1.0 changing the game too much?

[Aerial]

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

I find pawn vs pawn combat fun, and I tend to go for it, but I have one major problem with it: it's too unpredictable. The reason why it's unpredictable is that the gap in shooting skill between pawns that are supposedly good at shooting and pawns that are bad at shooting is way too small, in that everyone is too inaccurate, especially at short range. Just think about it; in Rimworld, it's perfectly possible for a pawn who is supposedly a planet-class shooter to miss several shots in a row on a downed elephant that is only a few meters away. This exact thing happened to me many times, but it shouldn't. In real life, not even a beginner would miss like that.

If the gap were wider, it would become more reasonable to specialize pawns into soldiers and workers rather than just draft everyone every time, because professional soldier pawns will have more chances to beat by a raid by themselves, unless the raiders also have very good soldiers. Another problem that inaccuracies cause is that it makes banzai charges from raiders too good, especially early on in the game. A few guys with knives and clubs charge at your pawns across an open field, your pawns miss every single shots at them, and then you either stand your ground and lose, or you do the door strategy and just wait until they turn their back and walk away before you go out and try again. It's lame, but it's necessary. And even if your pawn does manage to hit something, it most likely wont incapacitate the raiders, who can receive a direct shotgun blast and still go on to fight in melee.

On the other hand, you don't want everyone to be too accurate, otherwise all fights will be over in seconds. Maybe that aside from widening the gap in combat skills, all pawns should also be much more accurate at close range and less accurate at longer range. And while we're at it, the chances of suffering permanent injuries and especially of dying are way too high. In actual wars, most of the participants survive and come out without being crippled. They should have less permanent injuries, but also take longer to recover from their wounds, and maybe bleed out a bit faster to make battlefield medicine more important.

This would make a big difference for me, because it would make preparation count a lot more toward whether I could survive a raid or not.  Previously, the ability to build static defenses like turrets, trap corridors, and/or killboxes made up for the fact that close combat is really dangerous and allowed good preparation to go a pretty long way toward "guaranteeing" success (or at least allowing my little group to be victorious with not-a-colony-crippling level of loss/damage).

But if I could have highly trained pawns that I knew would (likely) take down their target if I set them up in a good position to do so before they came into range to harm any of my other pawns, then that, too, allows me to be successful through preparation.  And it would be more fun.  And probably make the damage and/losses feel more deserved because it would be more a failure of my preparation, not bad RNG on armor or weapon miss chances.

[Skryabin]

Too often raids just don't make sense because the raiders don't want anything. They just want to do as much damage as possible until a bunch of them are dead.

Raids are generated because of wealth, to me it makes sense that a lot of raids should happen specifically because they want to steal stuff.

In my last colony at the very beginning one raider showed up. The colonists were hiding inside the building and waiting for him. But the guy comes straight to their temp stockpile, grabs 500 silver, and immediately runs away. The colonists were in shock from such impudence. And there was no chance to catch up anyway. That was fun!

Since then they always keep their gold indoors 

(Oh and that happened in beta 18 btw...)

[East]

When you do not know precisely, it is sometimes helpful to list thoughts that come to mind. Even if it is ridiculous. Just a idea.



A part of the famous and successful mod of combat.

shield - What melee needs is an additional HP that can last for as long as he can fight the enemy. Because if you stick to the enemy, the proximity is advantageous. Only melee can wear a shield.

CE - It's fast and powerful enough to knock your opponent into a blow. This is more severe for RNG. Famous in that it is cool and powerful.

rimsenal - Even weapons of the same kind are given characteristics according to the manufacturer.For example, the attack type change of an assault rifle. It would be interesting to have such a wide variety of customizations.

covering fire - If you are shot, there is a steady decrease, so if the bar is exhausted, you will not be able to act for a certain amount of time. Increased defense force in the meantime. However, the enemy is too weak in Killzon and disappears.

poison - The poison does not directly cause damage, but ignores armor. 4 shot down. anesthetic. It's too strong for an enemy like a trumbo.

flash bang - stun human grenade

side arm - Secondary weapon. When the enemy approaches, it can be changed into a melee weapon.

dress room - Replace clothes in draft. / closet. Quick change clothes(armor).

moat



In other games.

