The balancing process

[PatrykSzczescie]

Fighting centipedes, you ought to use their speed movement against them. Do you have an idea how to kite?

[DariusWolfe]

Stuff shooting point blank has to go or melee is dead, far more dead than B18.  It's gone from a 3 strat to a 1 strat.  Player could always fire point blank in earlier patches, that should go too.  Right now point blank gunfire completely ruins the melee vs blunt gun damage trades up close.

I don't know that I agree, but it does seem to need some serious rebalancing. it seems to me that the problem with bringing a gun to a knife fight is that you're going to have your shot interrupted a lot, and shots are going to go wild as often as not since the melee fighter will have a chance to redirect the weapon.

Isn't melee skill supposed to give a dodge chance? It seems like that should be applied to ranged weapons at close range, as well as having a good chance to interrupt the firing cooldown. Those changes by themselves might go along way toward balancing ranged weapons in melee range without completely removing it.

[Madman666]

I actually like that power armor wearing guys actually feel like they wear power armor, not cardboard imitations. So they should fairly effortlessly go through trapped hallways. Centipedes... Well. They definitely could use something to counter them with. If you get several at once, fights tend to get atrociously long.

As for melee - yes, with point blank shots being allowed its useless and harmful to ever send someone into melee. Aside from expendable combat pets. I second people complaining about their colonists shooting point blank when trying to beat some sense into berserked pawns. Its annoying to have to drop weapons first before attacking someone with fists. That should go.

I disagree however with completely banning player from forcing poink blank shots for colonists. Because shooting instead of using melee is the only chance for a stray pawn to survive an attack from wolves, lynxes and cougars, that sneak up on them without any warning. I cannot count the times my pawns pulled through a wolf attack because they used shotguns and rifles point blank instead of fists.

I don't know how to balance it right, but i know one thing for sure - the only point of melee in RW was always its capability to completely negate ranged weaponry. Ambushing ranged raiders was the only efficient way to use melee and it was a vallid tactic. Now its mostly gone - i don't see myself ambushing anyone, if they can still shoot even with much lesser hit chance. They ll still hit someone with missed shots anyway.

[ashaffee]

I made a whole post on why centipedes are 100% broken in the early game. You have to be at the tech level for some form of combination between sniper rifles, emp, or motars.

I believe shooting while in melee with small guns like a revolver and pistol is 100% fair. Being able to do that with a rifle, shotgun, minigun, grenade  and launcher is 100% broken. I always read on the forums how people hated brawlers and found them so useless in beta 18. I chuckled because I loved using melee guys in very tactical ways to shut my enemy down.

Now in 1.0 melee fighters are 100% worthless. There is no strategy with using melee fighters that isn't going to cripple/kill them extremely fast (besides just shield bet door openers...). There hasn't been anything game breaking in 1.0 until I discovered how melee works against heavy weapons. Now I am praying to hear from you Tynan to tell me this is all just a bad dream.

The thing about shooting point blank vs a wolf or something.. I don't find it needed imo. If they are around your territory consider the same value as a raid and take them out before they are hungry. If you want to tame them, consider working your way up the food chain. Grab something like a boar, turtle, or turkey and have a few of those types of grazing animals walk around with your animal tamer to design it that they can actually kill the predator before it turns on you while taming it. (those animals were just an example for thought process not actual selection).

[Tynan]

Hey the shooting-melee thing is getting removed!

This was discussed in the main thread on 1.0 unstable.

This thread is really for my original article, so if another reply has to do with that please post, but for general discussions of 1.0 let's concentrate the discussion in the main thread linked above so we don't have to duplicate discussion.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback everyone!

[Madman666]

Well thats good news! I was getting worried point-blank faceshots will be a permanent end for anything melee oriented. Good stuff.

[Syrchalis]

Hey the shooting-melee thing is getting removed!

This was discussed in the main thread on 1.0 unstable.

This thread is really for my original article, so if another reply has to do with that please post, but for general discussions of 1.0 let's concentrate the discussion in the main thread linked above so we don't have to duplicate discussion.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback everyone!

One thing that I have been wondering about since I started playing Rimworld in A15 - what do you think about the balance of the different terrain types: Flat, Small Hills, Large Hills and Mountainous?

I know there are some mechanics in place (infestations) to make mountain bases weaker, but I still feel there is a great difficulty difference.

Whenever I play a flat map, I feel starved for ores, because there is very little rock on the map and thus very little ores. The more "hilly" the map the easier it gets, because the rocks create choke points and you have more ores to use. The only appeal of flat maps is more useable land and being able to pretty freely design your base.

There is also the huge advantage of mountain maps that enemies can only come from around 66% of the border, because one side and about a third of two sides is blocked by the mountain. Simply being able to tell where enemies are coming from makes it a lot easier because:
1. You can prepare your defenses accordingly
2. Since it's a mountain map there is probably natural choke points everywhere
3. You have a lot more preparation time - because you don't have to build in the middle of the map, but can build on the mountain side, the map essentially is twice as large. Add all the rocks that make pathing to your base even longer and enemies need 2-4x as long to reach your base versus flat maps.

