Why is shooting so underpowered?

[マルコ]

In real life the expectation is that if you run 10 meters towards someone holding an m16 pointed at you, you're dead.
In this game npc can sprint 100 meters and is not rare that not even a single bullet will hit them... even if the weapon was held by a decent shooter and of normal quality...
It's underwhelming really, like even with a good shooter and a good rifle I still fear to be out in the open shooting rather than behind a steel trap... shooting, or at least Aim from the shooting skill needs a buff, what do you think?

[ichifish]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Astasia:

Oprindeligt skrevet af ichifish:

As someone who’s never used combat extended, what does it do besides adding an ammo requirement?

It flattens progression by adding an ablative system to armor, so with even mediocre quality armor your colonists can completely ignore small-arms fire, while causing all weapons to do more damage to unarmored pawns. People who are bad at the game can rush armor and completely trivialize most early raids, then complain on the forums here when they get stomped by mechanoids (which are heavily armored). It changes the health system to adjust how body parts are hit in combat, with the goal IIRC to avoid body part loss, which is one of the main reasons it's incompatible with so many mods. It adds an inventory management system so you have to micro the weight of armor, weapons and ammo on your colonists, causing a hard incompatibility with a bunch of other mods. Then it makes a bunch of other small and pointless changes to game systems for "realism" and to further make it incompatible, things like smoke in rooms and projectiles arcing over walls and hitting pawns in a closed room with stone arrows because reasons.

Sometimes I think it intentionally tries to be incompatible with everything. One of the more amusing examples is Vanilla Expanded Hair came out and on their FAQ they have the obligatory "is it CE compatible" questions, the answer is "It's a hair mod, yes." Shortly after, CE had an update that made it incompatible with VE Hair, causing beards to show up as pink boxes on colonists. Because for whatever reason CE decided it needed to fundamentally change how equipment layers on colonists are rendered.

It almost sounds like you don’t like it.

Seems like it’s got a lot of baggage, but being able to adjust global armor values in the options settings would be kind of cool.

[LIMP BISQUICK]

The core problems with vanilla IMO. Lacks formation tools. Unnecessary variables that determine whether the bullet hits/misses and inability to quickly access that information. Skill factor not good. Lacks proper skill training mechanics. You either spent a lot of time leveling up a pawn or spent a good amount resources investing in that pawn to be decent, the fact they can die due to a dice roll or random event blows. Not to mention all the debuffs that happen while in combat. I'm not against friendly fire but it's exaggerated so there's plenty of dumb situations with that without the basic tools. Plenty of other problems I won't bother to list.

I don't struggle with it but there's a lot of downsides to where I don't blame people investing in a killbox or cheesy exploits and call it a day. If you want to mod it then don't hesitate as vanilla combat is far from perfect.

[Sepherix]

Oprindeligt skrevet af ichifish:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Straw:

Use combat extended it's the best mod for combat ovehaul

As someone who’s never used combat extended, what does it do besides adding an ammo requirement?

It strips up melee entirely by making every weapon almost never miss. And make bleeding even more of an issue so that even if you don't kill in one shot, the bleeding will get the raiders. Its baby mode. You have tools to stop bleeding, they don't. And yeah, only one dude with a poor quality rifle will kill every raiders for a year or two. ONE DUDE. There's no challenge.

[Morkonan]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

In real life the expectation is that if you run 10 meters towards someone holding an m16 pointed at you, you're dead.
In this game npc can sprint 100 meters and is not rare that not even a single bullet will hit them... even if the weapon was held by a decent shooter and of normal quality...
It's underwhelming really, like even with a good shooter and a good rifle I still fear to be out in the open shooting rather than behind a steel trap... shooting, or at least Aim from the shooting skill needs a buff, what do you think?

To put a great deal more emphasis on something Astasia mentioned: Progression.

You have to "feel" improvement and progression being reflected in your efforts in-game. Any "good game" pays attention to this, else players end up saying "that stat doesn't matter" even if it really does somewhere in some back-end calc. So, all of the various stats related to Shooting can have a visible impact in your pawn's performance in-game. (Skill, traits, quality, etc. "Range-based" modifiers reward your weapon selection and tactics.)

The more variables you have to progress and modify some kind of in-game-reflected... thing, the bigger the gap you have to make the resulting performance in order to demonstrate "progression." So, low-level performance is typically "abysmal" compared to higher level performance across all the variables involved.

Pedantic, I know. But, that's one reason why these sorts of real-life weapons don't perform as expected.

Oprindeligt skrevet af 8faiNt ı♣ı:

does vanilla combot not get affected by mental breakdowns and such?

