1.0 changing the game too much?

[Neotic]

Technically these reviews shouldn't even be posted as 1.0 isn't a final product

[Skaer]

Or do players like this strategy? Should it be left alone?

There's hardly anything else that during the early game would allow us to beat the better equipped, outnumbering 3 to 1, raids of the higher difficulty levels, or am I missing something?

[RemingtonRyder]

It's worth asking what you'd do as a player if you were raiding a faction base and the defenders started doing this.

I would tuck in behind some cover and shoot the door from a safe distance. The idea being that if the defenders do try sneaking out of that door, they might get caught by some stray bullets. If I succeed in destroying the door, they can't use this tactic any more, and I can resume pillaging and burning the outlying buildings if there aren't any defenders in sight.

As for why raiders do what they do? Show of force. They're intimidating you by showing up and destroying your stuff. If you try to stop them, they'll escalate it to hurting your people and (possibly) kidnapping the ones that go down.

Look at games like Fallout 4, where you build up your settlements and add defences. Even a well-armed raid gets mown down when there are lots of turrets and defenders putting bullets their way. It should be expected that some raiders lose their lives. I think that one of the weaknesses of raiders in a game like that is that they take cover and try to shoot into a heavily fortified position for too long, when they should realise the futility of such a slugfest and book it back to their hideout.

In games like XCOM 2, sometimes your objective isn't to kill all enemies, but to place some charges and get the hell out of there so you can blow up the objective at a safe distance.

Similarly, when raiders in RimWorld realise that you have a heavily fortified settlement, maybe they should look at ways of causing big damage somewhere and then getting out of there.

[Greep]

Well, if we're really roleplaying raiders and I felt a place is too fortified I would either

1) never attack it again
2) bring mortars or frags every time

So I don't know if it's worth bothering making them smarter in this way since we're already hampering them to begin with by making them prepare terribly.

[Perq]

Given how many mods people are using (especially QoL wise) I'd say changes are needed. Of course the game will be different.

If I were to guess, I'd go with people complaining about cheesy strats being nerfed/changed so that you cannot play on highest difficulty as easily (which never was intended, as I understand their description).
People love to think that they are genius at what they are doing, therefor when their (genius) strat gets removed and they cannot steamroll highest difficulty, they get angry. I wouldn't mind those people too much, cheesy strats usually come from oversights in design (which is natural in such complex games - you cannot expect to think of everything) and usually lead to games being boring quickly because there is simply nothing to master.

[blowlotsup]

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 is exactly how I feel about things.

I think that also leads to another problem I face during this game; value vs time spent. Let me preface this by saying I play mostly on Rough difficulty, Cass or Randy depending on how the mood takes me. I have 500+ hours in this game and each colony I like to try something different. I like both skill-begets-reward types of gameplay and the randomness-leads-to-storytelling aspects of the game; I also appreciate that balancing these two things is very difficult.

This game poses threats with events with increasing difficulty, whether it be with length of event, numbers or types of attackers, or quality of equipment, where eventually the player needs an advantage to beat the encounter. I class a "win" as an outcome that has very few permanent injuries and/or deaths, and enough colonists left for the colony to remain functional and continue on the path to its goal. By and large I believe the non-combat encounters to be relatively balanced and, if prepared properly, can be overcome, e.g. toxic fallout is beaten with hydroponics.

So focusing on combat-based events, we have the following: by spending time and resources with research and crafting, the game gives the player advantages in the form of armour, turrets, mortars and craftable weapons. However right now some of those advantages either don't happen fast enough or don't have as much of an impact as the time spent would suggest. The biggest enemy during combat encounters is by far the RNG of damage taken and the impact that has on the colony as a whole. So let's look at the advantages the game gives you to deal with combat, and why time spent doesn't feel worth it.

Crafting weapons: I like the variety of weapons and that they have different roles. However with the difference in shooting skill feeling like it has such a little impact on accuracy (as mentioned by Ilya), crafting better guns seems to inflate wealth more than being able to utilise them outweighs the increased raid difficulty. The game will send extra raiders or better equipped raiders because you now have 2 excellent charge rifles with nice armour penetration, but if your 15+ shooters can't reliably hit the broad side of a mountain with them, then it doesn't matter a damn what guns they're firing. 

