Criticism on mechanoid clusters

[Hykal]

Mechanoid clusters, which has replaced the ancient ship parts of old, are a mixed bag for me.

I find them fun to fight. They really require far more thought than just "build a bunch of sandbags and gun them from afar/mortar them to death."

But on the other hand, it really freaking sucks they just land right in the middle of my base and vomit out a small fort of turrets and enemies. On the outside of my walls that isn't such a big deal. When they land on the inside they destroy my farms and the inferno turrets just sets everything on fire.

Some are manageable - just use a combination of smokes and EMP. The clusters with the obvious red barrels are easy too, you just need to find the right angle. But some clusters cannot be reliably be planned ahead.

Drop pods are one of the few things you can't plan ahead aside of planting a turret everywhere or making sure everyone is in full armor all the time. Mech clusters landing in your home area is just worse. It destroys my farms and kills a cow or two. I'm currently in a temperate forest, and I shudder to think what happens if you live in a desert or ice sheet and have your precious few livestock killed.

I have Better Pawn Control installed, and with a press of a button you can send your animals to safety. If a cluster lands in your grazing fields, you have to scroll down the entire animals tab, which sucks if you don't have BPC installed. I have 20 or so animals, and this mechanic discourages me from having them.

You can use the installed walls as cover, but that's not always reliable either. The charge blaster turret, which is devastating at close range, is the greatest threat. Woe betide to the one pawn that doesn't have a full set of flak armor. I've literally had one of my best builders killed because she couldn't get into cover soon and got gunned down by a lucky shot. The inferno cannons? Disrupts my formation and leads to them getting gunned down by turrets or other mechanoids. The new launchers also shoot fairly slowly, and if it's 1v1 vs a charge turret vs a pawn with an EMP launcher, my money is on the turret.

It seems to me that the clusters require more use of the new EMP/smoke launchers, while I don't mind, it basically does mean that I have four pawns lugging them around instead of other guns. They're basically useless 90% of the time, and having to micromanage weapons isn't Rimworld's strong suit. I dislike it immensely. Even if it was my choice of accepting the quest, again, I can't plan ahead. I can't decide to either give my pawn a sniper rifle or an SMG because it's a coin flip where they land.

Mortars? Yes, they would be very useful if I had half a dozen of them and the cluster didn't land in the mortar's blind spot. And we all know how extremely unreliable they are. You can waste a dozen shells to destroy a psychic ship part, imagine how much it would need to take one out in your base.

I had one instance of a pawn running away from them, landing in my base, and the quest tab specifically said he's a good fighter. He came unarmed and that's fine, but he can't take off his clothes at all. He has no armor, and even if I had an extra set of flak I can't give him that. This refugee pawn was by all accounts useless despite having amazing stats.

I don't want to risk his life to get the reward. If he was a noble, that's fine, but this is some random guy not related to the Empire. He has no monosword, no power armor, no psychic abilities, just some high stats in shooting.

Overall, I'm enjoying my time with the DLC, but I do think the mech clusters need some rethinking done.

[Romulus]

I'm just not having fun with mech clusters

i like the idea that they've got a big facelift but i simply cannot deal with them and they are really ruining the game for me atm. In my eyes they are just too powerful and i'm nowhere near the tech level where i can even possibly deal with them. Esentially the dlc is useless to me as i'm severely punished for accepting any empire mission where most have mech cluster consequences especially on no reloading mode. Anyone else struggling with these? If anyone has any strategies or tips on how to deal with them that would be great, i've lost about 5 colonies to them now :(

[MagnusGrey]

I took out one with a royal reinforcement and another with morters (with a defensive line for when they charge)

[starkmaddness]

I had two that I just avoided for a while, as all I had was short bows. Set the allowed area so my colonists would avoid them.

Amusingly, I got raided and the raiders ran right into them and killed each other. Was fun to watch.

I had a third drop into my base, which I killed with bows and a dagger by first luring the mech away from the enemy turret. Pikemen are weak in melee. The turret itself I ended up charging with a dagger because a visitor showed up and was getting shot. They didn't run away fast enough when it started hissing and got exploded. Luckily they had the tough trait, and a few days later all was fine.

Basically separate them if possible. Lure them into your traps if possible. And melee pikemen and probably centepedes if you have a decent melee pawn, don't melee scythers. Use lots of cover.

[The Nut Champ]

use smoke launchers if you can, they literally make turrets useless.

emps, maces, warhammers and even clubs are good against mechanoid

hell you can probably fist down pikemen if you have enough pawns to gang up on it

[crossmr]

90% of the ones I've had so far have had both bullet and mortar shields, making them a giant pain in the ass to deal with.

[Gintoki Sakata]

The new bullet / mortal interceptor units are low effort content. They have no power requirements and create a bubble you have to enter . Path of Exile and few other games has this where devs design it to force players in to close combat and its absolutely low effort.

