Royal Colonists Overpowered?

[Dolphinizer]

I've always avoided big rimworld mods like Glitterworlds, Rimfeller, GeneticRim More Vanilla Turrets, Embrasures, etc because I felt they added optiosn that were simply way too powerful to your arsenal. I always enjoyed the well-tuned balance of Vanilla rimworld, where all methods of defending your colony come with serious advantages and drawbacks, but with the addition of this DLC, it seems the balance has been thrown way off.

For the relatively small sacrifice of having to make one fancy throne/bedroom and having one colonist be useless to your colony in times of peace, you gain a colonist who is singlehanded more powerful than the rest of your colony combined. Psycasts like Berserk allow you to single handedly destroy entire enemy raids without firing a single shot, whereas before you would have to burn an expensive rare artifact to get rid of an especially strong raider, with Berserk and a little micromanagement, you can get the entire raid to kill itself without firing a shot yourself.

Psycasts like wallraise have incredible potential for abuse, allowing you to allow only a couple pawns of a raid into your killbox, wall of their friends and kill them easily with overwhelming firepower. Burden, vertigo pulse and skip allow you to trivialize any melee raids or manhunter packs since you can slow them to a crawl allowing ample time to gun them down, then simply teleport them away the instant they get close. Almost all the psy powers are absurdly powerful, especially considering how small the sacrifice to gain them is.

Then there's the bladelinked weapons, which almost completely remove any reason to use normal melee weapons from the game, these things seem to be 2, maybe 3 times more powerful than their non-linked counterparts, I regularly have my pawns singlehandedly melee a grizzly bear or megasloth to death without suffering a single scratch using them.

I sent a convoy of 4 colonists to raid a pirate base, however none of them ever had to fire a shot, since my Baron singlehandedly wiped out half their forces by simple getting them to kill eachother in berserking rages, then going invisable and meleeing the stragglers to death easily. Despite being outnumbers 4 to 12 and having to clean up 5 turrets guarding the base, the only injuries my colonists sustained from the raid was a nick on the leg from a turret when i got careless destroying the base's powergrid afterward.

This is all not even mentioning that you can call in 3 different types of reinforcements for no cost at all to your colony once you've got a Baron colonist.

I don't like to complain about balance in games, and I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me, but in it's current state, the entire carefully balanced vanilla experience has been overwhelmed by the far, far superior options added in the Royalty DLC. There is no longer any real reason to have your colonists all pick up a gun and fight it out with the raiders, or to build elaborate killboxes or heat-traps, or to train massive amounts of labrador retrievers to maul your enemies, all these defensive strategies are far far more expensive and less effective than simply grinding some royal favour with the empire and building a fancy room.

Is anyone else noticing this?

[mooguy]

It's interesting you say that as a few posts down from yours some people were saying the mech clusters make the game too hard.

What difficulty are you playing on now? would turning it up a notch be better?

[Dolphinizer]

It's interesting you say that as a few posts down from yours some people were saying the mech clusters make the game too hard.

What difficulty are you playing on now? would turning it up a notch be better?

Randy Rough, my complaint has nothing to do with Clusters though.

[mooguy]

It's hard to separate mech clusters from what you're saying though since the idea is that the newer weapons and skills are made available to making dealing with them easier.

However you're making a fair point-  that since the other vanilla enemies ( humans, infestations ect) in 1.0 didn't receive the buff the way mechs did they have become a lot less formidable when using the new stuff against them.

I guess we have to hope that next possible content released makes the other vanilla enemies on par with the new mechanoids.

Maybe you could also play it on higher difficulties as well!

[8roads]

well, time to take on the empire!

[Tynan]

I think you're right there are definitely problems here. This kind of in-depth feedback is very useful and I'll be paying careful attention to it while reworking everything going forward. It's a very complex game so it takes a lot of time and a lot of feedback to really dial it in.

Psycasters are supposed to be transformative, powerful, but costly - but fights are also still supposed to be challenging and risky.

[Covered in Weasels]

I don't have a lot of experience with the new content so far, but it seems af though the berserk powers are particularly strong. They not only turn one enemy against their friends (multiple in the case of berserk pulse), but also cause their friends to fight back and hurt more raiders instead of your colonists.

[carbon]

I think the psychic hangover could use a bit of a buff. Currently, it's very much a mild inconvenience that only seems to last 12 hours or so.

It also, critically, does not in anyway prevent the hungover pawn from being a total psycasting badass. In fact, it doesn't seem like there's any opportunity cost at all to psycasting while hungover. It doesn't seem to extend the timer or make the symptoms worse, so why not Skip from your bed to the fridge?

[Ser Kitteh]

Please don't nerf berserk so fast, I'm enjoying it too much.

Anyway, it's quite clear that berserk may be the biggest offender. Now maybe it's just me, but how about just having a chance to berserk a few? Maybe a max of 5? That way, not all of them are attacking each other.

Invisible could be fixed by it 'breaking cover' by attacking, so it wouldn't let melee pawn royals to be so aggressive. A spell that makes the caster 'transparent' like Kitty from Xmen could do it, and it would allow pawns to run through gunfire. Obviously going in melee makes them more susceptible to being harmed.

Raise wall is perfect for patching perimeter defenses and giving pawns cover in a big plain of nothing, I don't really have issue with it.

Not sure I agree with bladelinked weapons. I have four years and have gotten one monosword (good) and I only gave it to my royal. Everyone else is using the zeushammer and a non-linked monosword.

As for calling reinforcements, honestly, I barely ever use it. That's combat experience not given to my own pawns, so I just don't use them at all.

[carbon]

One thing you could do to limit the spammability of certain psycasts is to have their costs increase with each use within a certain time span, sort of like how the calling for royal aid works, but the cost is additional psychic entropy rather than favor.

