Mortar Accuracy Settings

[Dargaron]

So, I just spent a full 25 High-Explosive Shells trying (and failing) to damage a Psychic Ship Chunk. I then reloaded and tried again, and still was unable to damage it below 25% before running out of shells. My pawns were 15 and 12 shooting, (one of whom had bionic eyes and a bionic hand), and the ship was slightly more than 100 tiles away from the mortars. This level of firepower should not be necessary to hit a stationary target.

I understand why mortars have limited accuracy in their default setting (sieges would be *brutal* if mortars had pinpoint accuracy), but I don't think I have ever, in more than 3,000 hours of Rimworld, seen a mortar shell hit anywhere close to the aiming point.

Therefore, mortars should have multiple accuracy settings: at the cost of extra aiming time aiming time (I'd tentatively propose 3x, 5x or 10x as potential multipliers for Precision Mode), mortars should be able to hit within a guaranteed, relatively tight radius.

If nothing else, mortar shots should become more accurate the more shots are fired at the same location, instead of the current paradigm of "fire randomly in the general direction of the target."

[Canute]

My pawns were 15 and 12 shooting

Shooting doesn't affect mortar's.

If you want them more accurate, try to search for mods.

[Dargaron]

If you want them more accurate, try to search for mods.

See, that would be an acceptable response...if development on the game were finished. However, the fact that updates keep showing up with balance changes means that it is perfectly legitimate to argue for balance alterations to the vanilla game.

Now, I know development isn't finished, because if it were, then there wouldn't be updates that make features objectively worse for people who don't have the newest, latest DLC (see: item stash quests no longer display the reward from the World Map: you have to click the Item Stash and then click the Quest Menu in order to see what each site offers. Quest rewards were also massively reduced in the Royalty patch, despite the fact that folks without the DLC don't get the commensurate increase in quests from the Empire). There also wouldn't be regular patch notifications on my Steam page listing various balance tweaks to the vanilla game. Yet there are. So don't you tell me to shut up, even if you phrase it in slightly more diplomatic language.

You'll note that I don't want mortars to be more accurate in their current form. That would be ridiculously overpowered. But their current form is too inaccurate to fulfill its basic purpose (hitting stationary targets with indirect fire), so I proposed an alternative firing mode that sacrifices rate of fire for accuracy.

[ShadowKatt]

Use mods. The mortars are not inaccurate because of a failing on the dev team behind them. Mortars have been tweaked several times and this is where they want the to be. If mortars are accurate, then you can turtle up in your base snug and safe and shell things to peices, ESPECIALLY with the mech clusters being introduced. That's not eventful though. There's no drama. Of the many tweaks to mortars they have had their damage lowered and their accuracy scattered to make you less reliant on them. You're not supposed to be able to shell the map. You're supposed to be shelled and find different tactical solutions to deal with seiges.

There are mods, expecially Mortar Accuracy, which fixes values to mortar accuracy. Depending on your setup you can use shooting, intellectual, or both. That's the only way, though, you're going to get accurate mortars. They're not going to be changed again in game. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[Dargaron]

Use mods. The mortars are not inaccurate because of a failing on the dev team behind them. Mortars have been tweaked several times and this is where they want the to be. If mortars are accurate, then you can turtle up in your base snug and safe and shell things to peices, ESPECIALLY with the mech clusters being introduced. That's not eventful though. There's no drama. Of the many tweaks to mortars they have had their damage lowered and their accuracy scattered to make you less reliant on them. You're not supposed to be able to shell the map. You're supposed to be shelled and find different tactical solutions to deal with seiges.

There are mods, expecially Mortar Accuracy, which fixes values to mortar accuracy. Depending on your setup you can use shooting, intellectual, or both. That's the only way, though, you're going to get accurate mortars. They're not going to be changed again in game. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Remember: Mech Clusters don't exist in my world, so making reference to them is irrelevant. I bought vanilla: vanilla should be a balanced product in-and-of itself.

