How do you usually deal with Mechanoid Clusters?

[WolfWhiteFire]

Hello, I recently purchased the royalty DLC and while I have been able to manage them so far, they feel like a far greater threat than raids and I am wary of one potentially getting out of control. My colony is on the largest non-extreme map size, in a mountainous region full of valleys, one of which holds the colony itself. I have had two mechanoid clusters so far, one I mustered all my people, animals, and a couple guests from the imperial faction together, and attacked with all the force I could.

I destroyed it, but there were a lot of heavy wounds and some people who I barely managed to heal in time, which encouraged me to start setting up small outposts distant from my colony with medical beds and some medicine to bring wounded to, in hopes of getting them treatment sooner. any of the raids so far barely managed to scratch my colonists, so this was clearly a far greater threat,

Next one went more smoothly, I had started getting my crafting and smithng operations going and started crafting actual armor for my colonists, then a trade caravan came by, they opened fire on the mechanoid cluster, and managed to kill it with about 2/3 of their people dead and the entire area on fire, with me rescuing two of the survivors in hopes of improving relations. I just mopped up the one turret that was left after that fight and the smoke factory suffering few wounds in my own people.

Thing is though, that was a large caravan and a lot of them died, and while I am not really concerned about any raids at this point, I am much more concerned about the mech clusters. They force you on the offensive and the turrets and mechanoids are pretty dangerous. I am crafting some nice armor from the Medieval Times mod, trying to get my whole colony a set, a bit harder with a mod doubling the population and number of enemies you face (kind of got tired of having 4-5 people for ages, current population is around 8), which will hopefully help make my colonists a lot harder to kill, though it will take a lot of steel to make it all.

On a side note, how do you make your pawns use psi powers, and am I correct in assuming these small outposts will eventually turn into full-fledged complexes with defenses that might rival your own base?

Back to the main question, how do you all usually deal with mechanoid clusters, any advice?

[gimmethegepgun]

First, I HIGHLY recommend not bringing animals to fight mech clusters that have turrets. Turrets have a very high chance of exploding once damaged enough, which will severely injure, maim, or kill those within the radius that don't have a shield belt. And you can't tell animals to get away from the turret before it explodes.

That aside, here are some general tips for fighting them:
Smoke prevents turrets from locking on, so smokepop belts or the smokepop psycast can help immensely.
Clusters often bring walls with them. Use that line of sight to engage fewer enemies at once, if possible.
You can use mortars to bombard the cluster to destroy turrets and eventually force the mechs to come to you. If there is a high-shield emitter, use an EMP mortar to disable it.
If there is an unstable energy cell in the cluster, damaging it will cause it to explode in a wide radius, usually destroying everything within that radius. Similarly, you can sometimes take out multiple turrets at once with their death explosion.
If there are no Scythers, you can attack them with a bunch of melees with shield belts. Most likely the ranged attacks won't break the shield, and once close enough to the large turrets they can't fire anyway. Same for ranged mechs, they can't use their gun if they're engaged in melee. If there ARE Scythers, then you can try to bait them out first and shoot them to death, or mob them one at a time with melees and hope they don't hurt you too much.
A flak vest and flak helmet is HIGHLY recommended if engaging them without smoke or shield, as charge blasters, charge lances, and needle guns can one-shot pawns by destroying their heart or brain.
If you can't prevent them from shooting inferno cannons at you, bring a firefoam popper with you. Set it up before you start the fight, and once they hit you with an inferno cannon it will pop and protect everyone in the radius from the flames. Alternatively, terrain permitting, you can stand in water for the same effect.

[WolfWhiteFire]

Unfortunately, I don't have any of that stuff yet, my colony is still pretty low-tech. Some poor quality guns looted from raids, a couple normal ones, I am starting up production of decent armor, and that is about it. Sounds like I have a lot of work to do coming up to remedy that, and it is good to have an idea of what to focus on obtaining.

For an idea of where my colony is at, I have a couple nice rooms, a fridge room, then a couple large rooms, one as a barracks, one as a crafting area, plus two side rooms. I have a large, walled off valley, and also tunneled into another small valley, so I have a lot of growing space, which I am using for bamboo, corn, rice, healroot, and cotton. At the entrance I have basic, granite fortifications, and then that is about the sum total of my colony, plus two wind turbines and a couple batteries.