As an aside, the time it takes to research the great bow is too much. On paper a great bow is a bit better than a bolt-action rifle, but factoring in research is it better than a free bolt-action rifle from a raider + batteries + hydroponics + solar panels? No. I don't think it would even be worth it for a tribal start. You want to focus on Electricity and by that time raiders have already given you free weapon "deliveries". At the beginning of the game you can't afford to dedicate one colonist to full time research, so by the time you're able to do that (after researching other things such as power-related tech), you've already got an abundance of better weapons.

Mortars: Great vs siege and mech ships, but little else. "Preparing" raids run around too much like headless chickens to be good targets. Give them actual combat use once the raiders meet your defenses, like the ability to destroy stone block cover. I also think the research investment is way too much. I'm more likely to recover all the mortars I need from sieges before the time it takes to research my own. You only need 3 or 4 realistically, and each siege usually comes with 2 for free.

Turrets: Just give them armour and a hefty repair cost rather than force them to be replaced. I like the idea of my pawns hunkering down behind the turret and using it as extra cover. They're made of huge chunks of steel/plasteel; make them act like one. I gave up using turrets a long time ago, simply due to the fact that they explode. Was this to counteract them being melee'd down so easily? Current use needs them on your front line to be useful and they cost too much in constant damage mitigation. If you stick them in your actual colony as a second line of defense there's too much friendly fire since you can't risk standing close enough to prevent it due to explosions. Stop them exploding so we can nestle them into nooks and crannies as a breach defense rather than needing to leave them in the open.

Smokepop belts: I love this addition. However it would be great to see the actual information about their usefulness. Maybe an option to make them not auto-trigger, but a manual thing akin to smoke grenades, actually breaking line of sight. Allow for escapes, re-positioning and rescues. Research placement and cost is spot on.

Shield belts: Going in the right direction for a melee solution, but the problem is the time it takes to invest in a melee pawn (that isn't just going to suicide into an enemy firing line) is horrendous. You need a full set of armour, a high quality melee weapon made from uranium or plasteel and the ability to craft your own shield belts. Those pieces of the puzzle are silly expensive from traders, and up until the point you can craft your own, melee just isn't viable if you value the lives of your pawns. Compared to any random colonist that can pick up a pistol and hide behind a wall and sandbag? Yeah.

Armour: There is a key element to combat in this game that makes armour in it's current state too volatile and RNG-based. Outside of an animal hunting a colonist, when a pawn is downed they're not longer seen as a threat and aren't targetted by enemy fire. If a colonist is down they're less likely to die because they're not being shot. If a colonist is armoured, they're less likely to go down and get hit more often while an ineffective shooting skill (which gets even worse as they get gain minor injuries) doesn't make that longevity worthwhile. They're not taking enough people down with them to justify it.

So, armour currently sits in the role of making fights last longer by virtue of RNG. It pays to be able to dispatch the enemy as fast as possible because limiting the amount of bullets that come out of their guns is key to RNG success. In a system of pure RNG, a longer fight is not always beneficial when a high shooting skill feels useless; if your 15+ shooter is fully decked out in armour but still can't hit anyone, having him sticking around in combat for longer is pointless. Deadly even, because he just becomes more of a bullet sponge until RNG hits and takes out their heart, neck or brain leading to death. "Stick a bunch of monkeys on typewriters you'll eventually produce shakespeare."

I think the role of armour should still continue to mitigate injuries into bruises and cracks, but not to necessarily make a pawn last longer in combat. I've had my armoured colonists still fighting with both legs and arms broken, bruised black and blue but no actual bleeding wounds. Why are they not down already in agonising pain? They shouldn't be able to walk at all.