The design decisions made in updating Rimworld to 1.1 directly contradict what you say. It *used* to be that causing enough damage to Crashed Ship Parts caused the attached Mechs to assault your base. Even hitting the Mechs would cause them to take aggressive action (although they would remain leashed to the ship part unless they continued taking damage). Now mechs will simply mill about a ship chunk, ignoring mortar shells until the ship chunk is destroyed. They were made more vulnerable to repeated mortar fire with the 1.1 update, not to mention less responsive to player action (what kind of AI is piloting these things if they aren't able to respond to indirect fire?)

What 1.1 did add was a new long-range Mechanoid, making it even less desirable to fight Mechanoids in the open: if the design decision was to entice the player to fight mechanoids in the open, why add a new enemy that specifically punishes that decision as part of the base-game patch?

And while certain psychic powers may be designed to encourage open-field fighting, I have to emphasize again, PSYCHIC POWERS DO NOT EXIST IN VANILLA. They should have no bearing on the balancing of encounter difficulty in games without Royalty.

There are still MANY in-game threats that Mortars cannot deal with:
-Sappers are too fast-moving for mortars to be effective (especially with a decrease in fire rate).

-Regular raids likewise: raids that attack "immediately" move too rapidly (at least on supported map sizes) to be vulnerable to mortars. Raiders who prepare may be vulnerable to mortar attacks, but honestly, I'd prefer if the "raiders will prepare before attacking" was removed, because the raiders don't *actually* do anything to prepare. It's just an artificial mechanism of allowing the player an opportunity to prepare their defenses.

-Infestations are by definition spawned under Overhead Mountains, which means they are largely immune to mortars.

-Obviously, Drop Pod raids are immune to Mortars: even if they aren't within the mortar's minimum range, using mortars on them involves dropping explosives on your own base.

The *only* raid types that are even slightly vulnerable to mortar fire are Ship Parts and Sieges. Yet in the 1.1 version, the mortar is *so* inaccurate that it takes at least a full day of shelling to destroy a singe ship part, at which point you still have to fight the attendant mechanoids. Sieges are likewise artificially extended by the fact that both the player and the AI are unable to effectively hit the other (although the AI is slightly more likely to hit due to the fact that its target is your whole base).

[ShadowKatt]

I feel ignored. Was I ignored? I feel like what I said was ignored.

To restate what I was saying, and to be more brief for clarity, mortars have been rejiggered over and over again until they got to where they are now. This isn't suddenly a 1.1 thing, they were just as bad in 1.0. This has been done intentionally, purposefully, and it's not about to change. They were bad in 1.0, they are bad in 1.1, and they're going to still be bad in 1.2. You can hate it, you can lodge a complaint, stage a protest, or even use the search function and go through all the other threads complaining about the mortars(I think I did two of them!). This is what mortars are, you're not supposed to rely on them and they've been made bad to ensure you don't

In short: If you want to mortar, use mods.

If you want to stay vanilla I do have some advice: Mortar batteries. A single mortar, even with mods, is fairly useless. Mortars need to be used in groups. If you're lucky, you'll manage to get a few good hits in half the amount as usual. It is luck based though so you could still end up in the same place.

[Dargaron]

Did *you* ignore the parts of my post where I laid out specific, measurable ways in which mortars were made less  effective at their primary task in 1.1? Namely, that mechanoids literally ignore mortar attacks, where previously a mortar could be used to force a confrontation by attacking the thing they are ostensibly there to protect?

Your advice of "mortar batteries" is also completely tone-deaf: having more mortars does not at all help fix the problem outlined in the OP, in which a full stack of High Explosive Shells (representing multiple days' worth of mining, refining, smithing and hauling, not to mention research and the labor required to produce the production facilities) completely failed to destroy a single, stationary target. Firing twenty-five shells in succession is no more or less accurate than firing five five-shell barrages from a battery: in fact, if you looked at my original suggestion, you'd realize that I wasn't asking for a way to fire shells faster, but in fact asking for the option to sacrifice rate of fire in exchange for even the most basic level of accuracy.

