Dealing with 9 centipedes

[gussmed]

I recently has a defoliator ship part land with 9 sleeping centipedes. My standard solution for that is to get adjacent and melee them all at once.

I was dubious about that this time because I’ve only got 10 colonists who could fight (plus 2 pacifists). Only 2 of them have halfway decent melee skills. That’s 9 colonists who’d have to go one-on-one melee, and one to shoot. I knew for certain most of them would lose those melee fights.

So I tried building some fortifications near the ship, and then opened up with charge lances and charge rifles.

Result: one dead colonist, 9 with severe injuries, and one with relatively light ones. I resurrected the dead colonist, but then discovered that resurrection doesn’t cure permanent brain injuries. So, another luciferium addict.

Really a terrible result all the way around. Not as bad as complete defeat, but pretty lousy.

I’m not really sure what I should have done differently. A conventional raid of that size might have been something I could handle, but of course a defoliator ship part forces you on the offense.

[gussmed]

On an unrelated note, severely wounded colonists are often pretty stupid. “I don’t have a rifle, I should wear a shield belt.” “My pants are tattered, I’m taking them off and getting new ones.” “There’s a fire!’

Yeah, yeah. You’re crippled by injuries and can barely move. Go back to bed. And don’t complain to me that you not wearing pants, that was your decision.

[Ξ Sikon]

EMP nades are key to my bot defenses. They work better than the EMP launcher. But those will interfere with shield belts so be careful.

I use mortars to destroy the ship. This forces the bots to attack my base so I funnel them into my killbox. I have a side door where my granader can start lobbing emp nades. Centipedes are the most dangerous thing because they soak up damage like it's nothing.

[Tertius]

Just recently, I had 4 centipedes and 4 lancers with a poison ship. It was my first encounter with centpedes, so I didn't really know what to do. I read centipedes are the worst of the mechanoids. In the past, I just ran out to a mechanoid ship and attacked, but that was never a good idea - many bad injuries.

I tried a new approach and used mortars. I saw the mechanoids stayed, but only until I was able to destroy the ship. After that, they approached. I had a granite wall around my base with groups of 3-4 turrets at the gates (distributed all around the base). The turrets act as decoys, so the mechanoids attack the turrets first instead of entering the base.

They split, so I chose the door with the least turrets and attacked the lancers first. I tried to engage them with my melee fighters (2 out of my 12 colonists). Although they had shield belts, they went down fast (not dead), but the lancers were dead as well. I rescued them with my 2 doctors (bleeding out in 3-4 hours, so it was pretty close) and continued the battle with the remaining colonists.

My second melee defense were the animals. I had 8 trained horses at the time and ordered them to attack what was left - the centipedes. Stampede. It was a tough fight, but except my two melee fighters, no other colonist was injured badly. The animals had more casualties, 2 dead as far as I remember, and 2 others crippled permanently.

I also didn't forget to wait for the morning for my attack. I only started after my colonists slept out and finished taking their meals to avoid silly behavior (going to sleep or eat in the middle of the battle) and mental breaks due to bad mood.

On my todo for the next encounter of this kind: build sandbag defenses before starting to attack ranged mechanoids. In front of the colony wall where they probably will attack. Bring one or two EMP launcher(s). Perhaps EMP traps, but these are difficult to place. Perhaps smoke launchers as well - never tried them in the past.

I didn't wait for them to enter the wall, because I didn't know which door/hole in the wall they will choose. I simply hadn't many encounters of this kind before. I didn't want them to clear all my turrets - these are a bit too expensive for just delaying the attack.
Melee enemies are best fought in a doorway with melee fighters as blocker, but as far as I see, ranged enemies can be fought in the field as long as you have some cover, decoys or meat shields like animals.

[WhiteWolf]

It depends.

.1. My go-to is mortars.

Shoot it and let them come to you. Mortars also takes care of sieges and can help with standard mech push early that you might have difficulties with. I focus on research from the start and have mortars in year 2. You need 6 high explosive to land to kill the ship. You can expect to spend 20 or so shots. However, if you factor the loss of productivity during raid (you moving across the map with everyone instead of working), loss of productivity after the raid (everyone in medbay) and hauling bodies across the map, you will reach to the conclusion that those 20 shells are actually cheaper. As an added bonus, it also damages the centipedes so when they reach your killbox, you have an easier time.

If you don't like the high RNG, there is a mod that allows mortars to be more accurate if pawns with high intelligence operate it.

.2. Tamed Animals

Centipes are not that good close combat.You put colonist on one side and charging animals on the other side. You will lose some but that's the best you can hope for.

.3. Wild animals

I am using this quite a lot in the late game. You can use animal pulsers to drive all animals into charging rage. You will fight the leftovers. As an added bonus, you get the loot from both animals and mech.

Early game animal wins by a fair margin (to dangerous for you afterwards).
Mid game animals win and you get a decent fight in base.
Late game it depends.Either way is not a bad idea.
Very late game mechs win. You still get to loot the whole map of animals afterwards.

