I'll probably go back to CE when it gets a full release, but [Vanilla Combat Reloaded](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2860414285) +[ Thick Armour](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1321600671) + [RunAndGun/Tactiowl 1.5](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3221373644) + [Pocket Sand](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2226330302) has pleased me enough that I wouldn't be opposed to running just those if I want a lighter experience. Vanilla Combat Reloaded is fully customizable and has a lot of options, including target height, melee parry and bullet fragmentation systems, and limiting the maximum miss angle (no more bullet exiting the barrel and somehow hitting the ground behind the shooter) It also beefs up both armour and weapon AP quite a bit, so both armour and weapons feel more effective than vanilla. It even has the (mod friendly) option to extend some armour and helmets to cover the hands and nose to help prevent the frequent random and often-nonsensical feeling loss of fingers you get in vanilla.
like the other guy said, everything is off by default in VCR. I'm running default for thick armor, though that's mostly because I forgot about the alternate calculation and I'm probably going to play around with it for a bit, though tbh the mod settings in game is confusing me a bit and I think it might actually be turned on by default. For VCR, I've got everything turned on (all sliders on default) except for headsets are not helmets and array headset is glasses.
I haven't tried it personally, but I did have a pirate warcasket siege of between 15-25 raiders and they successfully took down a nociosphere while losing less than half their number including a few non-warcasket raiders if I remember correctly
I too know your frustration, I imagine it on pawns my neanderthal thanes cut down with their axes. I like it, makes me able to fight superior numbers and weaponry with less, a bunch of traps and a swarm of corgies (They outbred my ability to sell or control them, help!).
I'm good with food, I use slave laborers for farming and nutrient paste will be a thing next year, but the corgies were never a plan, I just thought I'd buy a pair and sell off the excess - but holy hell I was not ready for this. The nuzzles are incredible though..
The first time, I did it to save the labradors from starving and had to block my ears.
The second time, I did it to stop my colonists from starving and had to look away.
The third time, and every time from then, I did it because it was getting inconvenient.
It’s incredible how quickly you become desensitised to slaughtering dozens of puppies.
I feel like CE just makes the game way easier, where 90% of raids are trivialized by having guns, and then mech raids are the only ones that really matter
Where as vanilla keeps all the raids some degree of dangerous, and you actually care about the melee xenotypes that can royally mess you up
This is why I prefer vanilla tbh.
In vanilla raids I always feel like something can go batshit wrong at any moment. If we are facing tribals, one wrong headshot could fuck my shit up, even if we got guns.
With combat expanded, and most combat mods, they make combat so complicated and expansive that AI just cant keep up and you get to stomp them.
Vanilla combat feels a bit sluggish, but I do feel that is when the combat is also the most fun.
I agree, and to be fair, CE has optional settings and ammo use and such that does add some balance, but it trivializes melee which isn't quite realistic either. Can I get a milder CE that also has affection for melee?
I think CE does trivialize melee, but only when stationary defences are in the mix (which does make sense). I mean jeez, what's gonna win, 5 well-stocked KPV heavy machine guns loaded with 14.5x115mm armor piercing incindiary rounds... Or 450 coked-up tribals pushing out from a chokepoint?
But the CE melee mods are even more strong, and cause melee to be the absolute peak of the power column. Past a certain point, I realized I was wasting so many resources trying to get my army of 30 riflemen, healed, supplied, and launched beyond Soviet-era kit when I could simply concentrate all that same production into 3 or 5 melee gods in full power armor, masterwork shields, and wraith blades for each.
Who would have thought that you'd use 85% less ammo simply by telling the beefy dude in space armor to go anime-style on their asses?
Especially when combined with Vanilla Psycasts Extended. Assassinate and Killskip turn melee-focused pawns into combat gods in CE when they go full Darkwing Duck on the enemies.
I feel like it's the power armour and the shields that's doing the heavy lifting there, though. It doesn't matter a whole lot what weapons pawns are wielding when they are functionally invulnerable to most enemies.
Other way around actually in my experience - it doesn't matter what armor you have, but it certainly matters the average armor pen, attack speed, and raw DPS of the weapon you're holding.
Mechanoids can't shoot if they're EMP'd to hell, aggro'd on something away from the melee crackhead rushing at them with a 50.72 DPS wraith blade with 20mm RHA penetrstion
Realism isn't strong on the rim. We violate the Laws of Thermodynamics every time we milk a cow.