XCOM - A weapon that smashes cover. / Rocket's secondary weapon. / mec trooper. A kind of boss. / Smoke bombs used in arbitrary positions, first aid kit. / Covering - Reducing the enemy's accuracy. / Destroy Shooting - Reduces enemy armor. / Additional fire rate when satisfied. /Increases the movement speed when the condition is satisfied. / If you are in front of you, the sniper range is greatly increased. / Reconnaissance items. / Can not use certain weapons for a certain amount of time. / Additional damage during close combat. / Critical resistance. / Recovery Field.

A defense game - A trap that forces enemy positions to move. / Additional damage to specific enemies. / If two attacks simultaneously, additional damage. / Traps to weaken enemy armor / Traps to reduce movement speed / Mutating enemies. / A trap to burn enemies. / Create temporary wall. /pulling trap / draw on trap / some time area attack traps. / Poisoned floor. Continuous damage. /slow trap

darksoul -Each weapon is divided into three stages of weakness, strong fire, and special skill, and has individual motion.

etc - level, Supported items slot , pet , dash / sprint / Critical Hit.



History and the actual army.

claymore mine / horse / wire entanglement. / bunker / flying drone / Grenade Launcher. /
The squad leader. squd sub leader - Two teams complement each other.
Single ankle landmine.
Tank.carriage. - Moving cover object.
Flamethrower.
dig trenches
Bunker Buster.



As I write the contents, I get more ideas. You make a shield man and the shield man gives cover back side. You can make an auxiliary item available. Throw smoke and throw grenades. If you see the door and throw grenade. Sapperization of the whole staff.
It is time to rest.
next time.

[DariusWolfe]

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

I find pawn vs pawn combat fun, and I tend to go for it, but I have one major problem with it: it's too unpredictable. The reason why it's unpredictable is that the gap in shooting skill between pawns that are supposedly good at shooting and pawns that are bad at shooting is way too small, in that everyone is too inaccurate, especially at short range. Just think about it; in Rimworld, it's perfectly possible for a pawn who is supposedly a planet-class shooter to miss several shots in a row on a downed elephant that is only a few meters away. This exact thing happened to me many times, but it shouldn't. In real life, not even a beginner would miss like that.

If the gap were wider, it would become more reasonable to specialize pawns into soldiers and workers rather than just draft everyone every time, because professional soldier pawns will have more chances to beat by a raid by themselves, unless the raiders also have very good soldiers. Another problem that inaccuracies cause is that it makes banzai charges from raiders too good, especially early on in the game. A few guys with knives and clubs charge at your pawns across an open field, your pawns miss every single shots at them, and then you either stand your ground and lose, or you do the door strategy and just wait until they turn their back and walk away before you go out and try again. It's lame, but it's necessary. And even if your pawn does manage to hit something, it most likely wont incapacitate the raiders, who can receive a direct shotgun blast and still go on to fight in melee.

On the other hand, you don't want everyone to be too accurate, otherwise all fights will be over in seconds. Maybe that aside from widening the gap in combat skills, all pawns should also be much more accurate at close range and less accurate at longer range. And while we're at it, the chances of suffering permanent injuries and especially of dying are way too high. In actual wars, most of the participants survive and come out without being crippled. They should have less permanent injuries, but also take longer to recover from their wounds, and maybe bleed out a bit faster to make battlefield medicine more important.

Ilya makes a very solid argument, and all I can really do is signal boost it.

[mcduff]

Too often raids just don't make sense because the raiders don't want anything. They just want to do as much damage as possible until a bunch of them are dead.

Raids are generated because of wealth, to me it makes sense that a lot of raids should happen specifically because they want to steal stuff.