Funny enough on mech landed right near my south kill box with both of them and now i have a free 100 projectil ground / air defense for half my base. Yea you can imagine most raids are joke .

Just wait till this gets modded and you can craft it . Also new auto cannon / inferno are just tedious.
Overall i would still love if he expanded more on mechs / infestation like starship troopers.

[Cormac]

Originally posted by crossmr:

90% of the ones I've had so far have had both bullet and mortar shields, making them a giant pain in the ass to deal with.

they can be easily dealed with with EMP weapons. a mortar shield can be turned off by a single morter round hiting the shield (at least in my expirience, i might have gone lucky)

building 1 more morter always loaded with EMP, shot it first, than switch everyone to HE rounds.

the ground one should also be deactivated with emp, or just run into the field.



but i do agree, some mech clusters, mostly those with to many auto cannons, are just a pain in the..... to deal with, i now got 2 long range scanner looking for steel only, just to get enough for making morter rounds <.<

[Gintoki Sakata]

worst part is some turrets explode and some don't .

[Tynan]

I appreciate the rich feedback! Certainly this is just the kind of thing I'm looking to tune going forward. It's a new gameplay concept and we did lots of balancing and adjusting pre-release but with more players come more data.

They are supposed to be difficult and to require new strategies. I think they're hitting these marks, but I don't want them to feel unfair (that said, nor should they always be defeatible without losses, at least above builder difficulty).

We're further adjusting how clusters choose where to spawn, because you're right some of them were spawning on top of things they shouldn't (or even indoors). The next hotfix, and probably another next week, will have adjustments on these fronts.

After that's done and the metagame matures a bit I'll be looking at other adjustments, but I don't want to move too fast and end up "thrashing" with the design.

Originally posted by mOj:

worst part is some turrets explode and some don't .

FWIW it's always been this way; player turrets use the same code.

[crossmr]

Originally posted by Cormac:

Originally posted by crossmr:

90% of the ones I've had so far have had both bullet and mortar shields, making them a giant pain in the ass to deal with.

they can be easily dealed with with EMP weapons. a mortar shield can be turned off by a single morter round hiting the shield (at least in my expirience, i might have gone lucky)

building 1 more morter always loaded with EMP, shot it first, than switch everyone to HE rounds.

the ground one should also be deactivated with emp, or just run into the field.



but i do agree, some mech clusters, mostly those with to many auto cannons, are just a pain in the..... to deal with, i now got 2 long range scanner looking for steel only, just to get enough for making morter rounds <.<

I dunno. I rescued a person from a cryo pod that had an emp launcher. I fired at the shield (couldn't get at the device itself) multiple times, shield never turned off. I fired several mortar rounds into the shield, it didn't turn off.

they definitely feel unfair, because it seems like you need to be fairly advanced to deal with them. The mechs themselves aren't necessarily the hard part, but breaking into the base can be. The random layout can almost guarantee that you're going to get shredded unless you're really OP.

[Cormac]

Originally posted by Tynan:

I appreciate the rich feedback! Certainly this is just the kind of thing I'm looking to tune going forward. It's a new gameplay concept and we did lots of balancing and adjusting pre-release but with more players come more data.

are the clusters completly randomized or are they at least partly 'fixed'

what i mean is: is it possible to have 100% pregenerated perfectly build clusters spawn?
and i don't mean they are always the same, lets say, there are 10 pre generated 'builds' for your current level.
walls, sandbacks and so on have a 100% spawn chance.
there are 20 fixed spawn points for light turrets, based on your current leve, 3-5 will spawn in those locations, same with other turrets/defence structures (same with builders, make the other buildings fixed).
the base is generated like that, that it is heavyly fortified from 2 directions, but the other two directions have 4 proximity alerts (100% spawn chance) spread further so it is way harder to close in from this direction.

ofcourse, the bases are build in a way that you can tacticly attack them. you can engange part of their turrets from one direction, where 2/3 of them cannot fire to (their own walls), that swing to the other direction to attack half of the remaining turrets, but from there, you cannot attack the builder/special structure because of the walls (which are protected by shields or something)

instead of having a completly randomized base, where suddenly 6 heavy turrets all fire at the same time, plus light turrets and flamers....

yes, i understand your thought of 'not always be defeatable without losses', but getting fired by that amount of bullets, it's no longer a 'i made an error' my pawns are dead but 'it's a number thing', which makes it more frustating. losing pawns because you mad an error let player blame themself, losing pawns because of impossiblitys make players blame you

edit: in most cases, i just morter the hell out of them because sending out caravans to distant steel is way more secure than fighting them headon...

