Game balance issue

[TheMeInTeam]

There are actually multiple ways a colony of 7 pawns with 0 skill in shooting can repel a raid of 15 pirates without taking damage in Rimworld.  Turrets are only 1 of 3 that immediately come to mind, the other two being deadfall traps and miniguns + choke.

Isolation --> defeat in detail with perimeter wall and cover will take damage, but can consistently avoid risk of dying.  It's more micro intensive though.

Sappers can be broken with harassment from external structures with cover, mortars (better mid-late than early game due to #s), and steered with unpowered turrets (Bjorn has an excellent video on sapper pathing).  In essence, sappers will avoid turret line of sight powered or not, but have almost no pathing cost from walls so they tend to just destroy those.  Since unpowered turrets are unaffected by solar flares this steering method will always work...though since I use tribes I rarely can rely on it early and just challenge the sappers from the aforementioned structures.

Also, can you have enough traps when 30 tribals show up?  My 8 turret / 7 pawn defense takes them down adequately (the turret explosions, while expensive, are very helpful)

You would need to kill ~15 tribals, which would mean that you need them to slam into 20-30ish deadfall traps if you don't want to fire a shot.

30 traps cost 2100 steel, about the same as 12 turrets, but no components or power.  They have the disadvantage of immobility and more labor to maintain (rearming takes time), but are a viable choice for defense.  Since you can bait them in/out of a checkerboard maze or even just corridor to trip traps on both sides by using doors, tribes are easily handled.  The harder encounters for traps are actually centipedes (so slow and triggering them re-routes their pathing so it takes ages) and manhunters (raw HP can overwhelm traps unless you have tons)...you still need to shoot at those, but you don't need much colonist skill for it if you have a perimeter wall.

[Shurp]

So... with a lot of work it is possible to defeat large armies without turrets...

...or I can devmode a few explosions and go back to having fun.  Hmmm.

What I probably should do is hunt down a mod that opens up additional firepower options so that I can put all that steel and components into my colonists rather than more stuff.  Even defensive mods would be worthwhile if it protects limbs without the steep research curve of power armor or the eternal growing times of devilstrand.

[TheMeInTeam]

So... with a lot of work it is possible to defeat large armies without turrets...

...or I can devmode a few explosions and go back to having fun.  Hmmm.

What I probably should do is hunt down a mod that opens up additional firepower options so that I can put all that steel and components into my colonists rather than more stuff.  Even defensive mods would be worthwhile if it protects limbs without the steep research curve of power armor or the eternal growing times of devilstrand.

This isn't that much work:



--->



This is an old design though.  It glitches caravans into it and the surrounding base needs structures to beat sappers.  Not many though.

Lately I use this instead, but with fewer external structures after realizing I didn't need so many:



Finally, miniguns are not to be underestimated, they are ridiculous in end-game scenarios:



That was a manhunter pack on extreme, and I never had to shut the door.  The had no chance of coming close, nor would they with 2-3x as many.

[Shurp]

Yes, I see that trapped kill corridors are hilariously effective.

I see you place the traps in a checkerboard configuration.  Are colonists able to navigate that on their own or do you have to zone to keep them from setting off the traps?

Also you mention caravans; is there anything special required to keep them from getting killed?

[TheMeInTeam]

Yes, I see that trapped kill corridors are hilariously effective.

I see you place the traps in a checkerboard configuration.  Are colonists able to navigate that on their own or do you have to zone to keep them from setting off the traps?

Also you mention caravans; is there anything special required to keep them from getting killed?

Pawns traverse in diagonals safely, but caravans w/o trading spot mod will path into them if you make the maze bend around a corner.  For whatever reason, I've not had as much trouble with the straight line one.

Most of the time, Caravans won't trip them even if they path into them, but sometimes they do and you lose faction.  I consider that bugged (if it isn't, it's flagrantly bad implementation since caravans target it directly, enough that I don't think it is defensible in a rational framework), but it's nice to avoid it all the same.  The straight line version is good as a shooting corridor and seems to skip the problem.

