Shamblers are unbalanced (too fast)

[krzykoszgalazka]

Shamblers

They seem unbalanced. They move too fast, are quite durable, resistant to pain and psychology, kill everything living and appear in huge numbers (66 enemies, in mid/late ~350,000 wealth) - this creates a deadly combination for the colony.

It's a pity that they are don't like classic zombies (they withstand some kind of damage, but move slowly).. This is unsatisfying because the combat is downright murderous and the post-battle reward is poor (apart from Shard and Bioferrite). It's also a pity that you can't fight them with fire, I think their intelligence (or rather lack of it) should ignore the fact that fire harms them, and instead they avoid fire like normal intelligent living pawns.

I think that their movement should be slowed down even 3-4 times.
Alternatively, leave a few zombies as "spinters"

My digression is based mainly on experiences with sudden Shamblers invasions. The situation with wanderers sulking around the map for 2 days is a completely different story - I think it's a better experience

[Icy, Crispy, Energizing, Tasty]

fire seems to help me deal with them as well as AOE attacks like grenades

a heavily armored melee fighter works for me as well

[Red Bat]

Not to say giant shambler assaults aren't scary, but I think the game actually calculates shamblers as being worth more than say, militors, so a 60 shambler assault would be about an 80-100 militor assault and I think militors are a bit harder to fight in large numbers.

They also tend to do poorly against most animals assuming they are outnumbered. So it's not that out there to drag a group of 6 shamblers away from the horde and trick them into fighting your pen animals while you fight the rest only to check back and find out they lost to 20 ducks with 10 ducks left. You could also send a horde of rats at them to split them up and draw aggro to render even large hordes of shamblers mostly harmless, although I'm assuming most players don't keep about 50 rats on standby like I do.

They are an absolutely unrewarding raid type though. Even tribals at least drop stuff you can smelt and occasionally enough jade to make a sculpture. Shambler entities are even worse because they are just stronger versions of the same entities, with lower item drop rates and a 25 containment penalty stacked on. That said, this flips around if you use deadlife IEDs because one big shambler assault basically lets you break the game since corpses aren't used to calculate raid strength so there really won't be a way a raid can generate that can overcome a deadlife defense strategy.

[RTX4090]

i usually close all doors, continuously repair doors until shamblers die. This strategy can deal with 200 shamblers.

[Hykal]

Shamblers, unlike tribals and centipedes, only lasts 3 days tops. I've had manhunters last longer. They also drop the odd shard here and there. And of course, you can weaponize them yourself with deadlife items.

[Garma Cyro]

Have been able to kite them around. Move my pawns back a fair amount. Let them fire of a round. Rinse and repeat until the amount becomes manageable.

Though I've also started setting my ranged pawns with a rough 2-to-1 ratio of assault rifle
and minigun. My current 20 pawn colony has 4 melee pawns (getting turned into super-augmented vampires), 6 miniguns, 10 assault rifles.
If find adding some miniguns because effective when Rimworld starts unleashing larger hordes at your base.

[HunterSilver]

Shamblers already have a 0.7x movement speed multiplier. If you slowed them down any further then turtles could kite them. That's not even counting missing body parts or pre-existing injuries that they can spawn with. Without immunity to painshock you could just stand in an open field and wipe out infinitely large groups of shamblers with some ARs at their current speed.

[Nishe]

Weird, I personally thought shamblers weren't challenging enough. Multiple reasons - they drop dead too quickly, they don't wander very far from their starting point and start too closely packaged for their presence to cut off much of the map, they don't assault your base outside of a specific event, they don't attack wildlife (except with mods ofc) and their condition isn't contagious. Would like there to be more of a challenge/horror element to them.

I think the rewards are kind of fine given the relatively easy task of killing them too. My only criticism with the rewards would be that they don't seem to scale with the horde size (you seem to get about 0.5-1 shards per horde whether it's 10 shamblers or 60 in my experience). This is fine except for the fact that it means there isn't much incentive to increase the quality of your summoning ritual and therefore increase the horde size. The only other utility of summoning a horde would be to fight raiders, but the length of the summoning ritual and the amount of time it takes for them to arrive make that an extremely impractical solution.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Red Bat:

Not to say giant shambler assaults aren't scary, but I think the game actually calculates shamblers as being worth more than say, militors, so a 60 shambler assault would be about an 80-100 militor assault and I think militors are a bit harder to fight in large numbers.

They are actually the same(ish)
Militors have a value in the game of 45 points. Shambler's have two different types but are about the same; "Shambler soldiers" are also 45 points, "Shambler swarmers" are 40 points.