Generals, I need your advice!

[Geroj]

So I repeled without any problem lot of invasions (some huge ones), I have 11 colonists, all 10+ shooting(thats why only 11, we kill weak ones) all done without single load and now I am besieged by pirates. Nothing special, no armor, they lack any skill and have low numbers (only 9) -now you say, where is problem? Snipers! They are all equiped with sniper rifles ...all of them ... and they are brutally effective
First try
Ordered my men to split into 3 groups and attack their positions from sides( with assault rifles) while they are fixed to line of my own snipers
outcome, both two groups are dead before they reach their range, snipers are decimated
Second try
Two groups armed with mixed weaponry, every group have grenadier
outcome -most dead by instakill
Third try
EVERYBODY is sniper
outcome -everybody dead

...so ... one of them was more far from his group armed with sniper rifle and 0 (yes ZERO) shooting skill and I challenged him to trial by combat by my best soldier in power armor with 16 shooting skill
Mine missed every shot, enemy shot him 2x -in eye(from wiki its 8% chance from head area) and in arm with 0 skill
outcome
alt+f4, lot of adrenaline pumping into my blood stream, rage

This is outrageous! My own soldiers cant shoot a thing, but most of the time I have tactical advantage ...skills are just made up or what? They are useless, whole combat system is random dice roll
Now tell me that you planted something into illegal copies so anybody who pirate game have lot weaker soldiers (like ARMA devs made "fade") and this is not true and you send me true copy of rimworld, becasue this is unbelievable

[Sir Wagglepuss III]

First off, I'm pretty sure (Would appreciate if somebody could confirm though...) that armour currently does not work in Alpha 6 - The changes to how damage is handled has broken it for the moment, which I assume is going to be fixed in Alpha 7.

Second, a bunch of turrets and a kill-zone would easily dispatch that pirate raid. If you insist upon using your guys to fight them, then it would require a LOT of micromanagement. You would need to lure their party into close quarters, you CANNOT engage them in open ground under any circumstances. If they get an opportunity to fire first then you have failed, and need better ground. Producing your own bottlenecks with walls or luring them around mountainsides will both be effective.

Once you've set the ground rules and have an area where you can engage them, you need to be using weaponry that can aim and shoot faster than their Sniper Rifles. After firing a single round, you pull the colonist straight back out of their line-of-sight so that the opponents do not fire in the first place. Rinse and repeat until the targets are dead.

This will involve a lot of pausing, a lot of small movements, and a LOT of attention (Especially for an 11 man group...), but it's possible.

But really, luring them into a bottleneck and killzone of 6-12 turrets would be much more cost-effective. Or mortaring them.

[Goo Poni]

That last part amuses me greatly, but to your point, a lot of the gunplay is up to the whims of the RNG. Even with a skill of 20 and a sniper rifle, most shots are 50-50 hits due to cover, weather, time of day and other such factors. Aggravating this issue is that enemy raiders are disposable, your colonists are not. Literally all the raiders have to do is throw enough bodies. Your colonists will lose body parts, be incapacitated, go into shock and all of that stuff and come off worse with each fight while raiders can just keep throwing 20-30 men at you freely until you die.

It's not outrageous, the gunplay is just not in your favour beyond the first month or so when raider parties are 5 people maximum.

[Timber]

All out sniper raider parties are the next hardest thing to beat after a mech drop.

Sniper duels are seldom won and when they are it's at the cost of dozens of reloads. Unless you outnumber them 2 : 1 your only option is to stay indoors and let them come to you. Give up all hope of using cover to your advantage - it's just not reliable enough. Get the enemy to a mid-range choke point where assault rifles are superior to slow aimed sniper rifles.

If you have outdoor turrets you'll have to give up on them. You will need weapons with high rate of fire and moderate spread to keep the enemies stunned. A grenade or two might be useful if you have a guaranteed choke point but if not the grenadier often dies without having achieved anything meaningful. My own attempts at having a colonist throw frag grenades and then kite him out of harms way end in tragedy most of the time. It's just not worth the time I'd spend reloading.

If you are lucky the bandits will split in to smaller groups. If that happens use it to your advantage - have all of your colonists deal with each group separately.

When engaging move your most armored colonists to the front. This lowers the chance of getting terminal injuries.

If you want specifics I'd have to see some pictures of the colony.

