Nope, AI can't handle extended range :(

[Shurp]

So I thought it would be fun to extend the range of all firearms in Rimworld to 55 and see what sort of combat results.  Well, for the most part it works, except that it turns sappers into morons. 

With the extended range I don't have to build perimeter walls to protect my units from enemies with sniper rifles plinking them from out of range.  So I now have an open base design.  But since there's no distant walls for the sappers to attack they get confused.  They pick a point out of range of my shooters / turrets and then just mill about waiting for something to happen.  Occasionally one will wander into range and get picked off... this repeats until enough die and eventually they flee.

Any thoughts on how to address this?  I like the sort of firefights that extended range yields.  How does Combat Enhanced get around this problem?

[jamaicancastle]

As a super-cheap workaround, you could go find the raid strategy that spawns sappers and turn it into a copy of the regular raid. From what it sounds like, sappers won't be too useful a distinction even if they work "right", so you might as well do what's easy, right?

[Shurp]

That's one idea.  Unfortunately I have no idea where that is, but I guess I could dig.  It's certainly the easiest solution conceptually.

I was just hoping someone might know exactly what I was doing wrong to cause sappers to break.  Getting rid of my turrets might work too, maybe I should just do that.  I just like the fact that turrets give me a reason to go to neighboring settlements to buy components... without them my colony is pretty self-sufficient.

[edit] -------

Aha, I just found RaidStrategies.xml in Mods/Core/Defs/Storyteller.  I'm sure I can do something here, at the very least to turn a sapper attack into a regular attack.

[jamaicancastle]

I think it's the workerClass that determines what pawns get selected and how they act; if you patch that, it should act like a normal raid.

[Shurp]

Ah, now I see what you're talking about.  I'll give that a try and see what happens.  I think I'll change it to employ the smart attack otherwise I'd have to adjust the pointsFactor too. 

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OK, so devmode forced a sapper raid, and got an error message "insufficient squares for radius 59, max is 56.6", I'm not sure what that means -- and if it's a sapper message or a smart attack message.

But it looks like they did employ the smart attack mechanic -- they ran around my turrets and attacked my base from the other side.  Hmmm.  I'm not certain l like this   But at least it's not broken behavior like the sappers were!