How do you kill the new centipedes in 1.0?

[ashaffee]

Thank you tynan.

TheMeInTeam Well currently with basic flak armor and clothing you are looking at around 20% damage reduction on all body parts basically ( without actually doing the full math). So the risk of death is there but unlikely. Risk of injury on smaller parts on fingers is pretty likely but ripped off arm isn't so much. Like you said on lower difficulty you will easily out gun/kite them. Higher difficulty when you happen to be out numbered by them a lot of the time sacraficing a pawn in melee combat seems fair. Death and injury should happen in higher difficulty to give more motivation to do rescue missions and keep a good jail.

[Tekuki]

melee, just get people with spear and horn and for some reason they always hit the head, might be a bad idea but melee work for me, bullet get deflected too much

[TheMeInTeam]

Thank you tynan.

TheMeInTeam Well currently with basic flak armor and clothing you are looking at around 20% damage reduction on all body parts basically ( without actually doing the full math). So the risk of death is there but unlikely. Risk of injury on smaller parts on fingers is pretty likely but ripped off arm isn't so much. Like you said on lower difficulty you will easily out gun/kite them. Higher difficulty when you happen to be out numbered by them a lot of the time sacraficing a pawn in melee combat seems fair. Death and injury should happen in higher difficulty to give more motivation to do rescue missions and keep a good jail.

There is no reason to expose your pawns to infection risk, small chance of instant death with large # of rolls for it, and other RNG when the game gives you tools to avoid this.

It is possible to kill these safely on extreme difficulty, so why would a player pick a less safe option?  Running 8 pawns into 4 centipedes for melee is a fool's errand, even if they can't shoot you point blank and you are stacked with shield belts, plasteel maces, and armor. 

In contrast, if you have perfect micro you could kill these using one of several methods of various micro burden and have literally no chance of death or even infection to any of your pawns...with equipment available much earlier in the game at fewer resources.  To me this choice is over-obvious, though it's still frustrating because it just takes so long in IRL terms and to a lesser extent game terms.  Most raids aren't a grind like this, not even really dangerous ones.

Even with sub-perfect micro, you have to mess up pretty significantly to come away hurt worse than what you're guaranteed to have with melee.

[ashaffee]

I never said it was the first option or even the second option. But in a low tech colony I feel like it is the only option. Once emp, mortars, sniper rifles, IEDs are available the flood gates open up on the amount of choices you can make taking on that threat. Give me none of those things listed above and no tech to make any of it then you should have other strategies in place.

Plus like tyrnan stated before everyone enjoys playing the game with their own strategies that make it fun. Maybe I wanted to create a scenario where 80% of the players had brawler trait. With the changes he stated he is making that is possible to succeed on. But of course you will need to recycle colonist more often if you choose to do risky melee fights a lot.

Edit to respawn to your second statement: The fight actually is extremely quick vs centipedes when you take it close range. Shotguns destroy them in basically the time it takes them to do like 3-5 melee attacks. With bullet deflecting being a thing it might have actually died quicker with two brawlers attacking it but I haven't tested it. Also sometimes the only decision that makes sense could be to sacrifice one pawn vs the risk of loosing everyone(a rare decision to make but an option).

[TheMeInTeam]

I never said it was the first option or even the second option. But in a low tech colony I feel like it is the only option.

Using two looted revolvers isn't high tech.  I killed a centipede with that yesterday and didn't take any shots in return.  It was awful because of the sponging as I said earlier, but I still had literally the starting tribal techs and nothing else.  Melee in this scenario would have been a significantly worse play.

Don't get me wrong.  I WANT melee to be viable.  I WANT there to be some reason to actually use it in some contexts, compared to the entire history of this game where ordering shots at point blank is comparable or better than most melee weapons while not having the obvious downside of range = 1.  However, melee has always suffered, both from guaranteed return damage and from the fact that even at range = 1 it's barely outperforming guns...while a significant proportion of possible raids make using it non-starter.

I suppose with only 20% blunt resist doing an 8v1 with clubs would be faster, so that's a consideration once they stop shooting at point blank again.  I can envision blunt-based melee builds with maces actually working if the stun procs are decent.  In B18 before point-blank shot procs in melee I did use melee a good amount early game since most hits from that couldn't be infected.

[ashaffee]

Yea in my version there were two scythers that moved off into long distance sniper range. So there wasn't any reasonable way to kite the centipede during that. But tyrnan said he is removing the melee shooting thing and lowering centipedes. Also with deflect being such a huge feature melee gets a huge buff from not deflecting plus the 20% blunt damage. Obviously at this point it is theorycrafting because without these changes in the game we won't know how effective it really is.

[TheMeInTeam]

At minimum, it will be worth testing again.  The state of melee as of yesterday took very little experimentation to realize it's consistently not worth doing, falling squarely in Tynan's "noob trap" categorization.  Maybe it's out of there after the tweaks, maybe not, but based on the changes I expect it will at least not be worse than it was in B18.