[Geroj]

Yeah I know (both replies)
BUT
What I observed that enemy have always some better odds to hit me, no matter if it is day, what cover or rain
And they have all 0-5 ranged skill, yet they all mysteriously shoot from sniper rifle like it is part of their own body, I try to advance with micromanagment but once I am in range first shots and I have first dead (like shot off whole arm or leg or head or whatever) but its instakill and its unbelievable how accurate they are, yet mine troops are not (with LOT higher accuracy skill) from 20 shots 1 hit, they have from 20 shots around 7 hits
Tried it several times, 7 defeats, 11 victories from which I lost most of my soldiers, only one was satisfactory with 2 dead and one half dead
I even tried that one on one combat and surprisingly, soldier with 10 accuracy shot him in second hit, yet he survived 3! gun shots from sniper rifle
And I dont want to "cheat" like use turret traps, as I said till now I was quite succesfull with my maneuvering tactics in open field, had no problem to beat 25 pirates encircled by my soldiers without single loss ...well we lost one foot but thats for another story
Will test more later, never had to face group of snipers, but that accuracy is still just dice roll no matter what skill number there is

[BetaSpectre]

Easy
______       ________
l                 l              l
l Turret       lHouse      l
l                 l              l
---------      -----------

Simply keep SOLID walls covering turrets on 3 sides, with 1 side facing your base. This way ANYTHING will not be able to snipe your turrets while the guns can fire back.

There are 3 infinitly more effective defense strategies but this one looks the best to me. And it works.

[REMworlder]

Fire from incendiary mortars provides a good opportunity. If the mortar lands past their snipers but near their base, you'll have a window to shoot whoever's sent to put it out.

You can also kill them while they sleep (http://i.imgur.com/6q6BBX5.jpg). I don't remember how long it usually takes for them to sleep, but you can monitor it pretty easily.

[BetaSpectre]

I don't think he's talking about Sieges, but instead just a regular raid.

[minami26]

I share your rage from the diceroll accuracy stuff, theres no big difference between a lvl 20 shooting colonist from a lvl 5 shooting raider.

-- It all comes down to weapons really. all the shooting skill does is provide a tiny bit of accuracy to the weapon, while the accuracy stat of a particular weapon provides the shooting ability of a particular colonist/raider.

-- Indeed, if you attack a sniper raid head on you will lose because you are outnumbered. so there's no other choice but to use terrain to your advantage.

[Rahjital]

Raiders are not more accurate than colonists, this is just human bias. In every single game where hitting the enemy depends on random numbers, you hear people say that the enemies hit more often than they should

Armor works, it's just not all that useful. It can save your colonists from being killed by a single M24 hit to the torso, but there's not much more to it if you don't have power armour with a helmet.

Skills matter a lot too. At 30 squares, a lvl 5 shooting pawn still has only 25% base chance to hit. Add the 86% hit chance of M24 and the 25% hit chance for people hiding behind walls, and you'll have a total 5% chance to hit where a lvl 20 colonist would have 20% chance, a marked difference.

Goo Poni is right, the reason raiders win is because of their numerical advantage. In Alpha 5, it was possible to win when outnumbered more than 10:1 if one used the bullet-sponginess of their colonists well, but that doesn't work anyone. However, if you can't seem to win when you outnumber the enemy, then you must have very, very bad luck.

Is it a siege or a raid? If a siege, do what REMworlder said and murder them in their sleep; make sure to only target a single raider at a time, because being hit wakes them up. If it's a raid, you should be able to split the raiders and hit those smaller groups with everything you've got. Never let the enemy shoot at colonists out of cover, they are extremely vulnerable, and try to use only walls for cover, instead of sandbags, rock/slag chunks or trees/cacti.

[ChrisW]

Try building an entrance like this:



Use the mortars to get one or two of them, that will force them to attack you.
Assemble your folks right of the mortars, so they only attack once the turrets are down.
Note how I built small gate houses with batteries - they will ensure that even with broken power lines the turrets will have another two minutes of juice.
They will have to come around a corner and will stand in the fire of at first four, then at least two or one turret, before they find any cover.
So far, nothing passed this gate and lived. The only things my folks have to be good at are artillery and taking prisoners.

[BetaSpectre]

^ The set up looks nice but the Mortars being clumped together makes that a real hazard during a siege.

