1.3 and all the wall breaching sounds terrible

[Hades]

So reading through the update and it seems that every type of enemy and tech level is now going to have (and prefer) to simply breach walls and ignore entrances, choke points and all the perimeter defences that made tower defence/base building rewarding.

When I read "fighting in bedrooms is fun" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

For me at least, designing the base with strong perimeter walls and having solid defence line-ups at entry/choke points was an intrinsic part of the game - especially when dying colonists is a bit soul destroying. I got used to the odd wall breach and drop pod raids but really struggling with the idea of having a swiss cheese base and turrets everywhere.

Anyone heard of any options to diminish or disable this AI that makes swiss cheese of your carefully designed base? Or anyone have ideas of how to mod the wall-breaching tools out?

I dunno where this game is going tbh: magical dryads (robots sounds more thematic to me)... primitives with wall-smashing axes... I kind of wonder has Tynan lost game design control and a bunch of programmers looking for stuff to keep busy are churning out this.

[Pizzarugi]

The breach is going to be a raid type, similar to sappers and sieges. Not every raid is going to have breachers.

[Riftwalker]

isn't this a special raid type like siege? normal raids have normal AI

edit: there are already mods that allow you configure how often the raid types happen, so it'll probably extend to the new raids as well.

[Yaldabaoth]

Who is saying dryads aren't genetically engineered by a glitterworld and then spread to the rim to make it more amenable? And why would tribals always run through the most obvious traps? They have been around for longer than you have, they know how to knock down walls.
I think you're just anxious because things change and you can't.

[Lord Autismo]

Originally posted by Hades:

So reading through the update and it seems that every type of enemy and tech level is now going to have (and prefer) to simply breach walls and ignore entrances, choke points and all the perimeter defences that made tower defence/base building rewarding.

When I read "fighting in bedrooms is fun" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

For me at least, designing the base with strong perimeter walls and having solid defence line-ups at entry/choke points was an intrinsic part of the game - especially when dying colonists is a bit soul destroying. I got used to the odd wall breach and drop pod raids but really struggling with the idea of having a swiss cheese base and turrets everywhere.

Anyone heard of any options to diminish or disable this AI that makes swiss cheese of your carefully designed base? Or anyone have ideas of how to mod the wall-breaching tools out?

I dunno where this game is going tbh: magical dryads (robots sounds more thematic to me)... primitives with wall-smashing axes... I kind of wonder has Tynan lost game design control and a bunch of programmers looking for stuff to keep busy are churning out this.

Yeah download bloons tower defence instead

[LeeYonguy]

It will probably be modable so don't worry. But i don't understand people, if you know how to create a perfect base the game is too easy, they come with a great breach raid to spice up things

[FourGreenFields]

Originally posted by Hades:

For me at least, designing the base with strong perimeter walls

If you can't shoot from those perimeter walls, chances are they weren't "strong", but relying on the AI being dumb.

Add a door every once in a while. Barricades and walls in the area in front of it for maximum cover. Turrets are optional, but fit in nicely (mostly to draw fire). Reinforcing choke-points is something you do in addition to it, if you aren't the kind who considers meta-killboxes "not an exploit".

[Locklave]

Originally posted by Yaldabaoth:

And why would tribals always run through the most obvious traps?

Because tribals are people and people make stupid choices and don't notice things. Maybe they even saw it are thought...

"I can make it past in time."
"I can dodge it."
"I can avoid the trigger."

Do you think tribals are smarter then the average idiots you meet everyday? They might have skills we don't, like which mushrooms are poisonous, but they are just as dumb as everyone else.

[Lord Freedom]

OP, I think you have valid concerns but imo we have no idea how powerful we may be with the new features and therefore have no way to judge the balance of these new raid types.

In terms of defense, so far in the 1.3 beta, simply building more killbox-style entry ways has helped against breachers. Instead of having one killbox generally facing the biggest entrances to your map, you'll have to make 2-3, maybe even 4 for each direction.

In terms of the direction of the game, it is still a science fiction theme. Gauranlen trees are simply a new type of alien life form - The psychic connection your colonists have with them is entirely based on physics ( wavelengths, frequencies, etc. ). Ultimately you will be able to disable anything that you feel takes you away from your desired theme.

[adobo]

We already have sapper raids. This just means they have proper tools to do it now instead of bashing down your walls.

[Gandalf The Queen]

I understand you prefer safe cheese tactics but the last paragraph is just unnecessary

[Yaldabaoth]

Originally posted by Locklave:

Originally posted by Yaldabaoth:

And why would tribals always run through the most obvious traps?

Because tribals are people and people make stupid choices and don't notice things. Maybe they even saw it are thought...

"I can make it past in time."
"I can dodge it."
"I can avoid the trigger."

Do you think tribals are smarter then the average idiots you meet everyday? They might have skills we don't, like which mushrooms are poisonous, but they are just as dumb as everyone else.

And that's why sappers and breakers are special raids you don't see often. They ARE specialized teams that know what they are doing. Do you think tribals in ancient times saw a wall and freaked out, not recognizing what a wall is? The moment people started to put up walls, those who wanted to break in came up with methods. That's human thinking.

[Koba]

Originally posted by Yaldabaoth:

Originally posted by Locklave:

Because tribals are people and people make stupid choices and don't notice things. Maybe they even saw it are thought...

"I can make it past in time."
"I can dodge it."
"I can avoid the trigger."

Do you think tribals are smarter then the average idiots you meet everyday? They might have skills we don't, like which mushrooms are poisonous, but they are just as dumb as everyone else.