In my last colony at the very beginning one raider showed up. The colonists were hiding inside the building and waiting for him. But the guy comes straight to their temp stockpile, grabs 500 silver, and immediately runs away. The colonists were in shock from such impudence. And there was no chance to catch up anyway. That was fun!

Since then they always keep their gold indoors 

(Oh and that happened in beta 18 btw...)

Perfect

[Lightzy]

How about fog of war then?

[Jibbles]

What about buffing defense through preparation rather than simply buffing player pawns (which feels a bit cheaty). An option to 'dig in' or 'hunker down' whilst drafted that would take time to trigger but then impart a state of increased defense/aim/maybe range could provide a similar effect without imparting superhuman abilities to the player! It would reward good defensive positioning and planning but in a way that could be balanced vs offensive strategies (which the player is not forced to take part in to survive)?

Remember you're not always defending. It should also be viable to win caravan fights, quest fights, enemy town fights.

I would throw in that the options for defense even for your own base was/is too little.
I should point that they could provide an offensive approach against faction base.
Maybe you rather fix it to where pawn vs pawn is more appealing FIRST, tho the issue above would still be present.

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

In thinking about this it occurred to me how restrictive it is to be fighting humans with humans, since rule changes have to be kind of symmetrical. E.g. in DF you fight goblins, so the rules can be different on both sides (and you can't use their clothes).

"I am testing this game" pretty much nailed why I dislike engaging pawn vs pawn.

- Risky, the fact they can die vs being downed is huge.
- Movement speed; I don't install bionics unless they have a missing leg. So it seem anytime they a pawn gets hit/injured it becomes extremely hard to escape or move to better positions in the fight without other pawns intervening. (They're screwed) So I try to avoid the situation.
- Friendly fire. Late game tech - gizmo that could be worn to avoid FF and your colonists/turrets would be nice.

If you do not want suggestions like CE or sidearm then maybe throw some ideas that you've been brainstorming to help guide us towards that direction. 

The more tactical you want to be the more tedious it becomes to manage.

TLDR: Micro-managing a lot of pawns in a combat situation is not fun to me and I would like to see tools added for the player that make managing multiple pawns in combat easier.

The ultimate reason why I Dislike pawn vs pawn! I'm quite involved in pawn vs pawn but I usually have mods to help alleviate the issues. Without them, I never like the experience when pawn vs pawn, even in 1.0.  I can't stress enough how putting more work into pawn vs pawn without addressing the tedious of it is somewhat fruitless, or better yet, time spent elsewhere may be more rewarding. There so many issues with micromanaging, I can go in depth if needed.

[Broken Reality]

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

I find pawn vs pawn combat fun, and I tend to go for it, but I have one major problem with it: it's too unpredictable. The reason why it's unpredictable is that the gap in shooting skill between pawns that are supposedly good at shooting and pawns that are bad at shooting is way too small, in that everyone is too inaccurate, especially at short range. Just think about it; in Rimworld, it's perfectly possible for a pawn who is supposedly a planet-class shooter to miss several shots in a row on a downed elephant that is only a few meters away. This exact thing happened to me many times, but it shouldn't. In real life, not even a beginner would miss like that.

If the gap were wider, it would become more reasonable to specialize pawns into soldiers and workers rather than just draft everyone every time, because professional soldier pawns will have more chances to beat by a raid by themselves, unless the raiders also have very good soldiers. Another problem that inaccuracies cause is that it makes banzai charges from raiders too good, especially early on in the game. A few guys with knives and clubs charge at your pawns across an open field, your pawns miss every single shots at them, and then you either stand your ground and lose, or you do the door strategy and just wait until they turn their back and walk away before you go out and try again. It's lame, but it's necessary. And even if your pawn does manage to hit something, it most likely wont incapacitate the raiders, who can receive a direct shotgun blast and still go on to fight in melee.

On the other hand, you don't want everyone to be too accurate, otherwise all fights will be over in seconds. Maybe that aside from widening the gap in combat skills, all pawns should also be much more accurate at close range and less accurate at longer range. And while we're at it, the chances of suffering permanent injuries and especially of dying are way too high. In actual wars, most of the participants survive and come out without being crippled. They should have less permanent injuries, but also take longer to recover from their wounds, and maybe bleed out a bit faster to make battlefield medicine more important.

