Do bugs have too much armor?

[Ultimate Oddball]

Insects in Rimworld are super dangerous, which makes sense considering their size. But, they also seem to be resistant to bullets. Do you think insects should have less bullet resistance and/or health? I feel like they're overly armored to balance for the lack of numbers which would be inherent to insect colonies, but would be problematic for the engine, a la Starship Troopers.

I know they have exoskeletons and I admittedly haven't done the physics equations as far as how increasing their size would change their resistance to firearms, but it feels like they're too strong with regards to health currently in vanilla. What do you think?

[XelNigma]

Bugs are designed to be hard to handle with guns. They are an exclusive melee faction with high sharp resistance. But poor blunt resistance.
They are there to force you to use a different tactic. Which is why most people disable them.

A good tactic is to have 3 heavy armored melee guys with maces/hammers at a narrow hall or door. And all your gunners behind them. Once the hives get big add in a grenader or 2.

I do not think their individual health or armor is too much. But maybe the swarm size can be mid and late game.

[MadArtillery]

Pretty sure they are a faction intentionally designed to encourage diversification. Fire, animals, and melee are generally all better answers than trying to shoot them all down before they reach you. Honestly a good thing to learn as melee can be pretty scary in this game and I don't think many people would ever have a reason to even try it without infestations.

[Swordmouse]

I know it's very noticeable when you see/hear a megaspider deflect a round, but that's mostly because almost all shots are getting through. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible, hopefully without getting my math completely wrong and making myself look like a fool.

A Megaspider has 27% sharp armor.

Now let's pit that against a chain shotgun (14% armor penetration). This is the SECOND WORST armor penetration of any gun in the game. Only the machine pistol has worse armor pen. Even the lowly autopistol has better armor penetration than the chain shotty. But anyway.

We subtract the armor penetration of the gun from the armor on the overgrown land lobster. 27 -14 = 13.

So the megaspider is left with an armor of 13.

Whenever an attack hits, Rimworld performs a random roll between 0-100.

If the attack is <50% of the remaining armor value (0-6 on a 1d100), it completely deflects the shot, and there is no damage. If it rolls >50% of the armor value (7-13 on a 1d100) then the attack does half damage and is converted to blunt. If the attack does >100% of the armor value (14-100 on a 1d100) the attack does full damage.

So all that said, and allowing for a small margin of error depending on whether the game likes to round up or down (I'm not sure if exactly matching armor value equals full or partial damage), even with the second worst armor penetration in the game you have an

86% chance of doing full damage
7% chance to do half damage
7% chance to do no damage

All in all it's pretty miniscule, with less than 1 in 10 shots getting completely negated. If it was any less, they practically wouldn't have any armor at all, further driven home by the fact that despite the chain shotgun's atrocious armor penetration, it remains one of the best guns for dealing with infestations. All of this isn't for the sake of saying you're wrong, though. Hopefully you find it encouraging, and considering armor penetration can be a bit of a mystery, hopefully it helps you or someone else out to see the formula (assuming I remembered it correctly).

[jake]

Considering Megaspiders are the size of bears and have thick exoskeletons, its only fair they have high defense.
Look at bugs in real life. some actually get cut in half and still walk around.

[Vertibird]

The problem is not the insects, the destruction they do! Spawning in multiple rooms, they destroy everything in sight! By the time you defeat them, everything turns to ruble

[Astasia]

Ya the "armor" on insects is mostly cosmetic, it does effectively nothing in combat. It's there to remind you that these bugs have a carapace, but pretty much every weapon in the game has enough AP to bypass nearly all of it and the ones that don't bring it down to a point where it just doesn't matter.

The best way to deal with them is to block a door with 1-3 armored melee colonists and line up a bunch of colonists behind them with guns and just open up on them. Chain Shotguns work the best, I think that's why Swordmouse used it in their example. Chain Shotguns are basically the "anti-bug" weapon, even though they have one of the lowest AP in the game and do sharp damage, they are still by far the most effective weapon to use against bugs.

The only situation where the armor on a megaspider has any real effect, is against an unarmed human. Their blunt resist is about 20% as well, and human fists have 0 AP, so while only about a 15% effective DR it still makes it pretty clear you aren't going to punch one to death 1v1 in most cases.

[KalkiKrosah]

I thought the issue with insects was their quantity and how their best counter typing (blunt) has a notoriously shallow weapon pool of just 2 options: clubs and maces.

So the player has to get creative with dealing with insects. Most people will advise that you burn them with fire, which is the safest way to handle them... But then you effectively zone yourself out of a section of your base for about a day and give yourself a major mess to clean up. And you better hope the walls are thick because the bugs will try to break down the walls while you are doing this. Which is a problem in and of itself as the insect AI always prioritizes player built walls and structures. So if you plugged up a gap in the room the bugs will instinctively know where to break out of... Which is annoying. The bugs are almost too smart when programmed this way.

And then there will be instances where the fire option is not a good idea, like when the hive pops up in a large storage room, which is smart as it prevents drop pod raids from landing here but bad as insects are more annoying to deal with by comparison. Using fire (or any kind of explosive) often causes more damage than it prevents. So in these scenarios your best bet is a 3 man wall in heavy armor with blunt weapons blockading a hallway with a firing squad using automatic weaponry behind them, as others mentioned earlier. This puts colonists at risk of serious injury and death as you must willingly put them in harms way. I do wish that there was a 3rd tier to blunt weaponry beyond the mace. It would make insect fights less gimmicky as a definitive counter would exist for fighting bugs.

So I wouldn't touch the armor numbers of bugs but I would look at their genius AI pathing where they prioritize player built structures EXCLUSIVELY when enraged and instroduce a viable and less destructive counter too them. Like a tier 3 blunt weapon (Warhammer?) or poison gas grenades. Insect fighting options are too restrictive in it's current form.

[Astasia]

You don't want to use blunt against infestations, unless you have like a high quality uranium warhammer or zueshammer which are just good weapons all around and do enough damage to destroy bodyparts with every hit. Things like a mace or club are very bad options compared to a gladius or longsword, or any gun.

Megaspiders have 27% sharp resist and 20% blunt resist. Swords and maces all have enough AP to completely bypass that (long swords have 33% average, gladius 23% average, mace 21% average), so you would want to use a higher DPS cutting weapon (or gun) that causes bleeding to help down them faster and keep them from getting back up. With a mace you are doing less DPS and they will recover and get back up fairly often because they are just going to have bruises mostly.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Astasia:

so you would want to use a higher DPS cutting weapon (or gun) that causes bleeding to help down them faster and keep them from getting back up.

Not only that, but slashing wounds tend to hit multiple body parts and thus cause much more damage and pain.

[Ultimate Oddball]

Wow thank you very much for all the info everyone! I can't mark multiple responses as the topic answer but everyone answered this for me. I'll definitely look at adjusting my strategies in the future.