Mechanoid Rant

[FTR]

Just a thought on mech raids: scythers/lancers move faster than centipedes.  So you shouldn't have to face both at once unless there is a ship part or drop pods involved.  Just make sure to finish off the scythers before the centipedes get there.

But yeah, if there are more centipedes than colonists you're probably in trouble.  Maybe hit them with mortars?  They're slow enough that they should be easy to target, and if there's that many your mortars should hit something.

What if game is like "nope" ?

To this I would like to point out, that single centipede is able to survive 40+ direct mortar hits with HE. Tell me how viable this strategy is, when you account for forced miss radius on mortars and raid of 20+ mechanoids.

I mean not even orbial bombardment will kill all of those things (usually few of them die, but the others are not that much damaged).

The bottomline is, I'm not looking into ways how to destroy them, I am *able* to destroy them, I just don't enjoy the game anymore because every huge mechanoid raid takes ridiculously long time of extremely boring microing. And they also destroy around 20 autocannons and uranium slug cannons in the process if I have them up at the time.

Yeah I tried spaming them with mortals but it's really not worth it. Mortal shells barerly hurt them, and that's only if you don't miss which is very likely. I think even EMP shells are better option since this way you can cause them to "stretch" a bit until they reach your killbox, so they won't enter it all at once, which helps a bit.

And yes I can definately (still) handle mech raids that appear in my game. It's just that it takes so much stress and time to fight them, and then you gotta repair seriously damaged killbox or rearm (now rebuild) traps which I use to clean up scythers and lancers before centipedes reach the killbox. Dissassembling mechs doesn't even cover up the steel I have to use to kill them and I am trying to find better methods but I scum-loaded many times just to try different strategies (for the sake of learning) and nothing reliably works so far. Cleaning scythers and lancers with traps, stretching centipedes with EMP barrage and then giving all my colonists snipers+rocket launchers in the killbox seems to work best, but in exchage of a lot resources (mainly steel).

I also tried orbital beam against one of psychic ships and most centipedes survived even that. I had to finish them off one by one with sniper rifles.

I am still trying to come with better ways to kill them that do not require shitload of resources. I have to admit I didn't use uranium turrets yet, mainly because location in my current game doesn't really allow that unless I wanna replace my entire killbox. But I suspect they would also eat a lot of sacred uranium.

[b0rsuk]

Disclaimer: I play Randy Rough (2nd hardest difficulty level). I usually don't play very old colonies, just build a ship or travel to destination.

It seems to me you're complaining about the core mechanic of the game, which is constant buildup of raids. Mechanoids merely make it the most apparent. Number of colonists you have is more or less fixed, but raids keep growing. There's no cure to that.

That said, I picked up a few tricks.

Unless something has changed, centipedes arrive much later because they're slower. You have time to prepare.

EMP mortar is useful once they're in attack mode, because it lets you use divide&conquer. The downside is they disable your personal shields.

Plasteel turrets are nearly immune to inferno centipedes, because they're only 10% flammable and plasteel is common at this point. Personal shield wearing colonists are partially resistant.

When you have this many enemies, explosives scale very well because they don't have a limit on how many enemies they hit. First, try to bunch up mechanoids, for example by placing doors at your entrance.

Purchase all rocket launchers you can get.

IED traps can be remotely detonated by a skilled marksman. You can surround them with mortar shells for a nice chain reaction. You can make them put only 1 mortar shell per tile by ordering construction of IED traps but forbidding components.

It takes some guts to perform and inferno centipedes complicate this, but you can use the fact grenades are unaffected by smokepop belts. Dress your people in power armors, smokepop belts and give them grenades. Only a few EMP, the rest should be explosive ones. Combined with cover, you should be very hard to defeat.

I haven't tested it, but aren't the new uranium-powered turrets designed to deal with this?

Psychic ships are potentially ignorable if you equip everyone with a tinfoil hat helmet.

[Spocklw]

I really think you didn't understand what I'm trying to say. I'm not complaining about not being able to deal with them, I'm complaining about that they come every few days and in order to deal with them, I have to micro for at least 1 HOUR REALTIME!!! to get them killed. And few minutes after I'm done, there goes another raid full of them! It's really no fun to deal with that and basically only that late in the game.  IWhy would anyone think that it's ok to put nearly indestructible thing in the game and then send dozens of them down players lane? All other enemies are ok to deal with, even fun. Not this thing late game. When this appears it literally means either spend massive time microing it or lose your base. You apparently never experienced it and don't know what I'm talking about (which is bit weird with that badge you have), otherwise you wouldn't try to advice those things you did. E.g. uranium turrets can deal with few of them, not with ▼

[attachment deleted due to age]

[b0rsuk]

Would it be more fun if it was 400 pirates instead?