Ilya makes a very solid argument, and all I can really do is signal boost it.

I agree with this as well.

I used to use killboxes a lot in B18. With their reduced effectiveness in 1.0 I started using the door tactics (like the one in East's video moving people tactically to doorways to get better position and firing arcs and to avoid getting hit. I found this far more engaging and enjoyable. The risk of colonist injury and death is the downside and the recent increase in one shots made this less enticing. I do like the new armour system however layering armour feels and is kinda worthless. Before having several layers that added up to a good armour value did something now however with armour pen and the deflect chance system rather than flat damage reduction means that items like flak jackets and pants and dusters are actually of little benefit in most fights due to armour pen making them have such a low chance to do anything. This also makes the armour value on clothing seem irrelevant.

Right now the rate of permanent colonist injury feels too high though that may be due to how I am actively fighting more than in B18. However things like permanent eye scars are too common, I'd love the ability to remove non functional scared eyes surgically.

For the raiders and raids as someone said they just feel like they are there to kill and destroy as their only objective. Maybe if they had specific objectives  - capture someone, steal certain things, destroy certain things (could be defenses, production benches, resources, rooms ie rec room/dining room) then have them act on those (also alert the playing in the raid alert sometimes as to what they are intending (maybe you intercept some raider coms). So sappers would try to get to certain areas, drop pods would land near their intent. For the door tactic maybe having raiders hold target on the door primed to fire (low warmup time) when someone opens it again, after so many times seeing the door peeked have them destroy the door.

I'd like combat to stay feeling engaging rather than it just end up lining people up behind cover and shooting it out with attackers. I'd also like the ability to set defensive spot for colonists so that on drafting them I could send them to a set location (there was a mod that did this) this would be useful for getting people to the right places at the start of a fight and reduce setup time a bit.

[Copperwire]

Most of RW seems to be a story about raids attacking a house.  Since it is central, maybe that is due some thought.  I have seen a lot of great movies about people defending a building.

Something I have been considering is: how much of an advantage should being the defender give?  Is RW currently doing that?  How exactly does it give advantage to the defender?

While it is a rule of thumb, army infantry doctrine says you want 3 to 1 numbers to attack a fixed position.  That assumes A. acceptable levels of casualties and B. success as taking the objective and C. your combatants are roughly all "soldiers".

If we work with that, it can be assumed that people with guns in a building SHOULD be able to effectively defeat 2 to 1 odds fairly consistently.   Is that true now in RW?

If we look at why it is an advantage to be the defender in RL, its mostly cover and elevation.  RW doesn't have elevation and cover is .... odd.  RL, people like to shoot out of windows, or holes they make if they are lacking windows.  RW doesn't have windows and walls have HP/zero penetration until 0 HP.  The current go to for cover in RW is a door with sandbags in front of it - it is the window/firing slit equivalent - only it behaves totally different.  RL, you don't stand in doors and how quick you can move out of a door when the guy with a knife does make it across your field of fire is just not an issue.  RL, if a guy with a sword is trying to destroy a door so he can get inside you do not have to wait until the door is completely gone before just shooting him.  Lots of things like that.

Basically, we end up with a cover dynamic - and its kind of foreign to reality - which makes "balance" and "story" both a bit .... harder to achieve.  The yard stick for "feels right" is ... hard to apply.

Once you start looking at RW from story/plausibility, it gets messy. 

How many guys (ie tribals) with melee weapons charging a house with guys with guns in it should it take for them to do any damage?  Are we to assume groups that try this with less are crazy/stupid?  How many guys with bows?  So, are all tribals suicidal or unable to understand boom sticks?  How would said tribal raid would define success?  Would they be happy if 3/4 of them died and their lasting mark was the guy you micro'd slow got a finger cut off?  Would a downed pawn and maybe an arm cut off make it worth it for them?  Cause ... story?  What did we ever do to these guys, that they are so violent?