[B@R5uk]

Actually, it's much more advantageous to buy mortar shells from faction bases and not to make them. Their price is half of what ingredients price is. At least firefoam and EMP shells are as such. Also mortars suck, so it's much more usefull to build traps from mortar shells.

[fritzgryphon]

If we need an explanation as why they are inaccurate, remember than the Rimworld mortar crews fire totally blind.  They don't usually have line of sight or a spotter in place, and should have no idea where targets are or where shells land.

Fog of war isn't a mechanic in the game, but it is implied that individual colonists have regular vision.  They can't see the inside of unexplored areas, and their shooting accuracy is affected by smoke.

I think it would be cool if the presence of a spotter would improve the accuracy of subsequent mortar shots at a stationary target.  It would be balanced by requiring the player to put at least one colonist in harm's way out of the colony.

[Canute]

It is a basicly a risk vs reward decision.
The devs didn't want that you turtle in, and then kill the attacker with your accurate mortars.
If you search around you will find similar topics, and a few of them have statements of the devs.
Same thingis that animals/trader easyly destroy walls, if someone tried to imprison them with walls so they would starve or die from temperature effects.
Or the new royal helpers don't drop any valueable armor/weapons.

If you don't like that mechanic, feel free to use mods to override it.
And if you don't find a mod that 100% fill your needs maybe it motivate you to start your own modding ! :-)

[Jibbles]

then there wouldn't be updates that make features objectively worse for people who don't have the newest, latest DLC

I've seen many of those changes. Doesn't such kind make you want to cave in and buy DLC? *hint hint.

I never relied on mortar ship strategy. You use up quite a lot & the end result is just giving yourself the upper-hand, not really eliminating the problem.  You still have to fight tho I understood why people used that strat. There's nothing wrong in voicing for a change cause you begin to use hundreds of mods if you take the "just use a mod approach." 

From my experience, with all the different tweaks that come to mortars in several versions it wasn't unusual at all to take 40+, and there were times it took well over that.  I don't disagree with your perspective on mortars.  Nerf this and that with every update, yet rarely those kind of mechanics get revisited or tuned in with the nerfs.  It was reasonable, or rather a compromise, to throw away that many resources when damaging a ship or other things a while back. Not these days IMO, there's too much effort & time involved to waste it on strat like that to where you're shooting yourself in the foot,  to top it off there are more things demanding higher quantities of said resources than there used to be.

Actually, it's much more advantageous to buy mortar shells from faction bases and not to make them. Their price is half of what ingredients price is.

If you value your time, it is better to buy most items/ingredients than to craft even tho caravan can be a PITA.  Take advantage of it while you still can. It'll probably get nerfed whenever Tynan decides to focus and expand things like trading/quests through DLC.

[B@R5uk]

Take advantage of it while you still can. It'll probably get nerfed whenever...

I can't see how it can be nerfed. Shell's price is already sky high.

[Jibbles]

Take advantage of it while you still can. It'll probably get nerfed whenever...

I can't see how it can be nerfed. Shell's price is already sky high.

Was talking about acquiring general items/resources through trading, wouldn't be surprise to see them nerfed.  Still, just cause price is high does not give it immunity from nerfs.

[Ark]

I must state that RimWorld is a "story generator" game, not a hard-core simulation.
That said, RimWorld really pushes hand-to-hand combat by nerfing almost all ranged combat, dropping enemies inside your base and having metre thick stone walls seemingly made of cheese.
And I am going to assume that a RimWorld tile is 1x1 metres.
The RimWorld 1.1.2598 mortar has forced miss radius of 13 metres, firing delay of 28+4 seconds and the HE bomb has blast radius of 2.9 metres (5x5 tiles). RimWorld mortar bombs are only useful as IED traps.
Real 81mm M252 mortar has rate of fire of 30 rounds per minute for 2 minutes (2 second firing delay) and blast radius of 20 metres. Guided 81mm mortar bombs are under development.