How to bring the colonies out into the open again?

[Kagemusha12]

I think a good change to encourage more engagements outside of killboxes would be to make guns more deadly in general. I've used this example several times already, but look at the Combat Realism mod. Guns are very very deadly, it's quite easy to come out on top of a battle where the enemy has numbers, because what matters is hitting them, not having more people with more guns. A single LMG can turn the tide of an unfair battle, through suppression and just getting a lot of shots in on a large group.

What is the point of Melee skill then? Everyone would stick to ranged gunfights. What it does iseffectively cuts entire skill and weapon branch out.

Combat Realism still has the personal shields implemented ...
so your melee forces can still use the power of their shields to cover the distance between your position and the enemy ranged attack units and wreak havoc amongst them

[Reviire]

I think a good change to encourage more engagements outside of killboxes would be to make guns more deadly in general. I've used this example several times already, but look at the Combat Realism mod. Guns are very very deadly, it's quite easy to come out on top of a battle where the enemy has numbers, because what matters is hitting them, not having more people with more guns. A single LMG can turn the tide of an unfair battle, through suppression and just getting a lot of shots in on a large group.

What is the point of Melee skill then? Everyone would stick to ranged gunfights. What it does iseffectively cuts entire skill and weapon branch out.

As someone else said, use shields. Melee without shields is suicide, vanilla or not.

[Lightzy]

Mountainbasing is fine.
You don't ask for icesheet starts to be balanced properly with perfect-climate-valley starts, so there's no point in this either.

You only get to mountainbase rarely anyway, unless you pick mountains every time just for that. On the other hand, there are people who always select ice sheets for the challenge. It's fine.


Mountainbases also have the problem that they still need to protect the outside of the base, where the farms are (if no hydroponics) and the energy generators which are all outside.

I know if the sieges targetted my generators, that'd be a freakin killer. Maybe have them do that.

[b0rsuk]

Mountain bases don't bother me in Maia, because there's no way to build bases above ground and every base must have an airlock. But in Rimworld, I don't want to feel that playing outside mountains is a handicap.

[Jorlem]

Also, infestations weren't around back in 2014 I think.

Neither was the Random button for your landing site.  You always picked where you wanted to land. 


One thing that I think might be useful in making mountains less ideal would be to have heavier penalties for darkness.  Inside a mountain base, it is dark all the time, unless you build a ton of lights.  I think tying some negative occurrences to that darkness would help in pushing people outside.  Colonists stubbing their toes, tripping, bruising themselves opening doors or going in or out of bed, that sort of thing.

[Reviire]

Also, infestations weren't around back in 2014 I think.

Neither was the Random button for your landing site.  You always picked where you wanted to land. 


One thing that I think might be useful in making mountains less ideal would be to have heavier penalties for darkness.  Inside a mountain base, it is dark all the time, unless you build a ton of lights.  I think tying some negative occurrences to that darkness would help in pushing people outside.  Colonists stubbing their toes, tripping, bruising themselves opening doors or going in or out of bed, that sort of thing.

You're still going about this the wrong way. The solution isn't to nerf mountains more, there's already the complete bullshit infestations. You're going to completely remove the playstyle. Instead, you need to look at why people go into mountains, one big reason being, killboxes are the only way to survive for any extended period of time.

[Boston]

I think a good change to encourage more engagements outside of killboxes would be to make guns more deadly in general. I've used this example several times already, but look at the Combat Realism mod. Guns are very very deadly, it's quite easy to come out on top of a battle where the enemy has numbers, because what matters is hitting them, not having more people with more guns. A single LMG can turn the tide of an unfair battle, through suppression and just getting a lot of shots in on a large group.

What is the point of Melee skill then? Everyone would stick to ranged gunfights. What it does iseffectively cuts entire skill and weapon branch out.

If you haven't noticed, not many armies are running around with swords and spears nowadays. Melee combat as a skill is obsolete. Sure, soldiers still have knives and bayonets, but they don't exactly mount bayonet charges on the regular. Hell, the last bayonet charge in the US was in the Korean War.

The US Army doesn't even train with bayonets anymore, and hasn't since 2010. 