It is such an easy task to fullfill to not get hit by - debuff from weather,i dont know why you would not do it.

different playstyles i assume.

sure, your pawns arent likely to get hit lightning but the soil next to you will though, for me, fire in my killbox if i have one just means that I ve wasted a fire foam i could ve used against a mech shot or against an incendiary launcher

how many times your pawns had a mental breakdown because the fight took way long than it should though?

These things add up. They affect your combat experience one way or another. You can easily fix them.

While I understand your enthusiasm for "min/maxxing" things, the sorts of reasons you're listing for having made your initial statement are... sort of trivial compared to being "shot." They're certainly trivial to the moods of any well-managed, min-maxxed, colonists. They should have plenty of solid mood boosts they'll be carrying around with them all day, every day. (Diifficulty level notwithstanding.)

If you're min/maxxing your gameplay to this degree, you're not worried about a few points related to any penalty effecting your pawn's combat performance or their mood during a combat/draft encounter. They've got the best possible mood buffs to carry with them on the way to the fight... a couple of darkness/wet points ain't gonna matter that much.

Though, there is no valuable argument against doing such things. It's just that it's really not that big of a deal.

I always put a roof on my bunker areas due to... Well, it's a "Bunker." And, due to habits developed when there was a darkness-related combat penalty way-back-when, I guess.

In umpty-ninety bajillion hours of play, I may have had a couple of pawns suffer a mental break during combat. And, I'm having trouble remembering those instances, too. Even so, I still arm all my Caravaning Pawns with a joint or two, just in case things get dicey on the road... Being able to still fire while stoned out of their gourd is better than wandering around in a daze as a potential target.

PS: I've had a couple of colonists struck by lightning over the years! Why? I like sending pawns out to fight fires. I've also mortared them by accident. Probably by accident... maybe.

"Send it!"
<POOMF>
"Wait. Was that a Firefoam shell?"
"Firefoam? Uh, no, it was the "Hello Everybody" shell."
"Hello Everybody?"
"Yeah, "H.E.""

[Dropdeadfred]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

In real life

This isn't real life.

[Zachenstien]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

but how do I train melee

When a prisoner needs a bruising or a colonist for that matter, send your melee build to end it fast. BUT, make sure you have them drop their weapon if its a god weapon and dont even send them in if they have an implant like a knee spike or hand talon or they will just murder whoever you sent them on. Melee is very good, but it is and will be a grind to get it up, it is worth it as late game as they wont lose a single 1v1 with anything.

[ShuFlngPu]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

In real life the expectation is that if you run 10 meters towards someone holding an m16 pointed at you, you're dead.
In this game npc can sprint 100 meters and is not rare that not even a single bullet will hit them... even if the weapon was held by a decent shooter and of normal quality...
It's underwhelming really, like even with a good shooter and a good rifle I still fear to be out in the open shooting rather than behind a steel trap... shooting, or at least Aim from the shooting skill needs a buff, what do you think?

The devs will do nothing but tell you to mod it. Welcome to rimworld.

[ROE]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Zachenstien:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

but how do I train melee

When a prisoner needs a bruising or a colonist for that matter, send your melee build to end it fast. BUT, make sure you have them drop their weapon if its a god weapon and dont even send them in if they have an implant like a knee spike or hand talon or they will just murder whoever you sent them on. Melee is very good, but it is and will be a grind to get it up, it is worth it as late game as they wont lose a single 1v1 with anything.

Thank goodness for swords and lightsabers. By endgame most of my pawns are melee only.

If you don't use a killbox then melee is the only way really. The grind is real but once you get used to the necessary steps you can blow straight though to marine armor, or cataphract if you can get some lucky drops.

A fully armored cybered up melee pawn can eat more than one full on doom launcher rocket and keep mowing down opponents like nothing even happened. Give them some psy powers and just forget it.

Meanwhile, Jimmy ♥♥♥♥ shot raider is bleeding my fully covered snipers with his broke ass recurve bow from a field of daisies while my fourteen skill shooters miss 3/4 of their shots. That is called unbalanced and broken. Also not fun.

Raider's accuracy with simple bows, revolvers, autopistols, and machine pistols needs a good nerfing. Their accuracy at range is just ridiculous when compared to player pawns.

[Kasa]

I have close to about 900 hr's in rimworld so and have never modded combat directly and never had any real problem with it.

That said combat is NOT GOOD, I whole heartedly suggest getting one of the training dummy mods so you can train shooting and melee to decent levels (it's stupid that this isn't in the base game).
Get side arms so that your pawns can carry a ranged weapon and a melee weapon while switching weapons at the correct range.
After that run and gun is a good mod since it lets you move and shoot with penalties.

Training Mod Examples:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=717575199&searchtext=Training

Side arms:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927155256

Run and Gun:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1204108550&searchtext=run+and+gun

Keep in mid mod of these mods have over 300k subs, that means a third of a million accounts like and use these mods so no matter what the vanilla purists say it's only a handful of voices that are disagreeing with a chorus that says otherwise.

