate toggle from a "cautious fire" or "safe firing" toggle.

So when switching a colonist to manual control, "Allow Firing" would be set to on, as it is now, and "cautious"/"safe" firing would also be set to on. Colonists would then automatically shoot at hostiles, while not shooting at friendlies. They would automatically switch to shooting at a different hostile in such circumstances, if a target was available. This "Cautious"/"safe" firing toggle could be turned off, if a player desired to for some reason. The "Allow Firing" would be a separate toggle to completely turn off all firing until switched back on again.

And I'd agree that it would make things interesting if those who had the "Trigger Happy" trait ignored this, and perhaps had the "cautious"/"safe" firing toggle greyed out or missing.

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If the idea of a "cautious" or "safe" firing toggle isn't sexy enough, it could always be turned on its head to become an "Indiscriminate Fire" toggle! With this toggled on, colonists would open fire on hostile targets without consideration for the location of friendly pawns (so the same as the game is now). The "cautious"/"safe" firing mode would therefore just be a case of not having the "Indiscriminate Fire" toggle set to on, and its default setting should be off.

[cultist]

I don't think you understand how absurd this request is. You essentially want the pawns to have human-level AI, to be able to make complex moral decisions about whether or not an actual human would risk killing an ally in billions of different scenarios and hold or open fire based on that. And that's assuming a human would even make the right choice in these situations, which is obviously no guarantee.

Let's just imagine for a second that computers could do this. Now every pawn in the game needs to check thousands of variables before they fire a single shot, just in case an ally is in the way or MIGHT get in the way during firing. Every pawn, not just your colonists. The game would slow to a crawl in combat.