Trying to figure out the actual amount of armour a colonist has and how effective it is, is a lesson in futility. I don't want to have to break out a spreadsheet (exaggeration, I know) to work it all out. Is power armour on it's own actually fine? Layered armour better? Is it better to have higher armour on outer layers or on shirt/pants? I like the direction the system is heading in, but being able to see at a glance what the effect of having armour is would be great. Have it listed "Torso: 50% to deflect" or something to that effect.

This leads to another point; much like Ilya, I would love for my colony to have defined roles during combat as well as out of it. The ideal situation would be this:

• I want my ultimate soldier pawns to be on the front lines, almost guaranteed to win in a fair fight because I have worked towards that by training my shooting skill, and crafted more accurate weapons. I want my soldier pawns to be part of my actual defense, not just things that make use of defensive structures I build. I want them to be lumbering tanks, fully kitted out in power armour I have researched and crafted, barely taking any meaningful damage. They can and will go down just like a normal colonist, but through pain with broken bones, not from death or lost limbs. Shooting shouldn't be all about accuracy. It should be the knowledge of when to fire and when to take cover, and most importantly where to shoot. Have a high shooting skill add to cover bonus. Can accuracy be fine tuned to where called shots are a thing? A shooter of 10+ should be able to purposely target to kill or wound. Combat capable pawns on both sides should be able to take down targets easier. Make target priority, positioning and flanking more important.


• I want it to feel like the enemy has skillfully punched a hole through my defense that I need to deal with. Sapper raids are good at this, so maybe expand on this idea. I want raiders getting through my firing line with riot shields, smoke bombs and flash bangs. Have a builder with a shield belt construct sandbags within shooting range. Just something that is not a raider with 0 shooting and a sniper rifle taking out someone's brain because of armour penetration and luck. It seems to happen too often, but that's confirmation bias due to human nature. The brain is wired to focus more on the negative than positive. If a colonist loses a limb there's an upside because it can eventually be replaced with the newly added prosthetics and bionics. Instant death is 100% negative and it doesn't feel good for as often as it seems to happen, and replacing colonists is very difficult. Stories in this game come from loss and that shouldn't always mean one-shot death. Even death from something like infection or bleeding out feels better than dropping randomly in combat.


• I want kidnapping to be more of a common thing; my downed armoured colonists are worth a fortune to both myself AND my enemy. Have them steal my supplies and weapons. Make me want revenge. Make me want to launch a rescue. Force me to make that choice as a crippled colony, to rebuild or recover, because waste too much time and my kidnapped colonist might join the raider faction along with all his gear. Make me want to make more stories rather than sit back and let those stories come to me. I love the missions and quests to rescue colonists, just give me a system where if I'm adequately geared I don't risk the lives of 5-6 colonists for the sake of 1. Either make that pawn REALLY worth it or give me something else to offset the inconvenience.


• I want my medics hanging back with front-line built hospitals ready to take casualties, equipped with guns just in case the enemy does manage to get past my defenses of sandbags, colonists and turrets. Bleeding out times should pose an actual threat. Have battle-applied medicine temporarily reduce pain of cracks and bruises so my armoured colonists can get back into the fight for a bit. Have friendly medics be able to use inject drugs to drafted colonists as they're fighting. Painkillers. Go-juice. That makes my choice and time spent training animals for rescue to be actually important rather than just a handy cleanup crew after the fight is done.


• If all else fails I want my colonists to be able to fall back to secondary defenses when the first ones fall. Right now if all colonists disappear from line of sight, the AI forgets they existed and has no idea of where they could be. They wander off to go headbutt a random wall a few times. The AI should work more towards breaking through defenses they were just firing at to get to where my colonists ran off to.


• Give me the ability to train my soldiers with something other than horseshoes. I don't want to have to draft every single colonist during a fight just for the sake of making up numbers; make sharpshooters count for something, and make it so holding back colonists for support roles and as a last resort actually has purpose.