Pirates sure know about guns and they have houses/sandbags themselves.  Are we to assume they just can't count when they show up at 1:1 odds or less?  Why exactly would 10 guys with grenades/moltovs pod drop in a base and start throwing them at walls/furniture right next to themselves?  Is this some religious thing?  As much as players break immersion to make economic calculations, "story" like that can do the same.

Example:  Who designed these electric turrets so they explode?  Why is a wooden dresser more durable then a machine built for combat THAT EXPLODES? Since they are made from steel and components, what exactly is exploding?

Besides the obvious "story" issues, these dynamics have side effects:  it gets harder to create/reinforce a perimeter around your base with turrets in a way that makes tactical sense if you need to worry about FF and explosive radius (you cant put them to close to your manned positions or each other...).  Elevation (or lack of it) and the minimum range on the larger turrets also factor in to this, especially in terms of FOF restrictions which diminish effective coverage per unit/combat value.  Now assign wealth to this vs other options...

This lends itself to kill boxes and other things that break suspension of disbelief.

Broken Dynamics become ripples:  Common use becomes kill boxes (designed so FF is not an issue and built in such a way so explosions are not an issue ie firefoam and walls), so you nerf them a bit cause its too easy and cheap - which makes applying them in any other way go from questionable to pointless. 

Maybe next people just start playing mountains because they are such a defensive advantage.  So, you make any unoccupied mountain space prone to hive attacks, because, easy is bad.  Next thing you know, players playing on plains get hives attacks from the space left open from the AD chamber on their map, so they learn to put wood walls all over anything on the map that says deep mountain and to go around early on and check all the existing terrain.  So, wood use for a start goes up, and people just come to accept the funny looking "hive prevention" all over, in fact, it becomes an icon of RW, nice - so something else needs adjusted, which creates another loose end .... and so on.  Maybe next it's traps .  Or doors.  Too powerful, right?

It seems like a lot of this could be avoided by making sure people in any terrain have tools that allow them to defend their bases.  Like windows.  And turrets that don't explode.  Make sure there is a core that works and has acceptable outcomes for the story your are trying to sell.  Consider how people who are not twinks are supposed to defend and make that function adequately rather then try to fix all the holes and exploits people do because they cant effectively use the tools at hand in a "normal"/"story approved" fashion.

Pardon my rambling and Cheers.

[SCESW]

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

First off, I've played soooo much Rimworld, even before it was on Steam and if I had made my own game, Rimworld is as close to what I wanted as currently exist.  So, Thank You for your hard work!

As a rural Texan, I grew up hunting with a plethora of weapons and later enhanced my skills by serving in the Army Infantry.  I find that Rimworld's combat is too quick and unforgiving, especially considering that most of the colonists are nothing more than neurotic cooks and/or socialite pyromaniacs who spend more of their day chasing down drunk chickens and choosing to eat raw meat without a table instead of walking 5 more feet to grab some fruit from a nearby bush.

Most actual real-world combat encounters are either over very quickly due to explosives or ambushes or they drag out for a long period of time because people tend to have horrible aim when under pressure and bullets are flying in all directions.  Even trained police officers tend to miss many of their shots, as can be seen from the link below.

I am glad that Rimworld has the ability to be modded because one of the first mods I look for is something to add combat skills (and more skills, in general) to the limited mix of Pyromaniac and Chemical Interest.

Combat is more than simply aiming.  It is keeping your cool under pressure.  Looking for and properly taking cover (watch news feeds of clashes in 3rd world countries where local militia stand in the middle of the street firing randomly down the road and compare that to armored, trained soldiers from a 1st world country who take cover behind armored vehicles and fire in semi-auto instead of full-auto.)

Perhaps take some notes from successful combat simulation games and add a few extra stats, such as Suppression, Panicked, Prone, Confused, etc.  Rimworld already has the ability to affect movement, vision and cover on the fly.  Skills that increase or decrease those effects are the difference between a skilled soldier constantly taking advantage of the nearest cover and the colony bartender running through a firefight to save the woman of his dreams when she takes a bullet to the leg.