So for example, casting pulse berserk initially costs 60 entropy (or whatever the current cost is), but then goes on a 5 day cooldown. You can still cast it while on cooldown, but the cost goes up by 25 entropy increments (60, 85, 110, etc.) and the cooldown goes back to 5 days with each cast. You end up in a situation where you basically have to go into entropy overload to keep spamming some of the more powerful abilities, but the game won't hard stop you if you're willing to risk brain damage.

Again, this would only apply to a select few psycasts that are particularly effective. You would always still have lesser ones to spam as you please.

[zizard]

Just give them a chance to backfire. That should be Fun^TM and lead to a lot of popular reddit posts.

[DuckBoy]

Ahh, the good old days of listing out my best exploits and watching them disappear overnight

Step 1: Start a tribe with a half decent medicine and a masochist
Step 2: Capture the knight/praetor/count from the first mission and remove all their implants
Step 3: Create a masochistic psion
Step 4: Betray the royals (who cares) and get the psychic silencer for your psion
Step 5: Cast berserk on a pair of thrumbos and watch them kill each other
Step 6: Cast berserk pulse on an infestation and watch it kill itself
Step 7: Die to mechs

[Boboid]

Thought I'd chime in particularly on the melee weapons as I make significant use of melee in virtually all my colonies - The problem isn't just Linked melee weapons ( though they are absolutely incredibly powerful ) it's also Plasma/Monoswords and Zeushammers.

Plasmaswords effectively stun any non-mech target they swing at indefinitely as ignited pawns are forced to run around until they extinguish themselves. It comes at the small opportunity cost of some raw damage output compared to a longsword but in general the effect of an enemy taking up space in melee combat while not fighting back is more powerful than killing that target.

Zeushammers are just.. the best blunt melee weapons for general use in addition to their EMP utility. They're probably the least powerful of the new weapon types but they still outclass their competition trivially while being fairly common relative to their power level.

Monoswords meanwhile are just strictly better versions of all other melee weapons for pure damage output. They do more base dps than Longswords while also ignoring almost all armor. In practice they end up doing ~2-3x the damage output of a plasteel longsword of comparable quality against most targets.
Additionally Good+ quality monoswords do more than 30 damage per swing which removes limbs in a single hit which reduces kill/down times considerably.

---
As for their linked versions - Only linked monoswords even have a detection chance. Anyone can use a linked Plasma/Zeus with total impunity - they're bonkers.

Linked Plasmaswords have all their inherent advantages while also being far too lethal - the average raider can't handle being swung at twice.

Linked Zeushammers essentially ignore all armor while -again- doing more damage by a huge margin *and* passing the 30 damage threshold required to remove limbs while having a high attack speed.

And Linked Monoswords are ... egregious blenders.
High skill melee colonists with good equipment ( Recon armor, marine/cataphract helmets, shield belts) might as well be lawnmowers.
The average number of hits to kill a human with a Linked Monosword is 2. They swing once every second.
If you exert any control over the combat (By reducing the range at which enemies can engage primarily through LOS blocking) then a single monosword can often take out an entire raid by just standing next to an entrance and cutting down anyone who walks through in an instant.

Meanwhile my current colony has eight linked weapons by year 9.

3 Zeushammers, 3 plasmaswords, 2 monoswords.
Everyone using them has 15+ melee skill, I've got an additional 3 standard monoswords and a zeushammer..
It's like a woodchipper in here! I just finished killing 117 megasloths as a result of a damaged monument -  And to be clear that's just my 12 guys standing shoulder to shoulder in a corridor beating them to death. No notable injuries or really any risk at all.. because I cast vertigo pulse twice.
Could've cast berserk pulse, didn't need to

Intended to be at war with the empire but with royal favor toggled off you get a lot of quests that reward gigantic amounts of reputation so I've still yet to actually be at war with them.
With royal favor quests off it gives me more access to quests likely to yield linked weapons and the notion of using a non-dlc weapon isn't even a consideration.
Linked weapons are so strong that you could cut their raw dps by.. 40%? and I'd still clamor to buy them or be rewarded them via quests every time.

Building a melee-orriented colony is probably.. 4x? more powerful compared to pre-royalty. Before accounting for psypowers.. which are giant force multipliers in of themselves.

Overall I'd say the Royalty melee weapons are a bit too common, and the Linked weapons need their disadvantages to be more prominent AND have their damage output lowered.

[zizard]

ooh let's make the swords have their own mood bars and you have to polish them, feed them, take them for walks, cuddle them to sleep etc. or they will be sad and become limp in combat

[Lexa]

It's interesting you say that as a few posts down from yours some people were saying the mech clusters make the game too hard.

Mech Clusters AND psycasts both seem overtuned af to me. Just in different directions. Id be happy with a nerf to both. Though i havent had yet the chance to etensively test the latest patch mech nerfs, the range on the turrets wasnt touched and thats my main problem... Maybe with the fire rate nerf and further long range accuracy nerf it wont be anymore... but still, i really dont like approaching clusters.

Building a melee-orriented colony is probably.. 4x? more powerful compared to pre-royalty. Before accounting for psypowers.. which are giant force multipliers in of themselves.

To add on this, i always considered meele to be frighteningly poweful and efficent before even 1.1. With proper choke points, LoS breaks, small rooms and flanking opportunities i've always called my bases blenders to begin with (especially if i happen to tame bears and breed them, which i certainly will try) already because meeleing pawns pervents them from using their guns - something thats critical for dealing with centipedes.
I havent had this luck you have with the bladelink weapons but if so then i may need to reconsider mainly using animals and instead use pawns with those.