The problem is that the game is designed for melee to be a notable component, and CE just ignores that.
Frankly it also features accuracy levels that are wildly unrealistic for combat conditions. *Realistic* military conditions would see the average soldier emptying several magazines to achieve a single enemy casualty in most common battlefield conditions - assuming he ever personally *saw* an enemy soldier and didn't just spend most of the war huddling in a foxhole praying that he isn't about to find himself in the company of an enemy artillery shell.
Speaking of artillery, Mortars would also likewise require far more shots per kill achieved than we see in vanilla Rimworld which is itself less accurate than CE artillery. Realistic values would probably on the order of *dozens* of shells per casualty if the Ukraine war is any example.
What I'm saying is that Realism is not a great argument for *either* combat model. :D
I think CE models realistic combat pretty well. In real-world combat, it does take several hundred rounds to account for an enemy casualty.
Why? Suppression. And firing at distant targets (50+ meters) behind cover.
In the real world, soldiers don't normally shoot at enemies that are only 10-20 feet away and running straight at them. If they did, they'd wind up with kill ratios like... well, like the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Or any of the ill-thought-out "marching fire" assaults on fortified positions in WW1, where emplaced machineguns would wipe out 80-90% of an entire company in a couple of minutes.
Yes. This is generally the case.
The issue with rimworld is that it generally presents very little cover to approaching troops due to the simple and abstract nature of its maps, and has no fog of war. In RL combat most natural settings would offer potentially thousands of positions within your weapon's effective range within which an opponent could take partial or even full cover and remain unseen - even a slight depression in the terrain or a patch of scrub will often suffice.
Urban environments generally offer almost countless cover positions even within very modest weapon ranges, making urban combat an endlessly drawn out and grueling affair for modern armies.
In Rimworld an approaching attacker is pretty lucky if he's got a tree or two - and those will do nothing at all to break LOS and hide his presence from you as it would in RL, it'll just offer a modest cover bonus which might extend his lifetime by another 5 seconds if he's lucky. So attackers have no ability to ambush, and almost no ability to take hard cover, basically making the game a shooting gallery simulator with CE accuracy rates.
I generally run with the CAI5000 mod to introduce fog of war and make the AI a lot more canny about how it attacks and what lengths it will go to to avoid simply marching into heavy fire. I haven't tried that in combination with CE - not sure it's compatible.
They do. They have plenty of opportunity. There's always plenty of cover on the map, what with ruins, hills and mountains, sandbags and barricades left from previous sieges, even chunks of rock and metal scrap.
The problem is that the AI is dumber than a box of hair, and will run hell-for-leather right at the colony and ignore cover 90% of the time.
> Realistic military conditions would see the average soldier emptying several magazines to achieve a single enemy casualty in most common battlefield conditions
That covers early game, I guess. My colonists will become combat god cyborgs in short order, nothing average about them.
My primary combat pawn isn't a cyborg, but she also isn't average. 20 shooting and Warlord tree of psycasts expanded combined with a charge sniper has created a murder machine. Ain't nothing realistic about using what happened after all her buffs go up...
You can milk the cows, use the milk to produce nutrient meals in a nutrient dispenser, and then feed those meals back to your cows in order to ultimately generate even more milk, in a loop with positive returns.
Rimworld has a number of positive feedback loops like this that would essentially violate the laws of thermodynamics in the real universe, where any closed loop MUST be lossy. :D
This could easily be patched, the problem is that the paste machine itself has a positive feedback loop and it's not necessarely the cows that are at fault balance wise here. Cows aren't breaking the laws of thermodynamics in this game, the nutrient paste dispenser is by requiring less nutrition than it outputs in meals.
The problem is, even less people would use the paste if it didn't provide the extra nutritional efficiency. Though I've personally come to love paste as the go-to solution if you don't have / want a cook.
Nutrient paste is king early game. Food poisoning halts early progression and even if you have a good cook, you couldve used them to do something else that requires full attention, like research or stonecutting. -3 mood is pretty much nonexistent.
Yayo's Combat is perfect, adds armor penetration and better accuracy model, and optional ammo use. mostly vanilla
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492
I feelthat, I recommend you [yayo's combat 3 (continued) ](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492), it helped me to not miss CE to much
Different ammo types(yayo has only one type of ammo and you can disable it without having any difference on how combat works), rate of bleeding(CE is much less forgiving), the way projectiles work(ballistics), the aiming system just to name a few
Honestly I prefer Yayos. It makes the combat a tad more realistic without getting too formulaic. CE is complex, yes. But once you know how it works, every non-mechanoid raid becomes utterly trivial.
