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[Crossbowman]

They absolutely can, since the primary source of damage from stick bombs is the explosion, whereas the primary source of damage from fragmentation grenades is the fragmentation (predictably). I use them when I have FSX and no ability to build PTRS yet.

[BladeOfSharpness]

Great! Now I wonder if it was possible for me to knew that just by inspecting the Centipede. There is no rating against explosion or I missed it?

Totally unrelated, but I have at last my first load of devilstrands available. And then... the disappointment. I'm playing a western themed game, and I thought that I would create dusters with devilstrand and that they would provide a decent protection. But no, they are just a bit above rhinoceros leather.

Bottom line, anything I can do with devilstrand, if I'm industrial level tech? I play with mods

[iceball3]

Great! Now I wonder if it was possible for me to knew that just by inspecting the Centipede. There is no rating against explosion or I missed it?

Totally unrelated, but I have at last my first load of devilstrands available. And then... the disappointment. I'm playing a western themed game, and I thought that I would create dusters with devilstrand and that they would provide a decent protection. But no, they are just a bit above rhinoceros leather.

Bottom line, anything I can do with devilstrand, if I'm industrial level tech? I play with mods

They should work a bit better in flak vests or composite vests, as the base protection value for those are better.

[Crossbowman]

Yeah, I highly recommend using devilstrand to craft composite helmets and composite vests. You don't want your pawns getting their heads blown off by some shrapnel or their insides shredded instantly by grenades, after all.

[Morbo513]

Re: The comparison of Centipedes to WW1-era tanks, I think that's apt, and what I like about their metaphorical tankiness, low speed and general threat level. However, there are a bunch of reasons that takes it off the mark. First is the fact that colonists are rarely expendable, you're not an early-19th century European army, most of the time you're dealing with a hamlet's worth of people. Second is that micro-geography that would give infantry an advantage over something like a tank is not really present in Rimworld (Nevermind trenches).
Third is that most of the weapons carried by such tanks weren't especially more lethal than those carried by their squishy meat-sack counterparts. Generally, a machinegun fired from a tank isn't going to kill someone dead any faster than if it was fired from the next trench over. Obviously the type matters and the mechanoids' are supposedly more advanced, and heavier variants at that on the centipedes. The issue is they're powerful to the point of rendering null most means of protection the player has for their colonists. I'm fine with "Get shot with this and they'll probably be incapacitated except if they're lucky and in power armour", I'm not fine with "Hit with this = instant death regardless of what they're wearing". Not to mention that the Centipede's charge blaster is going score hits more than once in many circumstances.

Which is an issue I also have with the majority of explosive weapons. Again, the Inferno cannon is top of this list, but it's the same story from the Doomsday on down to even the RPG-7. Sure, someone gets caught in the immediate blast, take off one of their legs, shred them up, whatever. But again, especially given their near-ubiquity by mid-game, instant-death from these weapons is simply not fun to deal with.

Anyway, speaking of trenches, they'd be a great addition to CE - after all, it's the most basic and expedient yet effective types of fortification against ranged attack, and probably the first thing I'd think of if I knew there were armed bastards coming to shoot me on this shithole planet I found myself on. You could even have deep trenches that offer near-full protection from anything exploding or shooting from anywhere except "above"/immediately outside it, but I imagine that's be more complexity than it's worth.

[BladeOfSharpness]

Thanks for the answer on devilstrands. I'm reluctant to make composite helmets, it don't look very western to me. Now being headless is not cool either!

As for centipede, I managed to fend off a raid with colt revolvers, Sharp Sniper rifle with AP ammos and ... dynamite. I guess without dynamite, I would not have managed to put down the centipede with inferno cannon. Except I also charged it with 2 pawns with high level melee and cavalry saber, and it seems it did something (one kited if targeted while the other striked).
So as you can guess, this is very much western style.

Back to my point, the bigger centipedes seem to be prone to melee and won't fire their cannon if caught in melee, right?

Also, would embrasure not being better than trenches in defense?

[BladeOfSharpness]

And now for a totally unrelated remark. It seems that for a given ammos, whatever the weapon it is used in, the damages are the same. This seems totally absurd to me. Unless there is some penetration factor that differs, but it is not indicated in the weapon description.

Because definitively, a rifle firing a bullet provides much more kinetic energy to it, compared to a handgun.

[Retry_02Hide]

And now for a totally unrelated remark. It seems that for a given ammos, whatever the weapon it is used in, the damages are the same. This seems totally absurd to me. Unless there is some penetration factor that differs, but it is not indicated in the weapon description.

Because definitively, a rifle firing a bullet provides much more kinetic energy to it, compared to a handgun.

This is what bothers me a lot, too. I have some mods that add new weapons, and I have played them in no ce version before, so I know which performs better. But in CE, things u can know about weapon are only ammo it use, and some accuracy factors, which can't really present the differences between the weapons using same ammo.

[BladeOfSharpness]

But is the stat existing or not?

[Crossbowman]

<snip>

I agree with the point on microtopography; the terrain in Rimworld is largely either flat or mountainous, with no rolling hills or anything like that. However, I think you are taking the analogy to WWI tanks a bit too far. I was using it as a way to describe how centipedes are used, rather than how they compared to other units present during WWI. Also, you're kinda discounting the heavy weapons that those tanks used, which I feel contribute to the point I was making that centipedes are shock units. In other words, they're used as heavy shock/breakthrough vehicles that can punch holes in your defences that lancers and scythers can then exploit and must be addressed as such. The role they play is of units that must be treated with caution, rather than regular raiders or even lancers/scythers. The weapons that centipedes use are strong in comparison to the weapons that your colonists typically have, which, again, makes them highly suitable for being shock units. Explosives in general are just very difficult weapons to fight, so you must prepare for them. A centipede using an incendiary launcher and a regular pirate raider using a regular incendiary launcher will both shred a colonist to pieces; it's just harder to tackle the centipede.