Adding more 'fighting skills' could drag out hand-to-hand combat to be more interesting compared to the current method where there seems to be no such thing as a Riposte, Parry or Block between two people fighting with swords/clubs.  Perhaps that is in the code, however, I've not noticed it in gameplay.

In short, I'm confused why my colonist are more likely to go crazy because they ate without a table than they are during an intense fire-fight with alien robot invaders.  I believe that a way to help soften that sharp contrast is to have more skills (perhaps with less extreme percentages +10% instead of +50%) to diversify colonists and give them more options to stay alive beyond the oh-so-common Pyromaniac or Chemical Interest.

Also, to make the Mechanoid fights more interesting... why must every Mechanoid be created equal?  How about a few negative traits to give us the option to form strategies against them.  For example, targeting the 'Rusty' Mechanoid with decreased armor first.  Or have the mechaniods crash land with some damage instead of always coming in fresh for the attack.  Give us reasons to flank an enemy and to sneak up on them.  Basically, just more ways to make combat less of a game of 'Hide in the Doorways and kite back and forth' or 'Welcome to my Killbox 3.0'.

I would like to see more defensive structures such as the Embrasures mod, foxholes, hunting blinds (hidden until discovered) and perhaps watch towers to increase range (even though there is no Z-plane).

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/25/shannon-watts/do-more-7-10-police-bullets-miss-their-mark-gun-co/

[GideonHidolka]

Given the nature of the game, I would approach the issue of combat from a table top rpg aspect, specifically a lethal RPG game.


In a lethal, tactical RPG game consider the GM the story teller and the player characters the pawns. Out of the gate, the player characters are slightly tougher then your run of the mill enemy's. I don't think this can be avoided in a setting where a small number of players will have to take on a large number of enemies. In rimworld, I'd consider this plot armor, not the invicble kind, the kind where they are a bit tougher so when they do die its dramatic instead of anticlimatic.


I would give player pawns a bonus to evade, its invisible and you wouldent really notice without being told.


Next, the second way players can survive in that type of RPG is by having a breadth of tactical options. Cover, abilitys, etc. I have no idea what is possible to be programmed in rimworld. But my suggestions would be to implement things such as suppression, targeting limbs, stances for melee fighters. Maybe firing modes for guns, or a stance to make pawns hunker down behind cover but shoot less.


The third aspect is, when im running a game for my players, the enemys act diffirently depending on what they are and whats going on. Does a raider want to steal money? kidnap a pawn, break the solar panels? Maybe if raids had objectives aside from kill everybody you could adapt strategys against it.


If the red letter pops up and says the pirates from bogga buuloo have shown up, they want to kidnap the doctor because they need one. Do you hide the doctor in a bunker and set up position around him since you know thats where the raiders will go? toss him to the raiders so they leave? send him running in one direction possibly splitting the enemy force?

[5thHorseman]

My two main beefs with the combat UI/UX are positioning and group actions.

There is no reasonably easy way to direct many pawns to all take cover from a direction yet also be out of each others' lines of fire. Part of the problem is, when I direct everybody into the area they all show up at different times and the locations where other pawns are headed are both unselectable and invisible. So I don't know I can't go there until I try. It'd be nice if a ghost of a colonist showed up where I was ordering them to go. Then, I could also click that ghost to select the colonist and order them somewhere else.

Another thing I'd like to do is to be able to set up shooter spots and just have any colonist with a gun go there. Maybe be able to create a spot with a bill in it that lists the weapons that - if the colonist has it - are allowed in that spot. Then I could say highlight that area and say "everybody who's drafted, go here!" and then they'd just do it.