While melee should totally be part of the game (hell, my survivalist solo pawn uses melee all the time, in knife-fights with raiders), saying it "removes a skill" is hyperbole. Asides from designated melee-ers, themselves used only to take prisoners and to shut down snipers, does anyone actually use melee? Like , really use melee?

Without personal (or defensive shields in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield) shields, equipping a pawn with Melee is effectively a death sentence. They either get shot to death or get stabbed/cut/beaten to death.

Guns (and bows, and other ranged weapons) should be lethal. Melee should be highly situational at best.

That is one thing I love about Combat Realism. When your pawn, or an enemy, runs out of ammo, they automatically pull out a melee weapon if they have one in their inventory. If we could make it so they pulled out the melee weapon as soon as someone came into melee range, I would weep tears of joy.

[Lightzy]

Slightly offtopic I guess, but the thread went there:

guns are and should be in every way better than melee.

Except there needs to be a material penalty --- ammunition.
Add ammunition needs into the core game, and it'll all balance out.

[Boston]

Slightly offtopic I guess, but the thread went there:

guns are and should be in every way better than melee.

Except there needs to be a material penalty --- ammunition.
Add ammunition needs into the core game, and it'll all balance out.

-ahem- Combat Realism -ahem-

[Lightzy]

Combat Realism also adds needless redundancy and introduces balance downgrades.

The ammo idea however, is sound.

[Reviire]

Combat Realism also adds needless redundancy and introduces balance downgrades.

The ammo idea however, is sound.

Care to explain? I mean it might be a little redundant.

[John_Bigless]

I have found a topic on Reddit recently where Tynan said he didn't want to add embrasures to the game because people were walling themselves in too much already. So I thought I'd start a thread where we could discuss how the game would have to change to entice us to play more open play styles.

Some thoughts:
- currently, the crashed ship parts always forces me out. Maybe we need more lingering dangers? Something that appears on the map and stays there until you deal with it.
- I think that mining is currently too fast. It is so easy to mine deep into the mountain that there is no reason to build outside. Not to mention that it is actually cheaper to have a mountain base. The walls are already there and the smooth stone floor requires no materials.

Muffshit, mining takes way to long for me.

[Reviire]

Someone tell Tynan that embrasures would help with encouraging people to build outside, since you'd be able to setup better defended. See dwarf fortress for details

[Pax_Empyrean]

Frankly, given that fortresses are so effective in Real life, I would be surprised if there was a way to balance the game to make them not effective in RimWorld without ridiculous Deus Ex Machina mechanisms. 

The difference between fortresses in real life and fortresses in Rimworld is that you couldn't feed yourself from inside your fortress in real life, which changes the whole dynamic between attackers and defenders. The ability to make a nigh-unbeatable killzone is less problematic when a sufficiently well-supplied enemy can force you to choose between leaving it or starving to death.

At present, the enemy comes in great enough numbers that if you don't have a big defensive advantage they'll kill you, so while I like the idea of promoting more open-field engagements the enemy's numbers are currently tilted toward "killbox or lose." Their numbers would need to be adjusted along with any change that makes you leave your killbox.

Which is, however,why fortresses in real life usdually had food supplies for several months stored within the fortress (and also access to deep wells for water supply), forcing any attackers to spend several months sieging the city.

Compared to RL equivalents of attacks on castles, the attackers in Rimworld usually come in woefully underprepared

Of course they stored food. And yet, starving them out remained the most common way of taking a fortress. In Rimworld, that's not a viable option.

[b0rsuk]

One thing that I think might be useful in making mountains less ideal would be to have heavier penalties for darkness.

We already have a mechanic, we just need to fix it. It's called Cabin Fever. The problem is you can stay underground for 2 months and it will be completely cured if you step outside for a minute.

Another idea: explosive charges. Pirate/mechanoid/outlander raiders would plant HE charges which cause huge damage if not disarmed. Time trigger. If you shoot them, especially with grenades, they would go boom.

Imagine a raid where pirates plant HE charges at your solar panels, and continue with attack. Or they plant charges at walls, go back and guard them.