I'm not sure how exactly sieges operate now, but if one Mortar shot hits your Mortars the entire thing will go boom along with the 9 colonists since they'll be taking 3-4 Mortar explosions from the simultaneous building detonations.

I think a spread of like 4-5 blocks is recommended for Mortars.

Another thing to look out for are exploding turrets, to avoid players from keeping several clumped together they explode with a radius of about 3.

Unless you're 100% that the guns won't be destroyed don't clump them up together or if you're willing to let them explode.

[Rahjital]

^ The set up looks nice but the Mortars being clumped together makes that a real hazard during a siege.

This, the mortars are going to do a lot of damage if they ever explode. You'll also want to put a stone wall between the two turrets so that they don't blow at once if one of them is shot.

[Geroj]

If one of my soldiers lost one eye, is there some penalty? Or he is fine until he lost both of them

[RemingtonRyder]

When the enemy has snipers, you definitely need to find better cover than they have, and even then it's a dicey proposition to start taking shots.  Whether it's a raiding party or a siege, use the range circle to pick off targets which have good close-quarters weapons, or thrown weapons, without getting into range of a sniper.

With a siege, you can be considerably more patient, only moving your sniper into position when enemy snipers have ambled out of range.  With a raid, a pre-emptive strike can trigger the beginning of the base assault, so you will get maybe one or two shots off before you need to run.

Either way you look at it, creating an ambush for the low-fire-rate snipers to run into is one way to deal with them.  Preferably, you want your ambush party to be in cover behind some stone walls, ready to peek out and blast the raiders with automatic fire.

If you've picked off the guys with Uzis, M-16s, LMGs and shottys then you've evened the odds in your favour a bit.

Turrets are useful for attracting enemy fire, and as the posters above have said, if you tuck them away behind walls then the assaulting forces will take some serious damage before they start taking out turrets.

Remember that power will conduct up to five squares away from a conduit or a metal wall attached to a powered conduit, even if there is a wall in the way.  You can use this to shield your power supply, and the wall won't take damage from a turret explosion if there's a three tile gap - which is just enough to allow power to reach the turret.

Remember that in a siege, your objective is simply to outlast the enemy.

Now, you can fire mortars back at the enemy - in fact, if they're located in fairly open territory away from mountains I encourage you to do so, because it will inflict area damage from afar, despite how inaccurate mortars can be.  However your main job is to do quick repairs and beat out fires, and let your colonists go back to activities which boost their mood - like eating and sleeping in comfortable conditions.

The seigers by comparison have no comfort at all.  They're in an ugly location, sleeping on the ground, eating packaged meals off the floor, and watching their allies die horrifically when you score a hit, whether it's with a mortar or a shot from a sniper.

You don't even need to one-shot the enemy to death, they will bleed from their wounds long after they are wounded because the siegers don't do any medical care for their wounded.  At the moment, anyway.

When the seige party runs out of food, and they will eventually, mental breaks will occur.  This means that while your colonists stay alive in shelter, the odds are tipping increasingly in their favour.  Broken seigers will wander around or leave the map completely, and won't join in a base assault, so you can pick them off at your leisure.  This will allow you to focus on taking out enemies which haven't broken yet, or even killing the mortar operators.

While you can simply snipe the mortars to make them pop, I think you probably get more metal if you deconstruct them, so try to get a clean shot at the operator.

I don't think incendiary mortars are worth using unless you have three or four manned at a time, which means that there will be more chance of setting siegers on fire, rather than simply setting a nearby patch of ground on fire, which the siegers can easily deal with.  Also, if there's rain, you might as well stick with explosive mortars.

I think also that when the siegers decide to assault your base, it is key to be able to do the most damage to the seigers that you can before they reach your ambush point.  So, behind your sniper have one or two shooters to cover his retreat, and then when they need to fall back, the sniper can cover them with a shot or two, and so on.

You're looking to use that blind rush against them, and maybe inflict some further wounds or casualties, to further reduce their mood and increase the chance of them abandoning the charge.  You don't need to kill them all, just give them despair.  From there on, after your ambush (if it is successful) the rest is mop-up.

It doesn't always work out as perfectly as that.  The way I see it, if you can gain prisoners which will be useful to the colony then, even if you don't recruit them right away, they will make good replacements when one of your colonists is forced into early retirement.  And that's a sane outcome.