I do have a fair amount of resources, a couple dozen animals, a megasloth because my tamer got inspiration which I used on that, and I have the means to start making some nice plate armor from a medieval mod I have installed, which will help a lot in combat I have time to prepare for. Comes with a lot of penalties that makes it not really viable to wear outside of times I am expecting heavy combat though.

Fortunately it is mostly just pikemen, though the one that got wiped by the caravan had a scyther. It had about 2 inferno turrets and two of the smaller, weaker turrets, about 4-5 pikemen, plus a couple gloomlights. Only a smoke factory, which was a lot less threatening than the poison factory of the last one.

In other words, my colony is pretty primitive with little advanced tech so far. I am getting very close to +75 with the imperials for an alliance though, just need to satisfy a freeloading yeoman for a couple more weeks in-game.

I plan on focusing more on crafting and research coming up now that I have more people and the animals do all the hauling, but I am still a pretty low-tech colony for now at least.

[gooberwoc]

My only encounter with mechanoids ended with my colony dying, I'm still learning lol.

[Hykal]

The early days of Royalty was terrible. Just clusters after clusters. Sometimes twice in a single day!

However, current cluster design is quite well done, even if I have some grievances with it.

Clusters are in a way another form of sieges of psychic ship chunks. You are forced to sally out and destroy the enemy. In that way, it's not very different. What is different is the turrets, which are likely your second biggest threat after the mechanoids themselves.

One, smoke pops are very good. Whether it's using a smoke grenade launcher, the psycast that produces smoke, or smokepop belts, popping smoke does two things:

1. It makes it so turrets cannot lock onto you. Very useful in regards into getting cover. They can still shoot pawns not in smoke, so you can still be hurt if you get shot by a turret.
2. It makes shots inaccurate, from inside the smoke and outside the smoke. You don't want to be laying down fire from inside smoke.

The second is just rushing the turrets. Very unadvised unless you have shield belts and good armour. Turrets, save for the small ones, have a minimum range, and if you're smart, you can get into the range of a charge blaster turret no problem. It will randomly explode, so plan on that. Shield belts are hard to come by early game but you should consider buying them from nearby settlements.

Befriending the Empire also makes dealing with clusters easy. Psycasts are very strong and smart usage of powers like Beckon, Skip, Wall Raise, and so on can allow you to deal with clusters with no casualties. If you're a high ranking Royal, you can also summon enemies and direct them towards your enemy or even bombard from the sky.

But psycasts is a very complex topic, so you might want to ask more specific questions.

No, these clusters will not "grow" in any way, unless you count OTHER mech clusters popping in as growing.

[Aurian]

If you have or can somehow get some reeeally long range rifles like sniper rifles, it is often possible to start firing at turrets from a range they can't match. Then the mobile mechs will have to come to your colony defenses without their turrets as backup.

Sometimes you can also just ignore mech clusters for a while, especially if they are in an area your colonists rarely or never walk through and if the cluster doesn't include something like a defoliator or smoke emitter that you have to deal with. Even then, those tend to be on timers and not immediately active.

You could keep your colonists from walking near the mechs by selecting the cluster and the area around it as a new zone, and then 'inverting' the zone (meaning the area is everything except what you selected). Then assign your colonists to that area instead of 'unrestricted'.

If you can afford to just leave mechanoids be for a while, often the mechs will end up moping up raids for you.

[Hykal]

It's important to note that one lone sniper is usually not sufficient. Bring three or four of your best shooters, give them bionic legs, and even centipedes will fall prey to them.

[Gamefever]

Difficulty, Wealth, and even Time

Those effect raid and mech cluster size.
So mine is Adventure, which seems to be more my pace than extreme which I have played.

Have some EMP grenades and EMP luanchers maybe 2 of each just lying around for these moments and my favorite a melee pawn with Zues Hammer (serious bash damage, armor penetration, causes stuns, and has EMP effect wrapped in one CC weapon also comes with persona versions offering more effects).