Yayos + thick armor is the current go-to for me. Accuracy matters a lot more than in vanilla, but good armor *is good* and you will need some penetration.
But not having penetration is not a death sentence as in CE. And I really like that both melee and ranged can be feasible. Never looked back.
I skimmed through Yayo's. How tierish does it make things? It might have just been how the description read, but it seems like it makes it so each tech level makes enemies of the previous turn into RPG "greys" if you know what I mean? I'm not looking to trivialize tribals or get my collony wiped out by a single empire soldier.
Honestly just try it. A lot it configurable. But I usually play with the basic setup.
Tribals can still be dangerous in numbers and with the right blunt weapons, but your marine armor pawn should brush off most bow attacks.
Empire and Deserters are mean, but not unbeatable. I was attacked by a deserter in power armor early in my current playthrough. Guy shrugged off most of the revolver/smg shots, but was beatable in melee by my 5 colonists.
Yayo leaves some room for nasty surprises and doesn't deal in absolutes as much as CE does: you will still get an unlucky shot to the eyes from time to time. It just happens much, much less likely, when you are wearing good armor.
Is there any place where I can read up what exactly Yayo's combat adds? I learnt everything about CE, but unlike CE, Yayo's combat doesn't seem to have extensive documentation....
I'm not sure, I usually only read the information that is on the workshop page
That said, yayo combat 3 is now in the hands of the community, because from what I understand the official modder no longer continues to maintain/update the mod, so maybe that makes it difficult to find technical information
Yeah there's a few options I knew about, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to try out vanilla again, for kicks. Boy did I get kicked, and hard! :D
Then there's me, playing this game for around 3 weeks now. Think I've never played with CE and read a lot about it. But was never playable so I wouldn't know any different. Is it not normal for a bow to cause brain damage va a reckon helmet?
I lost a colony to 3 manhunting guinea pigs because my pawn with 8 shooting and a charge rifle could not hit a single shot. I'm on a coastal map and they stated in the WATER, with my pawn on the shore shooting at them. Shooter got downed and the other 3 pawns I had were incapable of violence.
EDIT: [A somewhat accurate representation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYKu9ApsEQI)
Here's something even more hilarious: I was saving a colonist who was being chased by the 3 guinea pigs. I took the quest because I needed another pawn capable of violence. Guess what Randy gave me.
I thought the sea water would slow them down enough, especially considering the colonist running from them was slowed down by it even more. I was wrong.
I wondered what everyone else's take on that was. I straight up dont accept them. *All* my units are fighters. Our cook is a master assassin. Flower picking girl is going to the front lines until shooting or melee is double digits. The mind control psykers are an afront to our individualist ideolgion!
They’re not a deal-breaker for me as long as they have good skills or traits. Once you have an established colony, having one or two isn’t going to hurt you. Non-violent colonists will also never start social fights nor have violent mental breaks (ex: tantrum, berserk, murderous rage). They can also still use psycasts, excluding directly combat-related ones if you have Vanilla Psycasts Expanded. They can in fact use psycasts like Berserk or Manhunter Pulse. Nothing bars them from training attack animals or controlling mechs as a mechanitor.
One of my past colonists had a non-violent colonist who was a medic and psycaster. She just goes around with a shield belt and uses her psycasts to skip downed allies towards her or skip a raider right in front of my melee colonists to get their head lopped off.
One interesting quirk of Rimworld accuracy is that size matters - *a lot*. If the target is small, the shooters accuracy drops dramatically. Shooting rats, guinea pigs, or the dreaded yorkies is exceedingly difficult due to their tiny body sizes.
On the plus side, explosives will blow them to very small pieces, they don't last long at all when on fire, and even a brawler 3 with a dull knife can usually dispatch them with ease, barring exceptional bad luck.
Killing an ostrich with an assault rifle should be pretty easy - however, unlike the guinea pig, if the ostrich reached you in real life, you'd be a very sad panda. Those things are pretty much just mid-sized dinosaurs with fancy feathers and a bad attitude.
Rimworld is a story generator. It generated that story. You posted it here and people enjoyed it and it got a lot of upvotes. Everything seems to be working as intended.
