IMHO about B19 Ranged Combat

[Aki-San]

I wanted to share some of my humble opinion about the ranged combat in B19.
Edit: i am mostly talking about offensive combat, where i am attacking a pirate outpost.

I think the new combat system is bad. It ignores armor, weapons, skill, positioning and tactics.

You can have fully equipped (ARs), fully decked out (power armor, full bionic), highly skilled colonists (15+ in shooting/melee) and they do nothing. enemy with skill 3 or below gets one hit in and critically damages your "super soldier"..

When hunting, the shots hitting are insane, far below 5% misses, if at all. In combat - totally sucking.

IMHO the part damage is very flawed. you can shoot like every organ in the enemy and they are still running around at full speed and are capable of critically hitting your colonists, while you take a bullet to the knee and die in 10 hours. (through power armor and bionic bones..)
And the movement penalty is insane on colonists. they get hit once and are permanently slowed by like 50%, while you can put 20 bullets in an enemy and he goes back to full speed right after the "stun".

And i think the "increased" hit chance (if it actually is this way) for "critical" bodyparts is very strange. like every second hit from an elephant or scyther goes to the head. enemies with like shooting 0-1 hit in my right eye more often than in arms+legs combined. maybe i am just unlucky but that how my fights are going..

I think either there should be an option to switch between enemy style (zerg/hordes vs hard hitting/less enemies) or it should be rebalanced overall and actually make armor, weapons and skill level usefull. Why is there a shooting skill if it does not change the tide of battle?

In B18 i really liked the curve in the shooting skill, especially in hunting. they missed like 90% of the shots at below 5, around 50% at 10, and hit 90% at 15. now they are like 99% on level 10 while hunting and at 20% while fighting... i hope this is not like there might be "adrenaline".

there is a little bit more about different occasions here (from me and others):
https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1735465524703065900/

Don't get me wrong, i would love them to be this hard, IF the enemies actually have the correct weapons, armor and skill.

If they have sucky armor ("fur loin cloth"), lead slingshots and are barely able to hold the weapons the right way around, they should not hit fully power armored super soldiers insanely hard.

Info:
B19, savage, cassandra
Steam, many ease of life mods, no mod that impacts storyteller or combat balance.

[Shurp]

I haven't played B19 long enough to directly experience what you're talking about, but I think I know what the problem is.  Armor is no longer effective at stopping attacks, but remains just as effective at attracting attacks, so it actually has *negative* value.  Strip it off and burn it and you'll take fewer critical hits (because fewer enemies will arrive to shoot at you).

I may need to create a mod to fix this...

[b0rsuk]

I spent little time playing A19 so far, but the melee-like stun on hit looks to be a major buff. I can't wait to see what a minigun does to a tribal or manhunter horde. If it does what I think it does, 2-3 minigunners should be able to annihiliate soft enemies coming from a single direction.

[bbqftw]

What b18 armor typically provided was guaranteed damage mitigation on most vitals except on brain and on neck. This meant that it was very difficult to get one shot in most vitals once you had flak vest, except for getting charge lanced in the neck, and brain shot.

B19's armor is more 'all-or-nothing'. You might take zero damage. You might take 50% damage. Or you might take the whole damage. As a result, a guy in legendary power armor can get one-shot-killed through the heart by a charge lance. On the other hand, you will sometimes take zero damage on shots that connect (something that rarely happens in b18).

In addition, certain vital organs HP were decreased (the heart moving from 20->15 HP means there is more range for one-shot kills, and most critically the fact that a 50% damage 'mitigated' charge lance shot will still destroy it in one hit). This increases the stories you can tell about charge lances.

There's also the factor that the wealth scaling is such that using un-tainted power armor / most bionics makes your game more dangerous on the higher difficulties due to increased enemy scaling. Forgo power armor, just run with a flak vest and crappy duster, and you will find your enemy raids to be far more manageable. And make sure to burn/gift what you aren't actively using.

At low wealth, my typical raids on merciless range from 1.5 to 2:1 at worst. At high wealth with maxed bionics + power armor I was routinely getting encounters closer to 8-10:1 odds (we are talking 220 tribal sappers vs 22 pawns). You take one wrong trade at the latter odds and someone is getting killed / downed outright. In such a case your tactics really are just AoE weapons like mortars and calling caravans on cooldown to buy doomsdays.

[Aki-San]

Hmm, thank you!

That 0/50/100 critical chance might explain why you see more sole deadly impacts. It still does not explain the balance difference between the skillset/weapons colonists vs NPCs.

I forgot to add that i am attacking, so the gear / enemy ratios are quite constant / low compared to my colonists. i upgraded to 6 to attack outposts and it mostly works.

Maybe i try antigrain surprises since mortar hit chance is still affected by you colonists shooting skill....

Again, i dont care much about Tribes, even with +10 Tribe / Colonists a good defense stops them. (Only issue is the amount of bodies and crappy Tribalwear to get rid off ).