And that's why sappers and breakers are special raids you don't see often. They ARE specialized teams that know what they are doing. Do you think tribals in ancient times saw a wall and freaked out, not recognizing what a wall is? The moment people started to put up walls, those who wanted to break in came up with methods. That's human thinking.

Besides that, we must remeber that our pawns are kind of "aliens" in this world and that is historically comproved that invaders ALWAYS have some hard times dealing with locals, don't matter how numerous or technologicaly advanced you are, sometimes you will find someone that know better how do fight in his own land.

[stevasaur]

Originally posted by Gandalf The Queen:

I understand you prefer safe cheese tactics but the last paragraph is just unnecessary

Let me give an illustrative example from my current run. It is currently 5005. My colonists have killed, on average, 100 enemies apiece: mechs, humanlikes and human-sized manhunting animals (I'm not counting the individual manhunting guinea pigs). I am also not counting trap kills because that's not recorded anywhere I'm aware of/ This is on Strive to Survive AKA Medium difficulty back before Tynan decided that descriptive difficulty levels weren't fancy enough, and of those various raiders, only less than 10% of them were quest enemies that I actively decided to fight. The remaining 90-or-so per colonist were invaders who showed up on the map with no objective other than to indiscriminately destroy owned structures and kill pawns/pets. There was no recourse besides violence to repel these attacks: even making peace with the relevant factions wouldn't have decreased the over all number of attacks.

In a world where a 100-to-1 kill ratio is necessary to survive on medium difficulty, any workable strategy is by definition cheesy. If your colonists are still alive after facing off against 100 times their number in equally-skilled opponents, then congratulations: you have engaged in cheese.

Note: the numbers above are before I've built a killbox or deployed any turrets. That's just from door cheese and luring enemies into a 1x1 hallway for a shootout.

Originally posted by Koba:

Besides that, we must remeber that our pawns are kind of "aliens" in this world and that is historically comproved that invaders ALWAYS have some hard times dealing with locals, don't matter how numerous or technologicaly advanced you are, sometimes you will find someone that know better how do fight in his own land.

Untrue. The Tribal Start faces the exact same raid setup as Crashlanded or Rich Explorer, and they're explicitly natives to the Rimworld.

[Dr. Uncredible]

Originally posted by stevasaur:

Originally posted by Gandalf The Queen:

I understand you prefer safe cheese tactics but the last paragraph is just unnecessary

Let me give an illustrative example from my current run. It is currently 5005. My colonists have killed, on average, 100 enemies apiece: mechs, humanlikes and human-sized manhunting animals (I'm not counting the individual manhunting guinea pigs). I am also not counting trap kills because that's not recorded anywhere I'm aware of/ This is on Strive to Survive AKA Medium difficulty back before Tynan decided that descriptive difficulty levels weren't fancy enough, and of those various raiders, only less than 10% of them were quest enemies that I actively decided to fight. The remaining 90-or-so per colonist were invaders who showed up on the map with no objective other than to indiscriminately destroy owned structures and kill pawns/pets. There was no recourse besides violence to repel these attacks: even making peace with the relevant factions wouldn't have decreased the over all number of attacks.

In a world where a 100-to-1 kill ratio is necessary to survive on medium difficulty, any workable strategy is by definition cheesy. If your colonists are still alive after facing off against 100 times their number in equally-skilled opponents, then congratulations: you have engaged in cheese.

Note: the numbers above are before I've built a killbox or deployed any turrets. That's just from door cheese and luring enemies into a 1x1 hallway for a shootout.

Originally posted by Koba:

Besides that, we must remeber that our pawns are kind of "aliens" in this world and that is historically comproved that invaders ALWAYS have some hard times dealing with locals, don't matter how numerous or technologicaly advanced you are, sometimes you will find someone that know better how do fight in his own land.

Untrue. The Tribal Start faces the exact same raid setup as Crashlanded or Rich Explorer, and they're explicitly natives to the Rimworld.

See, if those kills were pre-killbox you´ve nothing to worry about, you clearly allready possess the skills necessary to survive.
This is just a small measure to keep the game interesting, and anything not to a particular players taste can easily be opted out of either by options or mods.
I personally enjoy variation, and having to develop new skills to handle new invasions sounds like a challenge!

[stevasaur]

Originally posted by Dr. Uncredible:

See, if those kills were pre-killbox you´ve nothing to worry about, you clearly allready possess the skills necessary to survive.
This is just a small measure to keep the game interesting, and anything not to a particular players taste can easily be opted out of either by options or mods.
I personally enjoy variation, and having to develop new skills to handle new invasions sounds like a challenge!

The problem is that it's a symptom of a much longer trend in Rimworld development where instead of giving additional, non-combat tools to deal with raids, the developers just ham-fistedly create new raid types that bypass the existing countermeasures in an attempt to force "drama." The root issue (that raids are unreasoning, purely destructive opponents with no goals beyond "destroy things") is never addressed.

The quest system could have been a first step: make the majority of hostile encounters either opt-in (by accepting a quest which antagonizes X faction) or able to be bypassed (say, by providing resources or completing a monument/hospitality quest), while the raids that you do call down on your settlement are commensurately more dangerous. Instead, quests are a tacked-on system where the majority of combat is still "Bad Guys armed with a medium-sized PMC worth of Power Armor show up to kill you." That could still be the experience on the highest difficulty setting: that's fine, you even used to have to opt in to the highest difficulty level. But the default setting of Rimworld is "1-20 colonists each kill dozens of disposable enemies just to get through the year."