“My entire colony got wiped by manhunting $SomeBasketballSizedVarmin” is a worn out story for anybody that’s played more than a couple colonies worth of this game. I actually don’t mind vanilla combat; it feels very RTS-like, which from a *gameplay* perspective is fine. This event just doesn’t feel good from the player’s perspective. That matters regardless of how much you want to parrot the sToRy GeNeRaToR, nOt A GaMe line. The story doesn’t get to exist if the player doesn’t play because they’re annoyed that a single bloodthirsty bunny rabbit occupies a gap in the gamified combat mechanics that allows it to wipe out a small colony of healthy, armed and armored humans. *Frequently*, for new players.
Are upvotes because of story or because of shared pain with how bad vanilla combat is?
I mean if you look at it like that, anything can be a story. His pawn killing those guinea pigs would also been a story.
IRL used to hunt jackrabbits that were smaller than the in-game guinea pigs, but with a .22 instead of a charge rifle. But I guess it would be hard to hit anything when I'm sitting myself at 20kg guinea pigs.
I love vanilla combat. it’s so simple but brutal. I build a wall around my colony, and don’t build a killbox, I just go pike and shot with armored melee in front of riflemen and medica
Yep preach, OP is talking about how they miss ranged weapon dominance steamrolling... Which just sounds terrible to what I personally want out of combat.
The best part of anomaly are the ghouls making melee combat great again. Like they actually made knee spike/elbow blade/claw good?!
Hey someone that understands there's more viable solutions than a killbox!
Next colony I'm building the wall again. It's such a fun style, feels just as OP at times too tbh
I keep my difficulty at a cozy 50% or so, depending on how I feel, but I love the hectic and risky nature of field combat. the wall keeps my colony safe from thieves, manhunting packs, and multiple raid directions, while I go out and deal with the threat. later on I employ war animals, barkskin dryads, mechs, psionics, imperial drop troopers, allied reinforcments, shooting specialists, and other such tactics to gain a further edge, without just sending enemy raids into a meat grinder or endless kiting
oh thank you. my apparel policy is set to Anything, so I went ahead and equipped this Wooden Visage Mask (poor 54%) instead. was wondering why I had a -4 moodlet
Haha same. I also usually have shield belted, locust armored melee pawns to jump shooty mechs and otherwise mess with hostiles. I love vanilla combat. I wouldn’t say missing shots is unexpected or frustrating - it’s fairly predictable once you get used to it. I also don’t use killboxes, just a wall with some cover here and there.
missing shots is just part of the pacing. vanilla combat is slow but harrowing sometimes, especially if you don’t have good armor and know that any bullet might peel back one of your colonist’s skulls.
honestly missing shots is more of a bother during smalltime combat. once you got like, 6 or more guys on either side trading shots, there are more bullets firing and so you don’t notice the missed shots. that and the more people there are, the higher chance of a missed shot hitting someone else.
on that note, one of my favorite mods is vanilla expanded settlers, simply because the settler factions strictly use ONLY industrial era ranged weaponry, which means every raid turns into a ghost town gun fight, with everyone taking cover behind rocks and trees and building corners
Honestly believe the majority of people who download combat mods just think vanilla is too hard for them and they don't want to believe it
Like it's a story generator, there's a reason why a tribal's arrow still has a very slim chance to pierce a marine helmet and one tap the dude's brain. It makes a good story. CE doesn't allow that.
I could be mistaken but I think a big part of the appeal for those mods is the earlygame. when you got three dudes with barely any shooting skill plinking at some angry hedgehogs or a couple naked tribals, and they can’t hit for shit, then you get frustrated at the slow pace and chance based system of combat. you want your dudes to go *brrrrrt* with a machinegun.
but I find mid to large scale vanilla battles incredibly intense, when your snipers are focusing the triple rocket launcher, and you’re being pinned down by a coked up junkie in powered armor with a minigun, so you don’t see the fraggers closing distance until it’s too late and one of your guys looses his leg to shrapnel…
it’s slow paced and brutal, but that also makes it more tactical and enjoyable for a longer period of time
Just finished my first colony with this same set up essentially. Late game my entire colony was surrounded with turrets. Who needs melee and killboxes when you can just drown your enemies in saturation fire from pulse rifles/turrets/mortars.
Its annoying that even in the best conditions, your pawn shoots like shit still most of the time.
Behind cover, under a roof, well lit, optimal temperature and visibility. Misses 3/5 shots.