[Gamefever]

Nah man,

I just like rush steel plate armor, slap on a shield belt, mount him on a warpony and then we rush the enemy mortar position on war ponies!

Nothing like running down a bunch of cowards hiding in their hardpoint with all their guns.
Meanwhile I got my nerds raining down smoke from our own mortars, its ok if they miss with those.

My mounted patrol carries plasteel swords, spears, and uranium mace to the face.
That an getting trampled on by a horse is no joke either, adds a little extra damage.
____________________________________________________

Not that I have not been successful with ranged weapons because I have.
There are actually real issues but its mostly due to the player,

One way to get a real good idea of just how powerful the lack of terrain is for making your fire fight one sided is to set up a base on an arctic ice sheet, cause there is like nothing out there for them to hide behind.

When I play on a normal map, I set up a few fire zones, not actually kill boxes but these are about the same style. I make sure I have walls, sandbags, and everything.
Thing is that I have to prepare the field that the enemy will be standing in.
IF there are chunks, walls, tree's, and object out there it can be useful for the enemy to use as cover. Projectiles that have to travel across a cover object effect hit chances....So its got to be removed.

Only other fun thing I do on purpose, is make what amounts to an actual wooden killbox. Its cover meant to be used by the enemy which is then set on fire and yes it works really well.

My bases on normal maps get pretty big, so there split into sections that have fire breaks, and wings are intentional made so that they can catch fire. When the base proper is invaded my defenders fall back setting the wing ablaze. Works really well with drop pod attacks, you should see a whole raid of 12 drop into a small room only to have all the furniture go up in flames, they punch their way out only to find the hallway in the same condition.

[Astasia]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kasa:

After that run and gun is a good mod since it lets you move and shoot with penalties.

RunAndGun is one of the most ridiculously OP mods ever put up on the workshop. Bionic legs and a sniper rifle, you've just won the game.

The vanilla balance on kiting is already razor thin, there's really no room for adjustment without trivializing essentially all combat in the game. It doesn't matter what you set it to short of disabling it entirely, RunAndGun turns nearly every combat encounter into a joke.

[Gamefever]

Shooting "can" be really good.

The problem is falling for all the stuff you might read about in the forums cause when at first I was thinking OMG I cant kill anything with my guns...I'd read about how hunting rifle and sniper rifle were the way to go...Problem ROF and effective range on those weapons is trash.

Honestly the better weapons in this game actually have short ranges, like shotguns, autoshotguns, most of the auto guns except the big heavy guns. Even pistols are good guns in the right situations. But for all purpose its the SMG, hands down good gun, range is not great but that is typical engagement range, useful inside bases and tight quarters as well as mid range outdoors.

So its a matter of preparing where you will fight, sorry I know people are like man I dont like kill boxes....Well I'm not saying you have to have a kill box but you really need to figure on using your base as the firing range. There should not be too much stuff your not willing to sacrifice in that base either. What ever area you are building in you have a lot of control over how its going to go as you build it, so consider your actual buildings when building a kill zone.

Other tools,
Grenades often dont come up in discussions about guns, its like vaccum or something...But there are plenty of useful grenades that do beneficial things for you like blow stuff up or burn stuff or make all pawns inside a smoke ring untargetable by ranged weapons entirely. Yup smoke denies targeting, and you cannot pick targets behind smoke to shoot at....Fire also generates some smoke over time.

Having all pawns have guns is a bit excessive because you are not thinking about all the tools you have in the game.

[LIMP BISQUICK]

RunAndGun is one of the most ridiculously OP mods ever put up on the workshop. Bionic legs and a sniper rifle, you've just won the game.

NPC run and gun too. There are also mod settings too I believe. And from what I've seen a lot of people seem to engage in pawn combat more with such mods rather than stand behind a killbox. Can always look for other mods/settings to increase difficulty. There's kiting in vanilla as well but more laborious. There are plenty of exploits too so I don't see the point in acting like vanillas combat being perfectly balanced.

[Astasia]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jibbles:

NPC run and gun too. There are also mod settings too I believe. There's kiting in vanilla as well but more laborious.

NPCs don't run at you with two bionic/archotech legs with legendary weapons. The settings don't matter, short of disabling everything about the mod. There is kiting in vanilla, it's situational and balanced around pawns having to stop during the aim and cooldown phase. Even allowing them to move a tiny fraction of normal speed while shooting just breaks combat completely, there's such a narrow margin between the limits of vanilla kiting and being able to handle threats with impunity and no risk of being hit.

[bananaSplif]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Marcus:

Nah, I am completely against modding

dude