The only thing is that you have to build walls across the map to lure the animals to the location of the ship. Once build you can use them for future ships. Artifacts are not hard to get.

[Sugar Show]

also avoid put traps near

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1901833052

[starbabylon]

But you can lay a lot of spike traps (steel prefered but any will do) between them and your base, like a minefield and then kite them in.

(I advise https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1542019602)

It will not necessarily kill the centipedes, but if your mortars started damaging them, you add the traps damage and then there is only the killing to do with pawns + pets.

[Raymond]

all these paragraphs when all it takes is a sniper rifle.

[gussmed]

One sniper rifle is not nearly enough to kite 9 centipedes. Which, incidentally, was what I had on hand, one sniper rifle. I did start the combat by plinking away at a centipede with a sniper rifle. It took a lot of shots to wake them up, particularly since the first two hits didn’t penetrate the armor.

I’ve kited centipedes before with sniper rifles, but I had more rifles and fewer centipedes.

I do, incidentally, have a winding corridor o’ traps at the entrance to my base. I just didn’t have any confidence they’d do more than kill maybe one centipede and damage a few others. My experience with centipedes is that they’re ridiculously tanky. High armor, but mostly it’s high HP. Lancers and scythers tend to go down with 1-2 traps, but centipedes just soak up the hits.

[Razor 2.3]

Mortars would have helped here, especially with the mech behavior change. Mechs no longer attack at 50% ship part health, and now wait for the thing to be destroyed. Depending on your luck, you could have 2 centipedes dead, 2 healthy, and the rest damaged to varying degrees before the fight proper. Downside is this is something you have to prepare for in advance, since you'd need a fair number of shells to brute force your way past the RNG enough times to destroy the ship part. At least you could do it with only one mortar and pawn rotation, assuming the part wasn't too close to your fields.

[❂Jamie❂]

Sounds like you need some EMP weapons. Mechs are annoying to deal with early on as you don't have much to deal with them. Soon as you get EMP weapons, it becomes a cakewalk.As long as you have someone throwing EMP grenades at mechs or shooting them with EMP weapons, they'll just stand still, take damage and die.

Mortars are a massive help with these mech clusters. EMP rounds are a godsend just as you engage them. Be careful as some clusters drop in with anti-mortar shield. Which luckily has to go down and recharge so be sure to attack then! (haha stupid robots)

[gussmed]

Originally posted by Razor 2.3:

Mortars would have helped here, especially with the mech behavior change. Mechs no longer attack at 50% ship part health, and now wait for the thing to be destroyed.

That's surprising. The last time I tried shelling a ship part with HE, the guards starting attacking the moment any of them took damage. And I found it near impossible to hit a moving force with mortars, so only the initial attack did any damage.

I had MUCH more success with antigrain warheads due the massively increased blast radius. Hence my current thinking was not to bother with mortars until I had a few antigrain warheads.

Originally posted by ❂Jamie❂:

Soon as you get EMP weapons, it becomes a cakewalk.As long as you have someone throwing EMP grenades at mechs or shooting them with EMP weapons, they'll just stand still, take damage and die.

That's not my experience. What I've seen of EMP launchers is that they're helpful, but the stuns aren't remotely long enough to make it a cakewalk. They also announced "adapted" after a few hits and don't stun as long.

I've only used EMP launchers and Zeushammers. I don't know if EMP grenades are better, I've shied away from those because of the short range.

This was a ship part not a mech cluster. I've seen lots of mortar shields in mech clusters, but since I haven't invested in mortars yet this game, so that hasn't mattered so much. Bullet shields have been a problem, though.

[Vintorez]

Charge lances and other sniper-like weapons aren't good against centipedes. They're great against humans where an unmitigated shot can take off a limb, but it would take multiple shots luckily hitting the same spot on a centipede to do the same. Instead you want high dps output weapons like assault rifles and miniguns, especially the latter which can take advantage of their large size making them easier to land hits on.

As others mentioned, EMP weapons can give a great advantage especially in the opening moments.

Finally it helps to take advantage of lines of sight. Essentially what makes killboxes powerful, the less enemies that can see you at once, the better. Try to build in ways that would funnel them to reduce how many are able to fire on you at once.

[gussmed]

One thing I'd like to know is how sensitive the guards near ship parts are to construction. Basically, how close you can build without waking them up. I didn't want to try and build a trap / funnel system near them and wake them up while I was doing it.

[Razor 2.3]

Range for that is about 4 tiles away, if I remember correctly. Basically the blast radius of an IED. Because we used to just line the ship with explosives and detonate them. The mechs waking up was the devs' answer to that.

[Raymond]

Close all entrance into your base so the centipede will focus on your sniper pawn. A trigger happy sniper can fire the rifle before the centipede can get into firing range. If your sniper pawn get tired, call another pawn to take the rifle and continue kiting. It takes time and micro but it is safe and secure. Even if you dont hit your sniper has near-infinite tries to finish off the centipedes. The only real challenge to this strategy is your schedule management to keep back up pawns fresh and happy to maintain kiting.