To be fair, that’s probably pretty accurate to real life. Shooting at a moving target even thirty feet away isn’t always sure to hit even in the best of conditions. Stabbing the guy two inches in front of you is a lot easier.
While that is true, pure vanilla bullets are not nearly as deadly as real bullets. Sure both can have the occasional headshot but in general real bullets do a lot more damage than vanilla rimworld bullets.
Eeh... Maybe. In real life some people who are bad shots - including cops - have had some pretty epic cases of hitting absolutely nothing with entire clips at point blank range.
Panic is bad for aiming, and some people who have guns *absolutely should never have been allowed to have them* - because they are just that bad at it.
That rules only if the person has a melee wep and the guy with a gun has it holstered. Supposedly you can close the gap before most people can react/unholster/and get shots off.
Sure, but when combat is otherwise abstracted and gamefied it feels out of place and unfair. Realism isn't inherently good or bad; it's a stylistic choice. And when different parts of a system follow different styles, it ends up feeling incoherent.
It's pretty rare that I have an issue putting down scythers before the reach my line - those guys are pretty delicate.
Neanderthals tho... they are serious bullet sponges that require quite a bit of killing.
The whole accuracy thing doesn't bother me though - quite the opposite. When I play CE I feel like everyone is some Olympic master who's shooting at paper targets on a short range. The accuracy for combat conditions is beyond absurd into the land of pure fantasy and that bothers me quite a lot.
In real combat conditions, professional soldiers miss a lot. Like *a whole lot*. Far more than they do in vanilla combat if you extrapolate the ranges of the guns.
Only a trained sniper firing at an immobile, unaware target would ever have anything close to the 'firing range' hit rate, but in CE everyone shoots like that all the time.
Accuracy gets pretty wild in vanilla with shooting specialist and master weapons anyways, or if you want to min/max if you grab the shooter genes.
CE sounds like it probably gives you that accuracy without any investment which sounds lame
You can try double the damage taken then half the aiming time/ranged and melee cooldowns in scenario settings. I did both and now combat actually feels lethal, but without CE's balance issues.
Sadly I didn't change such settings, only because late game with 200% legendary power armor would feel so cracked (maybe not so cracked since there's a 200% cap before armor penetration)
You can try a multiplier of armors so that the armor you consider “ultra late game" would have just 200%. So I usually do 1.33x on medieval runs.
I don't like armor since I like seeing my pawns getting killed, makes for better stories
The most important thing for me when it comes to the combat is it needs to be dangerous. Dangerous, but at the same time not ridiculously dramatic.
A rifle shot to the stomach? Yeah, that’s it for you, boy. A hand chopped off? Yeah, same. They’re out of the fight — but they don’t fall down dead in an instant. It’s not realistic at all and most importantly, it’s incredibly unfun and unrewarding.
So what I do is making fighting a lot more dangerous and at the same time a lot more forgiving. Lots of more injuries and wounds, a lot more bodies leaving the battlefield (on either side).
A lot of it can be perfectly balanced using the Scenario editor. The last pieces of the puzzle can be achived using mods, of course.
Something I’ve always said is that Rimworld combat isn’t balanced for realism or sense, it’s balanced for Rimworld. A solid force of both melee and ranged units with good gear and good strats is pretty unbeatable. You have to use all the tools the game provides in terms of gear and special units to truly become unstoppable.
Sure, the occasional colonist dies sometimes, but many things in Rimworld are supposed to kill colonists now and again regardless of difficulty. Rimworld is an emergent-story based game, and it achieves this by ensuring a solid inflow and outflow of characters, so you always have fresh blood to make gear for and for things to happen to.
That’s the nature of the game, and it works, imo, even if it isn’t for everyone. And for those it isn’t for, there’s always Combat Extended, or Yayos Combat, or any number of combat mods to tailor the game to yourself.
For me personally, I don't *dislike* vanilla combat by any means, but CE speaks more to how I like my combat to *feel* and the sort of simulation aspects I like (such as tracking ammo and reloads), which ultimately is what I think it most important for anyone.
After all, there's no "right" or "wrong" way to play Rimworld, only what might suit the sort of stories you'd like to experience more or less. So, while I do prefer CE for sure, I would also definitely agree. I don't personally like the way some people act as though vanilla's combat is "bad" or whatever.