All of this combined would make me feel better about sending out a purposely trained combat unit of colonists into a pawn-on-pawn firefight because the work, time researching and resources I'd put into it would actively reduce the chance of losing a colonist. Right now deaths still feel cheap and random. I'd rather have deaths from pawns bleeding out in the middle of a fight than dropping like stones. That way it makes it a challenge to survive, not cross my fingers and hope the dice roll well. If you lose a colonist, I don't feel their worth is accurately represented. Not only has your combat ability greatly taken a fall, the ability to recover also has. This leads to a downward spiral that, while it can be interesting, is un-fun when it happens too often. The steam news section has it right with Rock Paper Shotgun calling RimWorld a catastrophe sim. It used to be a survival sim, and I liked that a bit better.

[Grubfist]

I haven't seen it in action yet, so I don't want to judge, but the animals being tamed "degrading" over time as I read in the 1.0 patch notes really scares me. I loved animals, especially my muffalo ranching, and the thought of them "untaming" makes me want to avoid the entire animal system. Why bother investing in them if they won't stick with me?

[DariusWolfe]

Go try it before you get worried. Your tamers will continually work to keep your animals tame. Unless you have a massive herd where the tamers aren't capable of keeping on top of it, you'll be fine. Even massive herds are still viable, you're just going to have to dedicate a lot more of your tamers time to upkeep.

[Razzoriel]

Crafting weapons:

The wealth difference in your guns is irrelevant. Equipment worn by your colonists do not count towards wealth in raids. Even still, supposing half of your colony is equipping a top-tier gun/weapon that is drastically inflating your wealth, it would account for one more raider, or a couple tribals, which wouldn't matter that much if you know what you're doing when defending.

As an aside, the time it takes to research the great bow is too much. On paper a great bow is a bit better than a bolt-action rifle

No, the great bow is not better then the BA rifle, for one simple reason: armor penetration. It is all fun and games until mechanoids come and start dinging all your flimsy arrows.

Mortars:

They USED to be quite valuable in A17 or B18. The whole idea behind mortars was to make your low-skill shooter man it. The forced miss was still high, but if you knew how to calculate raid routes, it could mean the difference between dead and alive colonists (one single mortar wounding so many soldiers/tribals plays a huge role in prolonged combat)

Turrets:

I don't mind them exploding, but I do mind that they're paper-thin. It's a little awkward to see mechanoids ding bullets and attacks, but not my huge autocannon, as you said.

Smokepop belts:

Reduces accuracy in both incoming and outcoming shots. Yes, it is great, but it is restricted in position. Using it to repo your shooters is good, but your melee will need to stay put after being shot if he wants the def boost. It's a highly defensive tool, trading the mobility of shields for sheer localized effectiveness.

Shield belts:

You can buy them. You can make them now without uranium. If anything, it is undercosted but gated in research.

Armour:

Your whole theory is completely destroyed by the simple fact that armor saves limbs. In two fights where a pawn goes unarmored, and one that he does, he might live both, but lose an arm, leg or worse, get his organs stabbed/shot.

if your 15+ shooter is fully decked out in armour but still can't hit anyone, having him sticking around in combat for longer is pointless. Deadly even, because he just becomes more of a bullet sponge until RNG hits and takes out their heart, neck or brain leading to death. "Stick a bunch of monkeys on typewriters you'll eventually produce shakespeare."

The whole purpose of armor is to protect pawns so they don't die. If your shooter is shot in the neck, or has enough wounds to bleed out, you don't sit him there, you remove him from the frontlines and get him ASAP to the doctor, and you let the more healthy colonists keep on fighting. IMO, for someone that has 400+ hours, you don't seem to be using the correct strategies here.

Trying to figure out the actual amount of armour a colonist has and how effective it is, is a lesson in futility. I don't want to have to break out a spreadsheet (exaggeration, I know) to work it all out. Is power armour on it's own actually fine? Layered armour better? Is it better to have higher armour on outer layers or on shirt/pants? I like the direction the system is heading in, but being able to see at a glance what the effect of having armour is would be great. Have it listed "Torso: 50% to deflect" or something to that effect.