And finally, I'm so sick of highlighting all of my ranged guys and clicking a single target to shoot, only to have 8 of them start shooting and the other 3 run forward to melee the item because they can't shoot it from where they are. Partially it's because it's never, ever what I'd want a ranged person to do and partially because they almost always are running into the paths of all the bullets my other colonists are shooting at the thing I wanted them to shoot. If there was a way - any way - to just have that never happen I'd be pretty much twice as happy with the combat UI.

[zizard]

Um, who is that response from? Not me, for sure.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.msg413449#msg413449
I appreciate that this bug might have taken a while to fix, and perhaps it's better to not make a big deal out of it other than saying that this post did not sit well with me given the clarity of the problem.

Pawn movement bug should've been fixed this week, if it isn't please report what's going wrong!

Thanks.

Still love to hear more suggestions about how to make tactical pawn vs pawn combat more attractive.

Reduce RNG. For the current armour system, every weapon should have damage less than 2x the HP of vital parts (except the brain I suppose) (I check charge lance damage every patch... it went back up to 30, which oneshots 15HP vitals). Fists should do less damage than the HP of fingers / toes. Add hand and foot protection. Add gear for blunt armour. It doesn't have to be as effective as sharp armour, but it's a clear gap in the system. Add the missing prosthetic / bionic parts (liver, lung, pelvis, ribcage, sternum, etc). Also add bionic hand/foot (even star wars has it). Smooth out the armour % -> EHP curve. Currently a 1% change in armour from 99->100 is worth almost 16 times as much EHP as 0->1.

Responsiveness can be slightly increased by moving some weapon CD into warmup, since we can cancel the warmup. Reduce armour movement penalties unless it is intended that bionic legs be compulsory for power armour users. Plate is not worth making due to this, since it is equivalent to 4x Slowpoke. People engaged in melee should have their aiming cancelled. Otherwise it just takes 1 centipede cheating and continuing to fire in melee.

Scale raids according to the geometric mean of pawn count and wealth (with each appropriately normalised). Or use some other system of clamping raid points to pawn count, similar to the clamping of impressiveness to room size. Use a smooth function (e.g. 1+ln(x), 1+sqrt(x)) for rescaling raid points rather than halving at 1k and halving again at 2k, as this leads to difficulty spikes below each linear section.

Slow down and smooth out the progression of psychic / poison ships so that we have more time to deal with them. Poison ship should give plants a MTB to die scaling with the time awake and distance from the ship. Eventual radius should increase without limit to avoid absurd situations where a poison ship lands more than 100 distance from anything you care about. Psychic ship low drone -12 almost forces an immediate pop+killbox. Try around -4/day.

Give pawns a temporary mood boost for fighting and killing enemies to partially offset the negative moods from "observed corpse", pain, and ugly environment, so that there is a reasonable breathing space for cleanup. Allow almost all drugs to be used from 0 tolerance without risk of addiction, and show when the safe level has been reached. Otherwise, the combat drugs are all basically "for enemy use only". Scale withdrawal duration and severity based on tolerance.

In thinking about this it occurred to me how restrictive it is to be fighting humans with humans, since rule changes have to be kind of symmetrical. E.g. in DF you fight goblins, so the rules can be different on both sides (and you can't use their clothes).

I think there are enough levers with gear to deal with this. Incidentally, the removal of weapon accuracy scaling with HP benefits raiders since their weapons used to be quite damaged. You might have already compensated for this, of course.

[Maern]

My current colony - tribal start Casssandra extreme. I've been abusing door peeking against raiders. My defense is literally just 4 11x11 rooms on 4 corners of my rectangular base. Each of these rooms alternates door-wall-door-wall, with a layer of sandbags in front.

Step 1: Place colonists at the doors to shoot once using weapons with low charge time.
Step 2: Immediately back off so the door shuts - most raiders won't be able to fire back.
Step 3: Wait for the raiders' status to go from "Searching for targets" to "Attacking random door/wall."
Step 4: Repeat Steps 1-3.