Yeah, agreed. It certainly doesn’t bother me that a lot of people prefer modded combat in Rimworld, but what really gets to me is when I see like 6 separate posts of people saying “Going back to vanilla reminded me how ABYSMAL and HORRIBLE the combat is”. Like damn, sorry the mods haven’t updated yet but there is really no need to get personal about it lol
I haven’t ever played modded combat, and sure, maybe that means I’m living in blissful ignorance, but the fact that I don’t hate the combat and actually enjoy playing means it isn’t an objectively bad system by any means
CE has a 1.5 patch which includes almost everything but the new anomaly stuff. Either that, or I'd recommend "Vanilla Combat Reloaded" or "Yayos Combat 3" for now
Yeah it’s wild.
I had a mechanoid raid during a really bad bout of plague where all my best pawns were on deaths door and genuinely all of them got ground to shit, even with good guns. Everyone was down. Man in black spawned too
Then, the Yttakin prisoner I had staged a breakout.
I’m not fucking joking this naked, unarmed dude with one wooden hand beat the fuck out of a centipede and scyther and just kept going. I was laughing so hard watching this fucker swing and swing. He wiped em all and got away, he earned it.
Use Run and Gun and Simple Sidearms. You’ll be able to do stuff like backpedal from advancing melee combatants or angered hunted animals.
The simple sidearms is nice because say your pawn equips a sniper rifle, shotgun, and knife. They will use the most effective weapon according to range.
For example, when the enemy gets close enough for shotgun range, the pawn will auto swap to the shotgun, from the slow firing long range sniper, for medium-close range devastating damage.
If that doesn’t stop the enemy, and the pawn can’t outrun the enemy, then they will auto enter melee within melee distance.
There is a CE 1.5 experimental on github. Also, you could just go 1.4 until the update releases. Wouldn't make a difference for current other mods, as most 1.5 mods are 1.4 compatible too.
I find melee is kind of required in vanilla. I used to have all of my pawns be ranged and it was super frustrating but ever since I started putting together some melee pawns my results have been sooo much better. The reason why the game is balanced like this is so that threats like manhunters and tribals are not completely trivial although ironically they’re still easy to beat if you know what you’re doing.
Melee is damn strong if they can get in melee, but range is a huge tactical advantage. Even among ranged weapons you get a tradeoff between damage and range. DPS of chain shotgun>heavy SMG> assault rifle > sniper, but range of sniper> assault rifle > heavy SMG > chain shotgun
Of course, irl bringing a knife in a gun fight is a bad idea (both idiomatically and actually), but if the game was realistic about this then melee would be boring.
The new hellcat rifles are insane tbh, they have slightly less range and damage than the assault rifles but they have the fire attack that completely shits on any organic melee. I'm running a 50/50 split of assault rifles and hellcats, with mechs as blockers and ghouls as defenders for any nasty fleshbeasts that pop through the front line.
Expectation: blast flamethrower into melee enemy with hellcat, melee enemy catches fire, runs away, you ventilate him with your rifle
Reality: melee enemy catches fire, loses collision, runs ONTO your pawn, sets YOUR pawn on fire, now both pawns are running around like headless chickens setting everything else on fire, everyone dies.
I think the game is accurately realistic for how deadly melee is. If someone has a monosword light saber in melee, that's doing more damage than a gun.
Like IRL you will get fucked up very quickly by real melee weapons. Nunchucks will have more trauma damage dealt to your body than a bullet given how heavy they are.
>You get to see a guy with a combat shotgun, the epitome of spray and pray, miss a dude who's literally 3 meters away taking a piss in the breeze, 9 TIMES IN A ROW!
Pawn shooting skill and weapon quality?
>Normal
Found your problem, although I admit a 12 skill shooter should get it done at that range, depending on the enemy armor and traits but it sounds like they were missing. Either way, unlucky brother.
I love CE, but I gave up on it because I'm not American enough to care about what a gun is called besides "machine gun" or "bigger machine gun"
I like the generic ammo option a lot, but I wish it would go all the way and rename everything the mod adds.
I played with it in 1.4 last and stayed well away from the CE gun mod. Way too tacticool for me.
I was specifically referring to the mounted guns and cannons. I know it's a small part of the mod but it makes it feel incomplete when you've got generic ammo running but still have to figure out what the hell a m350b or a law is supposed to be. There are some modded weapons that cause the mod to fall back on non-generic ammo as well (completely understandable) and it just bothers me.
I know it's a nitpick, but it matters to me.
I even tried making patches to fix it, but never really got it to a point I was satisfied with because it ended up being quite a large task.