It's actually very simple. If the attacker does not have a specific armor penetration, you just multiply the damage by 150%. That is his armor penetration value. So a 20 damage attack has 30% armor pen, for instance (scythers). Pila are notoriously high-damaging, but have very low armor pen, for example. You then remove the armor pen from your armor value and you get the chance to deflect/reduce the attack. It seems complicated, but on general you just have to multiply the expected damage by 1.5x and have some dozens of points above that to deflect/reduce it reliably.

So far, your points seem well-developed, but fail to provide a valid point since your strategies are not reliable and you have distorted views on how viable melee is, for instance. Nothing too far from what people are talking about, since everyone was relying on killboxes. But this is what called my attention below:

• I want my ultimate soldier pawns to be on the front lines, almost guaranteed to win in a fair fight because I have worked towards that by training my shooting skill, and crafted more accurate weapons. I want my soldier pawns to be part of my actual defense, not just things that make use of defensive structures I build. I want them to be lumbering tanks, fully kitted out in power armour I have researched and crafted, barely taking any meaningful damage. They can and will go down just like a normal colonist, but through pain with broken bones, not from death or lost limbs. Shooting shouldn't be all about accuracy. It should be the knowledge of when to fire and when to take cover, and most importantly where to shoot. Have a high shooting skill add to cover bonus. Can accuracy be fine tuned to where called shots are a thing? A shooter of 10+ should be able to purposely target to kill or wound. Combat capable pawns on both sides should be able to take down targets easier. Make target priority, positioning and flanking more important.

You want lumbering tanks, cover systems and more strategic combat. You can't make the first with the latter, since everyone would simply use power armor and melee instead of shooting. Balance must be taken. Today, in the current build, a shielded pawn with a longsword and a steel plate armor, with just 7-9+ melee, normal quality as standard, can tank and deflect attention reliably enough against outlanders. It can flank tribals and singlehandedly defeat three archers or more, unless you're really unlucky. One single melee guy can punish raids and avoid your valuable shooters getting shot. If you have two or three (three is a good standard when your colony reaches 9+ colonists, for door defense) melee pawns, one brawler, and all of them have enough equipment, they will provide a huge asset to your defenses. You use shooters/artifacts against the enemy's VIPs (high-combat pawns, high-power firearms, rocket launchers, etc). You charge their bolt-action/greatbows/lancers with melee after the shooters mitigate the initial wave, and leave one melee to protect them while they shoot (their shield also prevents friendly fire). All this combined with sandbags and turrets, all to bring up one point: why do you want this? You already have it. It takes a HUGE RNG failure to kill your melee people. They are already very beefy. There is no need for more protection against range, if anything, i'd simply make limbs default to 1 HP in one-shots, so they don't lose fingers that much. Simple.

I'm in favor of cover only to give miniguns a purpose beyond countering tribal bumrushes.

• I want it to feel like the enemy has skillfully punched a hole through my defense that I need to deal with. Sapper raids are good at this, so maybe expand on this idea. I want raiders getting through my firing line with riot shields, smoke bombs and flash bangs. Have a builder with a shield belt construct sandbags within shooting range. Just something that is not a raider with 0 shooting and a sniper rifle taking out someone's brain because of armour penetration and luck. It seems to happen too often, but that's confirmation bias due to human nature. The brain is wired to focus more on the negative than positive. If a colonist loses a limb there's an upside because it can eventually be replaced with the newly added prosthetics and bionics. Instant death is 100% negative and it doesn't feel good for as often as it seems to happen, and replacing colonists is very difficult. Stories in this game come from loss and that shouldn't always mean one-shot death. Even death from something like infection or bleeding out feels better than dropping randomly in combat.

A 0-shooting sniper rifle pawn has a really.. really low chance to hit anything. But if your pawn was in the open, it happens a lot. No cover is a bigger casualty-maker than anything.

• I want kidnapping to be more of a common thing; my downed armoured colonists are worth a fortune to both myself AND my enemy. Have them steal my supplies and weapons. Make me want revenge. Make me want to launch a rescue. Force me to make that choice as a crippled colony, to rebuild or recover, because waste too much time and my kidnapped colonist might join the raider faction along with all his gear. Make me want to make more stories rather than sit back and let those stories come to me. I love the missions and quests to rescue colonists, just give me a system where if I'm adequately geared I don't risk the lives of 5-6 colonists for the sake of 1. Either make that pawn REALLY worth it or give me something else to offset the inconvenience.