[Spocklw]

Generally yes, human raids are much better, because there are ways of dealing with them. AOE works on them very well. Not at those centipede bastards though. They just shrug mortar shells...

[zizard]

You get to have fun with prisoners afterwards too

[Thane]

The M_T mods really make it alot better. No starting structures and no mech raids. YOu'd be surprised, but without the plasteel/component drip from mechs the mid/lategame is still difficult.

[TheMeInTeam]

Would it be more fun if it was 400 pirates instead?

Yes.  The IRL time investment to deal with 400 pirates vs that is grossly disproportionate.  You could probably fight off quite a few 400 pirate raids in the same IRL time.

#1 problem with mechs is that the safest ways to fight them take ages, and this mostly applies to centipedes.

[b0rsuk]

Mechanoids are meant to challenge end-game colonies. And they do. What's the problem?

Speaking of Centipedes, they could take the Hell Knight treatment. Doom 1 used to have a monster called Baron of Hell. They initially appeared as a pair of minibosses. Everyone soon found out that Baron of Hell, taking 5 rockets/ssg blasts to die, was boring to fight, and not that dangerous. In DooM 2 a very similar monster was introduced - Baron of Hell, nearly identical in appearance but dying in 3 rockets. Overall DooM 2 has many Hell Knights but few Barons. Level designers could now place more "goat men" on map for increased monster firepower but without straining player ammo too much.

[TheMeInTeam]

Mechanoids are meant to challenge end-game colonies. And they do. What's the problem?

The problem is that what's quoted is an intellectually dishonest response to my post and doesn't address Spocklw's complaint.

I'm not sure if you're calling for more centipedes with less hp or something else in the 2nd paragraph, but that wouldn't fix the fundamental issue of disproportional IRL time consumption on rote tasks.

[Shurp]

So I'm trying to see what I'm missing here... ok, well I tried a test with a bunch of centipedes penned up, and the uselessness of mortars was established pretty quickly.  When they hit they're very effective, but they just never hit. 

Explosions are definitely the way to take them down, but yes, there's no *fun* way to accomplish this.  Just endless tedium.  It seems like Rimworld needs an anti-tank weapon.  I suppose you could manufacture lots of rockets but that would be outrageously expensive.  You need cannons vs. centipedes.  Maybe someone has modded one?

[Yoshida Keiji]

Indeed there is a wide disparity between expenses and gains. A player, even without killbox like myself sees a lot of money gone after a Mechanoids raid and little economical recovery. 5 Plasteel from Scythers and Lancers, and 10 Plasteel out of Centepides. And I don't use turrets, só rebuilding damaged/destroyed ones also count more resources costs. This is why I'm missing the Scyther Blades one could sell to recover. And at the rhythm this is going I'm tempted to ask for Charge Lance drops that can be both wielded by pawns, mounted on animals or other Security devices.

Plus to make for the lack of game Immersion, at late game we should be able to turn mechanoids to our side like the T2.

[zizard]

Past a certain point, doubling your base size makes raids four times larger. There isn't a strategy that can scale to keep up with that. The raid point formula is simply broken past about 200k wealth. The only solution is to burn down half your base and kill half your pawns. Story told.

[b0rsuk]

I would still go with mortars, especially on a map as big as that. Note you can have more than 1 mortar per colonist. It takes a few seconds to fire, but the bulk of the delay is in the reloading. More mortars will give you a better initial salvo. Centipedes are so slow they're begging for it. They're so slow you don't even have to lead the target.

When fighting, I would try to make them come from a narrow path to take advantage of excessive friendly fire.

It's a small comfort, but devilstrand has recently been buffed and it now offers around 100% fire resistance.

[TheMeInTeam]

So I'm trying to see what I'm missing here... ok, well I tried a test with a bunch of centipedes penned up, and the uselessness of mortars was established pretty quickly.  When they hit they're very effective, but they just never hit. 

Explosions are definitely the way to take them down, but yes, there's no *fun* way to accomplish this.  Just endless tedium.  It seems like Rimworld needs an anti-tank weapon.  I suppose you could manufacture lots of rockets but that would be outrageously expensive.  You need cannons vs. centipedes.  Maybe someone has modded one?

You can still sniper kite them freely after getting rid of non-centipedes, which is pretty easy to do safely in non-drop pod encounters.  Having 4 pawns with good snipers/shooting will drop an individual centipede or two easily enough, but when you have 10+ centipedes it takes so long that you have to zone everyone inside base and let shooters rest.  It quickly becomes a grind, despite that as long as you're somewhat diligent they can't hit you.