<snip>

Centipedes don't fire their main weapon if caught in melee before they begin aiming. If they are currently aiming at a colonist and you melee them, their behaviour is the same as that of all other pawns; that is, they will finish their current firing cycle before beginning melee combat. Never engage a heavy charge blaster centipede that is aiming at you in melee combat for that reason, as no amount of armour will prevent the centipede from eradicating a colonist's head or torso in one shot. By the word "bigger centipede", I assume you're using a mod, so I don't really have a baseline to go by in that case.

With regards to trenches, the advantage embrasures have over trenches would theoretically be that soldiers firing out of a bunker can fire over terrain such as rock chunks. In Rimworld, since everything (except said rock/steel slag chunks) is flat, trenches would work very well until/unless there is a rock chunk in the way. Since CE models cover as being of certain "heights" rather than vanilla Rimworld modelling cover as being of percentage effectiveness, I'd imagine that trenches would have to place pawns below regular height, which means that pawns within trenches would be unable to fire over sandbags, chunks, and possibly fences if mods add those. I don't know if doing this is even possible, but in order for trenches to be differentiated from embrasures, this would, in my opinion, be the most logical way to treat them. Otherwise, trenches would be superior to embrasures since trenches would probably take no resources to build, only work time (you're just digging in the ground after all). There are already mods that provide trench digging, so I'd look into those if you're interested in digging trenches for your pawns.

With regards to ammunition damage, it's true; there is a certain strangeness to how all cartridge types behave the same way when used in different weapons. I think in general, since rifles typically do not fire pistol cartridges, and pistols do not fire rifle cartridges, it's okay. There are very few instances where two vastly different weapons share a calibre. Two off the top of my head are the M3 grease gun and the M1911, which both fire .45 ACP, but the difference in muzzle energy is not vastly different. You wouldn't be using a grease gun to penetrate armour plating over an M1911, after all. And if you're talking .22LR, well, that round is so weak that the difference in penetration wouldn't even matter. I think the range differentiation between pistols and rifles does an overall good job of modelling the differences in how these weapons would be used at this point in time. While I don't think it's absurd, I do think that it could be reworked a bit; it's just that the difference would barely impact anything for a fair bit of added complexity.

[NoImageAvailable]

With regards to ammunition damage, it's true; there is a certain strangeness to how all cartridge types behave the same way when used in different weapons.

CE supports ammo types providing weapon-specific projectile stats. It's not used in the base mod as vanilla/CE Guns don't have any weapons where the difference would be significant. If some third-party mod does and isn't using this functionality then that's on whoever patched it.

[Crossbowman]

That's quite good to know! Though as you said, I haven't noticed anything where this is really necessary (e.g. a pistol firing .50 BMG rounds or something).

[BladeOfSharpness]

Regarding weapon-specific damage/penetration stat I don't think many modders out there know that. I'm playing with westerado and the .58 Minie ball is used by muskets, flintlock pistols and percussion pistols. The author is probably not aware of the subtlety.

[JT]

With regards to ammunition damage, it's true; there is a certain strangeness to how all cartridge types behave the same way when used in different weapons.

CE supports ammo types providing weapon-specific projectile stats. It's not used in the base mod as vanilla/CE Guns don't have any weapons where the difference would be significant. If some third-party mod does and isn't using this functionality then that's on whoever patched it.

Is there some other way to do this than defining an entirely new AmmoSet (and series of BulletCEs), though?  It's simple and easy to define a series of new AmmoSets for an entirely new ammo type added by the mod (I've done that myself for my WIP CE compatibility patch for Metro Armory), but duplicating a core AmmoSet feels particularly wrong.

Giving the weapon a stat multiplier would be more cross-compatible than creating patch soup where a mod must duplicate a vanilla AmmoSet for itself, and then not be able to use any ammo types that are patched into the vanilla AmmoSet by other mods other than by having to check for those mods and patch itself, and/or demand those mods to patch for its benefit.

A simple DamageFactor and MuzzleVelocityFactor as part of the weapon's stats would work wonders: the DamageFactor would increase (or decrease) the damage of each projectile fired by that weapon, and the MuzzleVelocityFactor would increase (or decrease) the speed.

(In case you're wondering, I already have two as-yet-unreleased use cases where I've bumped into this barrier:
1) Adding new low-tech variants of hand-swaged Soviet bullets that can be made by tribals, which are patched into vanilla 5.45x39mm and 7.62x54mm lists.  This invalidates any duplicates of the vanilla AmmoSet unless they accommodate this patch too.
2) Adding various AmmoSets to tweak the draw strengths of the bows I use in my mod, such that arrows, crossbow bolts, streamlined arrows, and great arrows all inflict different amounts of damage depending on the bow type.  Any arrow added to the vanilla AmmoSet is not duplicated into the new AmmoSets.)

[NoImageAvailable]

Is there some other way to do this than defining an entirely new AmmoSet (and series of BulletCEs), though?  It's simple and easy to define a series of new AmmoSets for an entirely new ammo type added by the mod (I've done that myself for my WIP CE compatibility patch for Metro Armory), but duplicating a core AmmoSet feels particularly wrong.

Never actually considered that use case. The separate AmmoSets were done mainly cause they give the modder maximum control over the projectile but for the simpler cases two stat modifiers might work better. I'll see if I can work that into the next release, whenever that happens.