They already do it. They just won't when one or two of your pawns are downed and the other three are shooting at them. The kidnapping happens as much as it should, and I'd support more of that, but can't see how it can happen more.

• I want my medics hanging back with front-line built hospitals ready to take casualties, equipped with guns just in case the enemy does manage to get past my defenses of sandbags, colonists and turrets. Bleeding out times should pose an actual threat. Have battle-applied medicine temporarily reduce pain of cracks and bruises so my armoured colonists can get back into the fight for a bit. Have friendly medics be able to use inject drugs to drafted colonists as they're fighting. Painkillers. Go-juice. That makes my choice and time spent training animals for rescue to be actually important rather than just a handy cleanup crew after the fight is done.

The only thing I want for combat medics is a "stabilizing" feature that removes pain shock and bleed for a few minutes, with only one application of a drug or medicine. An adrenaline injection so they feel no pain and get a movement speed buff in exchange for collapsing later would work as well.

• Give me the ability to train my soldiers with something other than horseshoes. I don't want to have to draft every single colonist during a fight just for the sake of making up numbers; make sharpshooters count for something, and make it so holding back colonists for support roles and as a last resort actually has purpose.

There is that; you make them hunt. Give them a low-accuracy gun and make them shoot at things. To train melee, you just punch some hares/raccoons.

The tl;dr: Your RNG is failing you because you're giving it too much lenience to act. My personal experience a few days ago with two lancers insta-killing two pawns with neck shots behind sandbags was a RNG failure. I shouldn't leave them as a valid target; I should have charged with my shielded melee; deflected lance shots can't kill you.

[Aerial]

Trying to figure out the actual amount of armour a colonist has and how effective it is, is a lesson in futility. I don't want to have to break out a spreadsheet (exaggeration, I know) to work it all out. Is power armour on it's own actually fine? Layered armour better? Is it better to have higher armour on outer layers or on shirt/pants? I like the direction the system is heading in, but being able to see at a glance what the effect of having armour is would be great. Have it listed "Torso: 50% to deflect" or something to that effect.

It's actually very simple. If the attacker does not have a specific armor penetration, you just multiply the damage by 150%. That is his armor penetration value. So a 20 damage attack has 30% armor pen, for instance (scythers). Pila are notoriously high-damaging, but have very low armor pen, for example. You then remove the armor pen from your armor value and you get the chance to deflect/reduce the attack. It seems complicated, but on general you just have to multiply the expected damage by 1.5x and have some dozens of points above that to deflect/reduce it reliably.

That doesn't sound very simple to me.  Where would an average joe player go to find that information, anyway?  Shouldn't it be summarized in a tooltip in a digestible format that doesn't require stopping the game to do some mental math/get out a calculator every time you need to figure out how a given piece of armor compares with possible damage sources?

• I want my ultimate soldier pawns to be on the front lines, almost guaranteed to win in a fair fight because I have worked towards that by training my shooting skill, and crafted more accurate weapons. I want my soldier pawns to be part of my actual defense, not just things that make use of defensive structures I build. I want them to be lumbering tanks, fully kitted out in power armour I have researched and crafted, barely taking any meaningful damage. They can and will go down just like a normal colonist, but through pain with broken bones, not from death or lost limbs. Shooting shouldn't be all about accuracy. It should be the knowledge of when to fire and when to take cover, and most importantly where to shoot. Have a high shooting skill add to cover bonus. Can accuracy be fine tuned to where called shots are a thing? A shooter of 10+ should be able to purposely target to kill or wound. Combat capable pawns on both sides should be able to take down targets easier. Make target priority, positioning and flanking more important.