@crossmr
maybe i just got lucky with the 3 mortar shields that the emp shell hit the shield generator O.o

[Chilli Dog Dave]

i think from personal experience clusters feel far to compact to the point its hard not to activate them when setting up to take one down, if the scan range was a wee bit smaller the player might stand alittle more chance seting up against one that drops near or in your base location, outside isn't much of an issue but inside the detection is pretty much always going to awaken them.

edit: of the 3 i'v taken down i feel having the scanner range start off small or deactivated but grow one or 2 tiles per day, would give you a setup time while also making it you cant just ignore it as a raider repelant

[Gintoki Sakata]

Originally posted by Tynan:

Originally posted by mOj:

worst part is some turrets explode and some don't .

FWIW it's always been this way; player turrets use the same code.

I see thanks keeping melee pawns on toes it seems. Also huge fan <3 wish i was smart like you :)

[flu007]

Originally posted by Tynan:

I appreciate the rich feedback! Certainly this is just the kind of thing I'm looking to tune going forward. It's a new gameplay concept and we did lots of balancing and adjusting pre-release but with more players come more data.

They are supposed to be difficult and to require new strategies. I think they're hitting these marks, but I don't want them to feel unfair (that said, nor should they always be defeatible without losses, at least above builder difficulty).

We're further adjusting how clusters choose where to spawn, because you're right some of them were spawning on top of things they shouldn't (or even indoors). The next hotfix, and probably another next week, will have adjustments on these fronts.

After that's done and the metagame matures a bit I'll be looking at other adjustments, but I don't want to move too fast and end up "thrashing" with the design.

A little bit of feedback from someone playing on Builder, then. :)

My experience with them is very limited, since I'm doing a Tribal start and still in my first year. I only accepted one quest with mechanoid clusters, just to see what it was like. (A Hunter With Enemies, protecting a sick pawn for a few days while mech clusters occasionally drop.)

Two clusters dropped during the mission, both times one Pikeman and one auto-turret. The first one right into the base, turret inside my research room. While I agree it's good you're fixing that, that actually made it pretty easy to deal with it, as I could just deconstruct a few wall segments and start pummeling it with clubs without having to approach it out in the open. It didn't seem to have a minimum firing range, though, so I still got some injured pawns, but nothing too serious.

The second one did drop out in the open some distance from the base, but as I was building some traps and thinking how to deal with it with my handful of guys with clubs and recurve bows, I got an opportunity to cheese it when a Tribute Collector group arrived, and took it.

Not enough experience to draw any big conclusions yet, but this one quest with them didn't make me feel it was unfairly hard, even for Builder difficulty. I mean, sure, I'm up against it a bit with just bows and clubs, but these are quests which warn of the type of opposition in advance, so I don't have to accept them.

I got offered two more quests with mech clusters since then, and didn't accept them. But their rewards weren't particularly great. If they had had a better reward, I might very well have risked it.
Which, I think, isn't a bad level of difficulty - even as a Builder player, I don't need the quests to be easy, especially if I can choose to take them with foreknowledge.
(That said, the one where a Lancer and a Scyther were going to drop every 18 hours for 5 days would have had to have a pretty awesome reward for me to risk that one with half a dozen guys with bows and clubs.)

[Hykal]

Thanks for the reply, Tynan!

I think one of the major ways players approach combat is to use their small force to overwhelm a minor part of a larger force. It can be as simple as having all eight of your pawns gun down one pirate with a rocket launcher or sending two melee pawns to 2v1 a scyther. The player MUST overwhelm the enemy with speed, this is moreso if they're outside on the world map.

But due to the how the combat works, specifically guns, the warmup time and the damage may not simply be enough to overwhelm a mechanoid. This can be seen best in regards to inferno turrets. If the inferno turret gets off ONE shot, they explode and set fire to four pawns with assault rifles, and those pawns panic and run around, and they get gunned down by the mini-slug turrets.

Now I don't have the numbers with me atm, but if I send one colonist peek the corner to lob an EMP, chances are the inferno turret, the other smaller turrets, the pikeman, the lancers, are going to focus all their firepower onto my one grenadier and end him. I could send a pawn with a high end personal shield to bait the turrets, but shields are simply not powerful enough to neglect such amount of firepower. Not every player is going to have access to power armor early on. The scythers running at my grenadier means I need to have a melee pawn babysitting them.

I simply do not always have the pawns carrying a smoke grenade or an EMP grenade. Even if 7 out of 8 colonists have EMP/smokes to shut down the enemies, that leaves me one pawn to do the actual damage. And even if I could reliably do this technique, I truly doubt this is viable late game. And more importantly, it's not fun.

I could simply build turrets WITHIN my perimeter wall, but as someone who has had a pawn obliterated by my own uranium slug turret, that's not wise nor advisable. Maybe if we could individually or automatically turn on turrets, but there are no mechanics that allow this other than cheesing the reconnect wires. Even having a power switch is not reliable.

Regardless, I can't wait for the next hotfix and look forward to see how the clusters can be improved.