Honestly some of the things that are not immediately obvious about mechs, they are vulnerable to grenade weapons and melee weapons in general. Mechs are vulnerable to decent bash weapons like uranium club. Really good melee weapons are plasteel speer and plasteel longsword if you dont have Thrumbo Horn, MonoSword, Zueshammer. Bash in general does less damage but has lower armor class to beat than slash so often bash is good way to go cause of stuns while high end slash weapons have extreme armor pierce values we are talking 2-3X more pierce than other weapons available.

Skip power is very useful for teleporting key mechs into arms reach of your pawns. Doing this means that they cant use their scary 1 hit kill ranged weapons.

Regular explosive grenade and grenade luancher can kill mechs and mech turrets with about 2 hits, that is pretty fast compared to all other range weapons available.

Special weapons like Doomsday and Triple Rocket Luancher are amazing but you must have EMP Launcher or EMP Mortars employed to disable shields to make a nice sized mech clump vulnerable to the attack.

Antigrain warhead is really good, costly and requires that you lob a bunch of EMP mortar rounds at the shields to remove them before dropping an AG round on the clump.

Mortars are "useful" but better with a mod that effects accuracy and overall they do less damage to mechs than other available options. You will need a lot of mortars and mortar rounds to effectively destroy mech clusters even with mod installed without mod you will need at least 4 to 12 of these things and that is a lot of pawns on mortars.

Mechs themselves are vulnerable to magic powers, especially Beserk pulse which can turn an entire mech clump against itself!
Mech buildings are not invulnerable to fire, lightning damage, and many enviroment effects that also effect your own structures.
Mech clusters often have power cells that are super explosive and can wipe out an entire cluster if hit.
Mech turrets are explosive, watch out cause the explosion can maim pawns, wipe out the cluster, and kill all pawns nearby.

Other Options...
There are times that clusters drop but are not actually a threat to you if you re zone where pawns can go, in that situation leaving said cluster untouched may be a benefit to you since other attacks on the colony may in fact move past said cluster and get destroyed coming to you. I have had a mech cluster that absorbed a few tribal raids before I finally went over there an removed the last two turrets.

Sometimes you get offered some help, in way of pawns armed with weapons be very observant cause sometimes these pawns are just trash pawns for the job and may not be useful other than being moving targets.

Have a good look at your armor if you have a lot of options that compare to marine armor you may be well equipped to deal with mechs aggressively.

Pawn Population
Can actually get really really big...Its not like it was there is a break point where you dont get more easy give me pawns....That is it, there is not a break point where the game just decides to kill you off anymore other than wealth, time, difficulty level.

Be aware of Pawn Value.
You can literally have fully kitted pawns in cyberware that are valued 12,000-15,000 each while the typical pawn value is actually 400-1,200 silver. That means that single pawn is worth 10-30 generic pawns. So be careful about not recruiting enough pawns because you may have the attitude that said pawn is "trash" but if you have a map that will support 10-30 more "trash" pawns than you have a lot of available cannon fodder that may not amount to a lot of value.

Royalty Pawns and Nature Druids spend loads of time meditating and generally have a high value compared to pawns that are not that type....So these pawns dont do enough work and require a lot of pawns doing work to support them. So even though it is true that you can have as many of the magic users as you want bear in mind these pawns spend lots of hours recovering their meditation focus. So having a lot of pawns that you are not attached to is a very good thing to support your elite core.

Stacking Honor,
Tribute Caravan comes once a year, will leave map if dangerous temperature.
Each prisoner you give them gives you 4 honor does not matter pawn value. Each stack of 69 gold gives 1 honor. So you can spend honor for permits like reinforcements and if you store enough honor you can have multiple reinforcements showing up on the map.
If you are not adverse to storing lots of prisoners for up to around a years stay in a sizable prison this can be very easy to get a lot of honor points stacked up.
Long term prisoner storage just means you need food to support them and a decent jailer to give them a beatdown for prison breaks. Your doctor can of course remove their arms, legs, and give them joywire all of which severely reduces their value and makes them easy to manage over long periods of time however they still each give you 4 honor when the tax man comes even if the pawn value has dropped to ~100 silver each.