You want lumbering tanks, cover systems and more strategic combat. You can't make the first with the latter, since everyone would simply use power armor and melee instead of shooting. Balance must be taken. Today, in the current build, a shielded pawn with a longsword and a steel plate armor, with just 7-9+ melee, normal quality as standard, can tank and deflect attention reliably enough against outlanders. It can flank tribals and singlehandedly defeat three archers or more, unless you're really unlucky. One single melee guy can punish raids and avoid your valuable shooters getting shot. If you have two or three (three is a good standard when your colony reaches 9+ colonists, for door defense) melee pawns, one brawler, and all of them have enough equipment, they will provide a huge asset to your defenses. You use shooters/artifacts against the enemy's VIPs (high-combat pawns, high-power firearms, rocket launchers, etc). You charge their bolt-action/greatbows/lancers with melee after the shooters mitigate the initial wave, and leave one melee to protect them while they shoot (their shield also prevents friendly fire). All this combined with sandbags and turrets, all to bring up one point: why do you want this? You already have it. It takes a HUGE RNG failure to kill your melee people. They are already very beefy. There is no need for more protection against range, if anything, i'd simply make limbs default to 1 HP in one-shots, so they don't lose fingers that much. Simple.

Honest question here.  There's been a lot of lobbying from the forum to make melee viable in combat, which I understand.  But should melee be required?  Shouldn't it be viable play to only have ranged soldiers? 

Your description above would imply to me that melee is absolutely critical to succeeding against raids and I am not sure that's what a lot of players would expect (since our perceptions are based largely on what real world modern militaries do and there are NO modern military units that send in guys with spears and heavy armor next to their rifle squads.  We do see riot police who are essentially melee units, but their goal is to deter with non-lethal force.)

[bbqftw]

I don't see melee as particularly strong outside really meme applications against things lacking ranged capability.

Most ranged weapons have poke/stab melee modes which means they can instantly inflict an eye scar, and this happens surprisingly often (did a test where I beat up 50 pawns until downing with shortbow melee and about 5 ended up with eye damage). In general you've lost tempo if this happens early, and early eye damage cripples melee a lot more than ranged.

Not to mention that there is a fair few things with one shot capability vs non brain vitals nowadays.

Of course, there are shield belts and armors offering such protections, but that falls into "you already won" category once secured for majority of your pawns.

Also steel plate, I am already laughing. Inflicting negative 4x jogger to your pawn to get fairly mediocre protection...

[Copperwire]

I am unsure about something so please correct if I am wrong:

When a storyteller decides it is raid time it chooses one of the hostile factions as the guest.  That means that if you make peace with all the human factions you can, you get attacked just as often and only face a choice of mechanoids or pirates.  Basically, this means that rather then your life getting easier when you make peace, it gets harder.  It even makes sense to go out of your way to make war with the gentle tribe...

Am I missing something?

[NuclearStudent]

I am unsure about something so please correct if I am wrong:

When a storyteller decides it is raid time it chooses one of the hostile factions as the guest.  That means that if you make peace with all the human factions you can, you get attacked just as often and only face a choice of mechanoids or pirates.  Basically, this means that rather then your life getting easier when you make peace, it gets harder.  It even makes sense to go out of your way to make war with the gentle tribe...

Am I missing something?

Yup, you're right.

On the flip side, if you have good relations, you're more likely to get reinforcements. However, that's just not enough to balance out the fact that mechanoid raids are inherently tough.

[Copperwire]

Excuse me while I go anti-negotiate with this yellow village up the street ....

[Razzoriel]

To me that melee is absolutely critical to succeeding against raids and I am not sure that's what a lot of players would expect (since our perceptions are based largely on what real world modern militaries do and there are NO modern military units that send in guys with spears and heavy armor next to their rifle squads.  We do see riot police who are essentially melee units, but their goal is to deter with non-lethal force.)

Modern military would see melee as an effective strategy if they had personal shields that would deter friendly fire and enemy fire while one of their men distracted two or three archers shooting at their squadron. There are multiple references of forward action to distract enemy fire until a squad repositions, and multiple reports of soldiers even risking their lives to do that, being so critical that one dies so that other few dozen may have a chance to live.