Next Challenge - No Modern Weapons!

[DDog]

For my next game..  no modern weapons.. only crossbows and Long Bows and hand held weapons.. wonder how long I will make it!!!

[DFDelta]

Using corners and other visual cover I've had a single guy armed with a sword kill whole raiding parties before, and bows are good enough for hunting even if they are much less effective then rifles.

Mechanoids and fortified siege camps will be very very very tough, though.

[Pathing]

Using corners and other visual cover I've had a single guy armed with a sword kill whole raiding parties before, and bows are good enough for hunting even if they are much less effective then rifles.

Mechanoids and fortified siege camps will be very very very tough, though.

Corner attack will kill raiding raiders.
Mechanoid robots will get stab later while at early game they will get ganged.
Siege raiders will be a problem until you can completely build wall along the border since if they drop
outside the wall they will be forced to assault and, probably, start to attack wall.

[DFDelta]

Luring mechanoids into a area designed to be melee-friendly and then zerg rushing them with stabby implements works, but they are far too tough to make that possible without suffering gruesome wounds yourself.
I've tried that the one time I tried a no firearms challenge and I never managed to kill a mecha without having one or two guys hospitalized afterwards.

Good idea with the wall, I need to try that.

[Boboid]

When you're trying to deal with mechs be sure to arm your pawns with blunt weapons. Centipedes in particular have very high sharp resistance ( 70% ) but only minor blunt resistance ( 20% ).

With the right weapons ( and correct target fire, always kill the scythers first ) you can take on pretty big mech waves.

Regarding siege camps, you can always kill them when they sleep. Only pawns who are attacked will wake up and try and fight (or flee)

Edit: It's worth noting some sieges will end ( they'll attack you ) before they become tired enough to sleep due to some weird anti-tiredness bonus they get at around 20/100 rest.

[FridayBiology]

use staggered alignment of columns around your base/choke points.

> being staggered ranged units would need to enter the columns to sight target. Handy for early m24 defense if your a not kill box user or if your lacking a m24 yourself.

C    S    C    S
S    C    S    C
C    S    C   
S    C    S    C
C    S    C    S

> Could you use Pila? You could create a column/windbreak before your defenses within Pila attack range.

C    R                    C    S    C    S
R    C                    S    C    S    C
C    R                    C    S    C   
R    C                    S    C    S    C
C    R                    C    S    C    S

S / R : sandbags/rock chunks
C : columns
: stabbers

[Listy]

Mechanoids and fortified siege camps will be very very very tough, though.

Should be easier than you think. I had a think about this when planning this:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=8350.msg83793#msg83793

A Pilum does 20 points of damage, which is quite impressive. I guess getting a 4Ft stick through the neck tends to offend.

Equally remember back to that first game of Rimworld you played. Where you placed down some turrets and then a horde of Tribals hove into view. You sat there smiling expecting a recreation of the first day of the Somme offensive. Then that moment of horror/panic as your turrets got their hats nailed on and out ranged by bows.
The Great bow in game has a range of something horrific like 30. Only two less than a Sniper rifle. So the standard tactic of "Snipe the mortars while building then leg it back to hide behind your kill box" should still be viable.

PS: I've been keeping an eye on stats. Best Close combat weapon should (I think) be the Legendary plasteel knife. I would love to try out a Legendary Uranium club, but it appears you can't make those in game.

In short the best material to make things out of is:
Sharps: Plasteel
Blunts: Uranium

[Boboid]

Quick addendum to that Listy - Wood is an exceptionally good blunt weapon material, in terms of total dps it goes up by 5% over steel ( 15% more attack speed, -10% damage, multiplicative modifiers applied after all other additive modifiers as far as I can tell ) and of course you can grow the stuff.

In my experience due to the (exceptionally) slow swing speed of Clubs and the stupid melee-chasing AI, faster weapons are by and large a strict bonus in addition to the small dps bonus.

Actually frankly due to the generally lower blunt mitigation across (Literally?) every piece of apparel, blunt weapons just generally seem to have the edge. They might not cause bleeding but raiders seldom die of bleeding unless they've been incapacitated, in which case the bleeding is a penalty. I'll have to do some number crunching on this later on!

As to the best close combat weapons, a legendary plasteel knife would work out to be 22.68 damage every 1.23 seconds (around 18dps) whereas a legendary plasteel Longsword would end up being 50.4 damage every 1.85 seconds (27 dps) with the significant advantage of being fatal if it were to hit the chest ( AFAIK torso has the highest hit probability )

Also Maces are typically higher dps than clubs with only marginal damage per swing differences.

Also Uranium works out to be identical to Steel in DPS, with higher damage per swing but a lower swing rate ( + 40% damage -40% swing rate) so technically Wood is slightly better than it

In short if you want to be making Blunt weapons make them out of Wood ( +15% swing rate -10% damage ) Silver ( +10% damage ) or Plasteel (+35% swing rate ) (And make Maces when you can, they take longer and use more materials)

And if you want to be making Sharp weapons make them out of Plasteel (+20% damage + 35% swing rate) or good Ol' steel, which is the baseline for all these numbers. (Generally make longswords imo, but you can do the calculations yourself (Damage/swingrate = dps) and make judgment calls based on that)


I'll have to sift through all the mitigations on various pieces of apparel and then compare mace/longsword dps when modified by mitigation, I'll pop back here at some point when I've done that
Edit: After a quick skim I've come to the conclusion that the better armoured your opponent ( The higher quality the material his clothing is made out of, and the higher tier his armour actually is) the better Blunt damage becomes.