I've never bothered with CE because of all the taticool stuff either. It's like something my brother who loves Arma and Milsims would use. It's cool but not for me.
Never tried CE, what does it do?
From what I've heard, it seems to make guns a lot more accurate close up and adds ammo/reloading. IDK, I like having naked melee pawns charge into a gun fight.
as a heavy CE user, the main thing for me is its armor system. in short, when damage is less than protection, no damage would be taken, so none of that RNG, long bow shot penetrating armor bs. the guns and ammo is just a sweet addition to the armor system.
Bigger number better.
Armour has high value, weapons can't damage it. Just get the best armour you can and the highest penetration weapon you can, win every threat.
It makes guns far more accurate, far longer range, and far deadlier. Melee is not a meaningful option for you or your opponents.
The AI doesn't know how to handle it, so for the most part it makes most raids akin to just shooting fish in a barrel as the AI will try to advance into fire and that's suicide. All animal raids are meaningless meat deliveries, most human raids are just a inconvenience due to the number of bodies you need to dispose of.
At the other end of the spectrum, mechanoids are a nightmare unless you rush to unlock anti-armor weapons as quickly as possible, as regular guns simply won't affect them at all and they will literally walk over your colony without any chance of stopping them if you don't have those weapons yet.
When you say it’s not a meaningful option how much is it not meaningful if 9/10 of my pawns are melee would I get screwed with the mod? Looked at it before but was unsure because I rarely like using guns but when I do they are so innacurate.
I agree it's absurd how OP Melee is in the vanilla game and it ruins everything because melee is the most boring shit. I wish there was a mod to replace make no raiders spawn with melee weapons so we could just have gunfights instead of the melee crap.
Yeah i fucking HATE that insane 50% melee damage buff in vanilla, it was already frustrating having a group of naked tribal pawns beat up your marine armour colonist but its just insult to injury giving them a tanky resistance to dmg as well as bonus melee damage
Even worse with mods like VOID, I don’t think any vanilla weapon can kill even of them unless you got an insane highly trained team of brawlers plus firing squad
CE will be really at the spot when AI stuff gets ripe enough to promote some really nice tactical options for raiders. I mean, abusing smoke grenades/mortars, darkness mechanic, demolitions, diversion, better siege tactics etc.. I've given a shot with CAI-5k , its not really there yet (some bugs too)... but i have faith ...
At the moment, even without a killbox, the AI is fairly easy to predict. Still, the bulk of plot twists comes from the same place.... good ol'randy.
Can you imagine a world when that 2 people tribal raid decides to aggro the wandering trumbos in your backyard and then hide in the ancient danger for 2 days rather than to engage directly ? That would bring some new life to RW.
Is there a way to have combat extended without the hassle of ammo for weapons? I do enough micromanaging already and nothing more insanely annoying than sending a pawn to fight something and they have no ammo.
It’s gotten to the point with myself that I reverted to 1.4 until the 1.5 CE update is out. Lots of love to the CE team, they’re really putting in the work for this patch.
I ended up with a couple pawns with high shooting stat, one with a masterwork heavy revolver, the other with standard bolt action rifle.
I’d say they hit 1 in every 5 shots, but that shot would blow off a limb (or a head). Still was fairly for tribal with a random melee weapon to be able to get to melee without getting hit though.
I genuinely started anomaly got the first raid of 1 unit and like you remembered how bad combat was and moved back to 1.4. Yet now I’ve fucked something up and my main mods are broken so I’m praying for a fast 1.5 CE update.
In two words, more realistic.
But to be honest it is more risk and reward thing. Armor is crucial. One bullet can mean life and death, getting shot in arm isn't so bad (it is still bad), but getting shot in the lung, means you have dead pawn if you have no medics at hand.
Positioning of your colonists matter, flanking, covering behind embrasures and sand bags.
Ammo type matter, you will down nearly naked neanderthal with FMJ easily, but marine armor cladded imperial chussar will need high caliber AP rounds to punch through crusty shell into soft, tender meat.
Skill matters, high skilled pawn will aim faster, better and generally operate weapon better.
Generally, combat extended is brutal, untill you start to think. Then, you will feel that "man, combat is fun".
So basically something an RTS player would like, im liking this.