A few points on using them compared to turrets:

- In contrast to turrets, traps can't be moved, so you NEED sapper countermeasures.  I've shown pictures of that in other threads, and there are other solutions than mine, but a trap maze alone won't stop them or sieges (it is effective once the siege rushes in though).
- They tend to kill scythers decently, but you will need to shoot centipedes.
- They are less steel-efficient than turrets, but much more power efficient and have nothing similar to a solar flare that shuts them off.
- Steel does 60 damage per trap, plasteel 72 (this has a chance to 1-shot humanlike, even decently armored).  If you use stone or wood they are much, much weaker and you'll need far more.
- Re-arming them takes your haulers a good chunk of time, in addition to lugging the bodies out of there.  Having extra hands is helpful to cover the work.
- Against manhunters, you will want someone in a door at the end of the maze to shoot them, then duck and shut it.  Animals set the traps off less frequently, so getting them to path over them more times is an advantage.  Small animals like squirrels and chickens don't set them off at all...though these are quite vexing for turrets too.
- I have heard other configurations are more efficient still, but every time I try them my pawns set off the traps, ignoring paths using doors to avoid them...which is also bad implementation but until it's fixed I'll play around it.

[Shurp]

The wiki says that stone traps do 36 pts of damage vs. 60 for steel -- that should still be effective if I have twice as many, right?  And if I just soften them up my colonists should be able to finish them off when they get to the killbox...

Also, I don't use the caravan spot mod (maybe I should); I guess I'll have to see what happens in vanilla...

[TheMeInTeam]

The wiki says that stone traps do 36 pts of damage vs. 60 for steel -- that should still be effective if I have twice as many, right?  And if I just soften them up my colonists should be able to finish them off when they get to the killbox...

Also, I don't use the caravan spot mod (maybe I should); I guess I'll have to see what happens in vanilla...

The damage is sharp damage, and gets reduced by armor.  60 one-spot damage on a leg or head with armor reduction is significantly more lethal than 36.  In practice, because the odds of hitting the same spot twice aren't huge (and in torso 36 isn't enough with 2 checks against armor reduction if the armor is good) you will need significantly more than double the number of traps when using stone, even worse for wood.

One thing I haven't tried is to see how raider pathing handles fires turning up in their path once they've already chosen it.  Could the be baited into walking through fire, similar to how the game lets them stack 8 people onto 1 tile?  I'm sure I'll test it at some point.

[Vlad0mi3r]

One thing I haven't tried is to see how raider pathing handles fires turning up in their path once they've already chosen it.  Could the be baited into walking through fire, similar to how the game lets them stack 8 people onto 1 tile?  I'm sure I'll test it at some point.

I tried something along that line with incendiary IED's. Setup a sapper trap (A section of wall that sapper path as being easier to get through see below) and what I found was you could set the sapper on fire but everyone else in the raid will just move away and then come back once the sapper had put themselves out.

Sapper trap MKII

G = granite wall  D = Deadfall trap F = Incendiary W = wood wall

      GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
      GGGGGGGGD          F    F                DGGGGGGGG
      GGGGGGGGGGGGGGWGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

So A three layer wall with the one wood wall and the gap. It doesn't always work perfectly sometimes after traps have been activated the Sappers don't path thorough the wood. You could add doors for the ability to add more dead falls with safe rearming.

[Mday]

Traps seems to have a much higher chance hitting head and neck? A hit in the neck will one shot any raider.

From my experience, it is better to skip the stone trap, provided you can afford the steel/plasteel.
Stone trap works, however it is not very efficient to gather the stone chunk, craft stone block and build more stone traps over a larger area. For all that effort and time I may as well just go for the steel trap.

[Shurp]

My colony is short on steel.  I don't have deep mining yet, and remember I built a bunch of turrets and mortars?   But there's no shortage of stone (I'm on large hills, I can just mine stone forever).

Also I imagine spamming stone traps will drive up my colony wealth slower than steel traps - ?

[SpaceDorf]

Do you have transport pods ?

Why not send a caravan 2 tiles away harvest your heart out and spam pods into your homebase ?

[Shurp]

No transport pods, no.  But I did discover that stone traps work just fine on ordinary pirates.  A dozen traps can easily kill 4 pirates.  I especially liked the one whose head got cut off.  CHOP!