Some counterplay against drop pods

[Modinstaller]

As it stands now, there's nearly no counter for drop pod raids. Your colony has 10 pawns scattered around doing their things, 10 mechanoids suddenly drop in your workshop or your storage and start destroying everything. If you try to fight them, you risk getting one-shot (that's even with marine armor + marine helmets) or losing limbs. If you don't try to fight them, your base gets ransacked.

If you prepare and make sure you have the right weapons and armor, half of your base is already gone. And chances are they'll take a few shots at your pawns right after landing before they have time to vacate, so it forces you to always equip armor, just in case, which slows down your pawns all the time just for one specific event. Even when you have armor equipped with a bunch of weapons good at countering lancers and scythers, any mistep could cause a death. You basically have to get your pawns as close to the lancers as possible and engage them in melee combat where they're weakest (unlike you want some pawn to randomly get one-shot through 130% sharp armor), and do it fast. The more time your pawns take to close the distance, the more chances of one-shots happening.

You can see that it's impossible to prevent loss like this, especially when the mechanoids outnumber you and you can't even engage all of them in melee. Not to mention that outfitting all your pawns with melee weapons will leave you vulnerable to a full scyther raid. There's just no winning. The only thing you can do is rig your whole colony with dozens of turrets everywhere. That's the only counterplay that I've found. How about something more engaging ?

And one of the most infuriating ways for colonists to die in this game is death by drop pod. Your augmented best guy just got killed by rng, aren't you having fun ? That's another part of drop pods that should change imo. (I know you can get generally get res serums, but it's too rare, slow and inconvenient in sea ice - but maybe it's just sea ice being unbalanced, idk)

Here's an idea : some device that needs to be researched and built, which draws power, and can detect drop pod raids in advance. Say, you have 1 minute or 2 to react to it. It tells you where it's going to land, and that's it. You can then outfit your pawns, move them out of the way so they don't get crushed, move some turrets, and get ready to fight.

[gottoni]

You can design your base to counter drop pods falling inside your base.

Make a big hall inside it with turrets and cover, then make all the rooms inside your base connecting to it. Once the drop comes, tell your colonists to move into position leaving all doors open behind and fight like a normal raid.

It work wonders because the raiders will always drop right next to your defenses if not inside it, so it is really easy to kite them into it and fight without making a mess in your base.

I attached an example for you with mechanoids dropping in my colonists rooms. Sometimes, not all of them get kited together, so they might do some damage before you can kite them all but it is no big deal. I might add this later in the wiki.

Btw, have some EMPs ready.



[attachment deleted due to age]

[hector212121]

How about adding automated anti-aircraft turrets and having drop pods spawn in as actual objects for 15-30 seconds before landing? A destroyed drop pod results in a crippled human or a somewhat damaged mechanoid. Scythers and lancers should be on their last legs and centipedes just dinged up a bit.

Also, anti-aircraft turrets should take potshops at ship parts while they're landing.

[BoogieMan]

My biggest issue with point blank drop pods is that for the most part you have to make special defenses just to deal with them, and them alone. All the other events have better ways to deal with them which makes drop pod defenses a redundant waste of resources and time for 99% of the rest of the game.

A way I can think of to make them feel a little less cheesy would be a tech you can research that is provides a sensor array. Requiring a structure to be built outside, unroofed, and powered. This would give provide you with short advance warning for raids and drop pods.

Maybe an advanced miniaturized version could be researched that could be carried by caravans to give them a better chance to avoid ambushes and attacks, if it makes a detection roll of sorts.

[Roolo]

My biggest issue with point blank drop pods is that for the most part you have to make special defenses just to deal with them, and them alone. All the other events have better ways to deal with them which makes drop pod defenses a redundant waste of resources and time for 99% of the rest of the game.

This isn't really true. You can design your base so that it's pretty well defended against drop pods, while using the same defences against regular raids. Here's an example:



Sure, it's not 100% fail proof, but this design has proved itself pretty well for me.