A plasteel Longsword does 10.81 dps, A plasteel Mace does 9.37 dps. Which is a difference of about 15% in favour of the longsword, however Sharp mitigation can be anywhere between 30-300% higher per piece of apparel.

Conclusion is that if you're cutting up tribespeople then Sharp is slightly better ,but if you want to kill Pirates or Mechs or.. well anyone with more than base-line cloth equipment, maces win every time.

Further edit: There's got to be some diminishing returns regarding mitigation after some quick testing, I don't know what the precise numbers are however, can anyone chime in ?

[Listy]

When I said knives it was, admittedly from very basic research.

However the higher swing speed means they're better I feel. As it allows you to get the first strike in, as swords take so long sometimes bad guys can run straight past you. They can certainly break combat if being pursued.

A few weeks back I did try to find out if anyone knew the ins and outs of Close combat, but it was Crickets chirping time. So I had to fudge it together as I went.

[Boboid]

S'all good, I -as you can probably tell- rather enjoy the number crunching.

With regards to swing speed - The first strike isn't *too* important because melee weapons have no "Warmup" which will reset if the target is struck in melee combat (IE: it's almost impossible to fire a gun when someone is hitting you with with a weapon that has an attack speed that is faster (lower) than your weapon's Warmup - there's some weird delay after being interrupted before the warmup timer starts again, so there's even more leeway for the melee attack speed- ) This means that in general when two targets walk towards one another ( Both with melee attack orders ) that the strikes ( ought? ) to happen at the same time,

But! That said swing speed is very important when trying to chase a target because the melee AI in Rimworld is a bit.. well.. crap.

When a pawn is told to melee a target they walk to the target and attempt to swing at it, if they successfully swing then they spend their weapons ENTIRE cooldown timer STANDING STILL, even if the target has moved (or died, actually). Once their cooldown timer has completed (They're ready for their next swing) then the pawn will repeat the process, walking towards the target and attempting to swing.

Long story short this means that when you're chasing a fleeing pawn, a pawn using a faster melee weapon will spend less time standing around.
It's also worth noting that there's a speed penalty associated with being hit in melee combat, pawns are " Tied up " for a short amount of time ( a mechanic I assume was implemented to compensate for the chasing situation explained above ) but this isn't always long enough to ensure maximum dps, so again faster weapons are preferable vs fleeing targets

Unfortunately I don't know the "Breakpoint" - attack speed - required to maintain close to 100% of dps since there are so many factors involved ( like movement speed ) and the speed penalty for being hit ect ect, none of which I have the numbers for.

From some -pretty poor- testing I'd say around 1.6 or 1.7 seconds between attacks is *about* right for two targets with similar movement speeds for the chaser to maintain fairly good time-on-target but it's worth noting that there's NO diminishing returns on the "Tie up" effect, so a very high attack speed effectively roots the target to the spot -This is actually very important when trying to kill Centipedes in melee, as lots of targets hitting a Centipede when he's attempting his random repositioning can prevent him from doing so for an exceptionally long time-

Fortunately this means an unarmed (or armed with ranged weapon) colonist ought to be able to punch a fleeing pirate to death if their movement speeds are similar ( obviously a wound to a leg (or to consciousness) will slow the target down even more ) over a long enough chase.

Also Logs are quite a bit better than punching ( 1 more damage, 1.5 instead of 1.67 attack speed) so that's always good to know.

Edit: Also for the sake of comprehensiveness colonists seem to prefer to use Power Claws and Scyther limbs over weapons 100% of the time as far as I can tell.. Given that a Power Claw does a measly 10 dps I'm not exactly sure why that is. Perhaps it's simply a work around or there may be some mechanic I'm not aware of.

That's actually something I'd love to hear from Tynan about because I have no idea how/why that's the case



Edit:Edit: Even more info - Blunt weapons have an entirely different set of mechanics regarding body part damage it seems! Sharp weapons only seem to target the standard set of bodyparts themselves, however blunt weapons have a sort of, damage continuation effect ( Trample, for anyone who plays MTG ) that applies to bones!

A blunt attack can strike the leg ( Bruise ) and then continue on to Crack the Tibia and Pelvis, causing two more wounds both of which cause more Pain, which can incapacitate the target.

It's possible guns use this system too, as I've occasionally seen a Shattered rib, I think that rather than excess damage continuing onto the rib, that the rib itself was hit rather than the torso ( as odd as that sounds).
I've *never* seen a sharp melee weapon do this ( I've cut up about 100 colonists with a legendary plasteel longsword at this point in testing ).

[postm00v]

I've always wanted to try this, but never started because I felt melee weapons are severly inferious to guns. Turns out I was wrong?

[Boboid]

Oh they're not inferior to guns at all, they're just a bit fiddly to use and require a well designed combat area.

Frankly on raw numbers alone they can out-perform everything up to a minigun in terms of damage/sec, they're downright deadly! Plus as previously mentioned, pawns armed with ranged weapons can't fire them in melee combat (generally) so they're forced to flee or use their fists to defend themselves

Also given what I've just discovered about blunt damage it seems as though you'll be able to incapacitate and therefore convert *vastly* more pawns on average, (which I always found to be the case while playing with melee weapons, but didn't understand until now) which can help compensate for any combat accidents involving mechanoids