Is it your goal to balance the four terrain types and provide different experiences, but with roughly the same difficulty level or do you accept the difficulty differences and just allow players to use it kind of as a third difficulty choice? (First being the actual difficulty, second being the biome).

As for the ore thing - I originally believed that amount of ores are the same for any terrain type. Naturally that would mean the density of ores is pretty extreme in flat maps and very low in mountain maps, but I think that's not the case. Maybe that would be a good balancing tool to at least decrease the difficulty gap? I strongly believe mountain maps would be a lot worse (but still enjoyable) if you had to really tunnel a lot to find resources.

[Razzoriel]

My 2 cents coming from someone spending tons of times preparing a mod and devising ways to diversify the current armor/weapon pool: Combat Extended adds a lot of concepts that official Rimworld needs to have.

- Armor damage reduction needs to stay. I like the concept of deflecting attacks, as well, but its the solution is simply to assign armor DR to "soft" armor, like clothing, and deflection to "hard" armor, like vests and power armor. This way, lets say, a 10%/30% armor has a 30% chance of deflecting, and those that go through only do 90% damage.

-Armor penetration. Bullets go through things easier than a dagger, but bulletproof vests stop the first, not the latter. Make a stat called "armor penetration" and make it appliable to weapons. It should deny DR or Deflection, or both.

- If none of above are possible, then combat will not change much. Bleed rates were never quick enough to incapacitate melee pawns in the first place.

[Madman666]

I really hope RW won't have CR aspects integrated. Its fine as an optional mod content, its well liked by a lot of people. But I for one, like RW's own combat system way more than one of Combat Realism. Theres way too much realism around you, to also seek it in games. Whats fun about short deadly fights, with pawns mostly just being oneshot?

[Razzoriel]

I really hope RW won't have CR aspects integrated. Its fine as an optional mod content, its well liked by a lot of people. But I for one, like RW's own combat system way more than one of Combat Realism. Theres way too much realism around you, to also seek it in games. Whats fun about short deadly fights, with pawns mostly just being oneshot?

You didnt understand that Ive simply asked for a few of the concepts to be integrated, and all of them would do the complete opposite of what you're concerned with

[TheMeInTeam]

One thing that I have been wondering about since I started playing Rimworld in A15 - what do you think about the balance of the different terrain types: Flat, Small Hills, Large Hills and Mountainous?

Flat maps definitely have less above-ground ore.  Maybe with the deep drill nerf it's different, but once you get to that on earlier patches standard stuff like steel and such wasn't an issue.

In terms of raid defense, the difference is overblown.  Base compound with perimeter wall should be very close to mountain base in defense strength.  You don't get insta-gibbed by bugs if they happen to spawn on you, and the moment you get your hands on mortars sieges don't mean very much.  I'd take a drop pod raid defense over an infestation any day - better loot + actual grace period to move before you're being attacked (hives spawn a few megascarabs instantly).  Outdoor bases have easier electricity management too...less centralized, possibly no conduits (so no zzt then).

I'm not convinced that mountainous is significantly easier than flat.  If it is, the reason is the resource availability post deep-drill nerf more so than ability to defend.

[ashaffee]

Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

[Alenerel]

Since the purpose of this thread was to share your insight on why you made the choices you did for the changes in 1.0. What was your reasoning behind making food poisoning crippling? Since 1 bad meal could potentially end the rich traveler scenario or brutal naked.

I think that he didnt like that the old food poisoning was meaningless, so he made it to have an impact. Problem is that it is too much now.

I think there should be different degrees of poisoning. The old one and the new one. I mean, you can have a simple stomachache or you can be in bed dying through your butt.

[Syrchalis]

I think -50% consciousness is a pretty serious debuff. And food poisoning sounds more like an event along the lines of "stubbed my toe", if you know what I mean. I never minded the current implementation, aside maybe from how to prevent it.

Basically having a good cook is mandatory and even then you get a poisoned stack of food sometimes. If you could somehow minimize the chance without having a good cook I would be okay with the debuff being even worse. Like having a clean storage/kitchen.

Otherwise it's basically just a random serious debuff you get with a chance depending on your cook (which you don't have much influence on if you aren't the "reroll 100x type") - which feels random and punishing, not difficult.

[TheMeInTeam]

^ Agreed, main issue is the disproportionate lack of counterplay on some of the things introduced by a couple new things in 1.0.  From a pure balance perspective, it's normally expected that literally perfect play is rewarded, not given massive penalty/killed.

Even the previous food poisoning was pretty significant to early game progress, when compared against the options available without reroll spam/prepare carefully to stop it.

Reroll is more important than ever, for example if you start tribal you can have instant game over to heatwave if you don't have 4 construction, kind of cheap.