Step 3 is what completely breaks the AI. Normally, if you go to door peek when their status is still "Searching for targets," they will charge their ranged attack the moment your colonists re-open the door. This means they will start attacking before your colonists do. However, by waiting until they "reset" and try to attack a structure, you can get shots off without them being able to fire back because they don't change back to "firing" status until they get hit. In addition, enemies will try to run to cover first before shooting, giving you even more time to hide.

Mechs become trivial with this strategy due to their weapon's long charge time. I've also literally just 5v18ed a pirate raid with no injuries by having 4 colonists fight and 1 run around to repair walls/doors. Surely door peeking needs to be nerfed (it was even more broken in B18).

The only threat so far has come from a mechanoid drop - 1 colonist and a handful of huskies died.

Now that's a quality report right there. Step-by-step, clear, awesome.

I think the first thought here is to make the raiders smarter in a human-like way so that they're not trivially defeated by such tactics. E.g. if it was a human controlling them, he'd not have them leave the door and attack the wall over and over, he'd probably have them attack the door specifically, right?

I'd love to see a video of this in action BTW. I've seen it before but not in the 1.0 build.

Or do players like this strategy? Should it be left alone? After all, consider the topic of this thread... All opinions welcome.

I registered to comment, after years playing this game, to say that rather than having the pawns go for the door, a tactician might place a couple pawns on suppression duty, firing on anyone foolish enough to open the door.  The rest of the team would calmly open a wall into a more vulnerable, less hardened position.  Is there a way to get the AI to behave in this manner?  It seems overly specific . . . but I would love to see raiders behave in that kind of "human" way.

[eugeneb]

I haven't played 1.0 yet so don't know how useful my feedback is going to be. I like the general direction of the game and all the new raid variations I've read about. AI and cheese (killboxes, etc) has been the least enjoyable part of the game to date. To me it has been a catch 22 kind of situation: playing with killboxes (and other cheese) is dead boring, while playing without cheese is impossible because game seems to scale difficulty with the assumption that you will use cheese (so huge raids that are impossible to deal with unless you funnel them into a killbox where they will die like lemmings...again and again, I might add).

I am not sure what a good solution would be. Making AI more human like, even if it's scripted, is definitely something that comes to mind. What would you do if you had to raid a base with a massive killbox? Probably use droppods, punch through the walls (intelligently, accounting for enemy snipers), level killbox with rockets or mortars, etc..

I'll also second another person's thought about combat skill not making that much of a difference right now. You can be a vatgrown terminator but you will be easily downed by zerg rush, e.g. by a bunch of tribals. And unless you cheese them, there is really not much you can do. And since difficulty scales by throwing more people at you, you have to cheese. I think the solution here would be to make quality matter more. Tactical games that come to mind are XCOM and such where you work hard on improving the quality of your people to counter the threats. You also choose particular set ups for particular threats (e.g. not bring a bunch of sniper rifles to combat zombie crowd).

Other than that, I find another person's suggestion to let AI play out the combat to be a bit extreme... but also interesting. I cannot tell whether this is something I'd enjoy and it sounds controversial but I would definitely be very curious to try it out and see how it plays.

In my last colony at the very beginning one raider showed up. The colonists were hiding inside the building and waiting for him. But the guy comes straight to their temp stockpile, grabs 500 silver, and immediately runs away. The colonists were in shock from such impudence. And there was no chance to catch up anyway. That was fun!

Since then they always keep their gold indoors 

(Oh and that happened in beta 18 btw...)

OMFG I though I was the only one this happened to. Easily one of my most memorable RW moments. 3 people crashland and work on setting up initial colony. First raid arrives which consists of one old crippled dude with a shoddy club. Colonists overcomplicate it and set up a clever ambush or something. Dude is heading to them, colonists grab their weapons harder, get a rush of adrenaline and brace for battle. Meanwhile the dude just grabs a big chunk of silver, turns 180 degrees around and starts running to the map edge. A couple missed shots and failed attempt to catch the guy and the colony ends up without big chunk of money. You can picture the looks on colonists faces.
I also had variations of this when I had stockpiles of plasteel closer to the outer perimeter and pirates would just grab it and run away which was pretty sad too.