Caravans

[tymur999]

I'm quite new to the game, being my second base already. Despite it only being only my second attempt, I learned quite a lot from my first, since I made through 5-6 winters. Though I still do not get caravans. I'm kind of confused on whether you trade with factions whenever you want, or just during those little scenarios. I'm also kind of confused on how to raid other bases. I'm kind of new, being only 1 winter in on my new base, but I have LMGs. I find those quite useful since you can easily gun down any raider that comes near you with ease, but I am not sure what to bring for raids. I want to try and raid a base, but I don't know when is a stable time to do so, and what supplies and people I need to bring.

Are Sniper Rifles good? I have a good shooter with no injuries that use a bolt-action rifle well. It seems like if you have even one minor injury, your whole shooting accuracy is decreased, which is a pain-in-the-butt for snipers. I also don't like to use the Assault Rifle, but I am planning to. Am I doing anything wrong here?

[Canute]

Do you play a permadeath game ?
If not why you don't just safe before you start a caravan or just safe before you attack/raid something.
Then you can still decide if you want send the caravan back home or try it again.
The best expierience are the one you made self. Sure we can give you hints about this and that. But maybe you want to try it out self at this way.

[Jibbles]

Up to you what you want to do with caravans.  There are several things that affect movement speed on caravans; weather conditions such as winter, pawns movement speed, terrains such as mountains etc.  There's a planning mode in world view in the bottom right.  You can set waypoints to calculate the time it takes to reach your destination before forming a caravan.

Most players caravan to trade with other factions. They usually don't raid bases since the loot isn't that great in b18, however, some opportunity events are worth it. Raiding is optional and you'll be fine without it if that's something you don't wish to do.  I don't recommend raiding to new players until they can handle the raids at their own base, or good at coming up with their own strategies for combat. At least equip pawns with good gear. Raiding is one of those things that you learn as you play. Get used to the caravan system first is my tip.

Sniper rifles are useful.  You'll see why it can potentially be a bad idea to equip all your pawns with them if that's what you plan to do :p It also depends on the pawn stats if the sniper rifle will be put to good use. e.g. A pawn with a trigger happy trait or a missing eye will shoot terribly with them.
Why don't you like to use assault rifles?

[tymur999]

I don't use it because the Assault Rifle does medium damage with medium range and medium accuracy. Basically, I'd rather use the LMG since you could easily gun down raiders.

[Lemonater47]

The assault rifle is far more accurate than an LMG. Making it a great weapon for gunning down individual targets at range. As the assault rifles range is quite far.


In terms of snipers they deal out the most damage per shot. 40 damage per shot. Which is enough to destroy most bodyparts on a human in a single shot (unarmoured). Low quality armour also doesn't stand a chance. You can explode people's heads with it. Even if they have a low quality helmet. The sniper is also pretty great against centipedes on the hands of a good shooter as they almost never miss against something that big combined with the damage it can start hindering the centipede quite early on with a few well placed shots.

Also rather useful if you see a raider coming at you wielding a triple rocket launcher or something. I have 2 snipers and they can get a few shots off at key targets before they get in range. Blew both legs off a guy once. Had a damn doomsday rocket.

[sick puppy]

depends if you wanna cheese it or not. if not, just attack when you feel like it. saving helps.
if yes, take any weapon that outranges the enemy and start shooting at him without him being able to retaliate as long as they are in their base. once they come out, ambush them with the rest of your army as if you were defending. bolt action rifles might be enough for that, to be safe, take a single sniper rifle with you.

about guns: assault rifles have more range and accuracy against single targets. lmg's are better at crowd control. but not much.
i generally view guns like this (from worse to better):
short bow, any unnamed projectile weapon, great bow, lmg, assault rifle (miniguns at key locations)
if you are in early game and have lots of weapons that i personally dont like, try to take low dmg/high frequency weapons like machine pistols instead of shotguns if you wanna make prisoners. shotguns are more likely to shoot off body parts (i guess that has been changed in b18) and have a high potential of excess damage. many weak shots dont destroy body parts and deal most of their damage to the opponent, even if weapons like the heavy smg and machine pistol have low range and damage output. honestly, shotguns and sniper rifles are among the last weapons i'd use on the regular, including pila. frag grenades and fire based weapons are a different story. i guess just as rarely useful like the sniper rifle.

[lancar]

Caravans are, despite the game trying to convince you otherwise, something for the mid-to-lategame colony to do. They're useful for getting rare resources, like gold or uranium, and offloading a bunch of valuable items like scyther blades and thrumbo horns to nearby friendly villages/towns.

When it comes to what to bring to them, think of general purpose weapons that always work in every scenario and then add a sniper rifle or two on top of it.

Assault rifles are a great choice, imho, because just like their real world counterparts they're very decent in every situation. They're the jack-of-all trades of guns that won't impress you but also will never let you down whether thats in open field warfare or heavy cover bunkers, and in a raid you simply cannot always control the flow of a fight.
The sniper rifle is there to pick off static defenses and other key targets, but not very useful once the mass of bullets start flying, which is why you should limit yourself to only one. Two if you sent a large army.

Also, consider bring a couple of melee guys. With only a small amount of steel brought with you, you can quickly repurpose one of those map-generated broken buildings into a makeshift bunker to lure enemies into to finish them off in close combat.