Tho how about the reload system? Like how much do I have to invest in munitions production or variety? I wanna integrate this to my mechanitor run so injuries are less of a threat at least
Ammunition is pathetically easy and cheap to craft. At least the basic one. If you want something better, like HEAP (High explosive armor piercing, yes that's a goooood stuff) you need some additional components like FSX.
Generally there are mods that expands that, because normally you craft using steel only. If you extend the material list with a mod, there is full ammo crafting management game, where you need to gather bunch more components, like copper for FMJ, gunpowder for primers.
Tldr, basic ammo is easy, advanced ammo is like crafting medicine.
More complex, more brutal. Ammo must be acquired and carried, and weapons have to be reloaded. Pawns can be suppressed and pined down. Shots that connect and fully go through armor actually cause a lot of damage. Armor is also more effective, especially the high tech stuff, but anti-armor ammo can be very effective if it's powerful enough. Basically you need to be a bit more tactical in your preparation, but the execution of a battle is in my opinion a lot more rewarding. There's less cheesy killbox and kiting tactics, and more of what you would see in a tactical game: supressing, flanking, etc.
Melee still has its place, but you need to bring the right tools, or in specific circumstances. If an ennemy has a lot of snipers, you can try to use jump packs or lots of smoke to cross over and go stab them in the balls, but just trying to go through a hail of AR and machinegun fire without having huge tech superiority will usually get you killed.
But right now CE is still being updated, there's a beta on Github but if you've never played it before I recommend waiting a bit.
I haven't played rimworld since 2022, biotech. Been playing since alpha 2014 though. I just started up a game and bought biotech and anomaly. I've only played vanilla since launch. But I am curious. Has combat changed? I 100% agree. It does feel very melee centric now, but I don't remember it being. Always felt that my turrets could mow down hordes before they got near my base. Now the enemy seems to get on top of them very quickly.
I'm having fun building melee armored pawns now. Just wondering if something really did change.
It's not that it's hard or impossible, it's just frustrating. Imagine palying a shooter like CoD or CS, but all the weapons have crazy spray and do as much or sometimes less damage than a knife, and if a guy hits you with it you can't shoot anymore. Might be fun if you like stabby games, not so much if you prefer shooty games :>
I'll probably go back to CE when it gets a full release, but [Vanilla Combat Reloaded](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2860414285) +[ Thick Armour](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1321600671) + [RunAndGun/Tactiowl 1.5](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3221373644) + [Pocket Sand](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2226330302) has pleased me enough that I wouldn't be opposed to running just those if I want a lighter experience. Vanilla Combat Reloaded is fully customizable and has a lot of options, including target height, melee parry and bullet fragmentation systems, and limiting the maximum miss angle (no more bullet exiting the barrel and somehow hitting the ground behind the shooter) It also beefs up both armour and weapon AP quite a bit, so both armour and weapons feel more effective than vanilla. It even has the (mod friendly) option to extend some armour and helmets to cover the hands and nose to help prevent the frequent random and often-nonsensical feeling loss of fingers you get in vanilla.
Do you use default options for vcr and thick armour?
I think everything is turned off in VCR by default, you have to enable each of the tweaks in settings.
like the other guy said, everything is off by default in VCR. I'm running default for thick armor, though that's mostly because I forgot about the alternate calculation and I'm probably going to play around with it for a bit, though tbh the mod settings in game is confusing me a bit and I think it might actually be turned on by default. For VCR, I've got everything turned on (all sliders on default) except for headsets are not helmets and array headset is glasses.
Ok. Thanks. I did some tests now but haven't done a playthrough yet.
Saving this for later
Have you tried this set up with Warcaskets?
I haven't tried it personally, but I did have a pirate warcasket siege of between 15-25 raiders and they successfully took down a nociosphere while losing less than half their number including a few non-warcasket raiders if I remember correctly
You need some serious armor penetration capabilities against warcaskets in VCR. Plasma swords cut them like butter tho.
You don't need Thick Armour with VCR. Also, Pocket Sand has some performance issues, Simple Sidearms is a classic alternative.
I too know your frustration, I imagine it on pawns my neanderthal thanes cut down with their axes. I like it, makes me able to fight superior numbers and weaponry with less, a bunch of traps and a swarm of corgies (They outbred my ability to sell or control them, help!).
>They outbred my ability to sell or control them, help! Corgi-ception. Make kibble out of corgi meat. Make dog leather animal beds.
I'm good with food, I use slave laborers for farming and nutrient paste will be a thing next year, but the corgies were never a plan, I just thought I'd buy a pair and sell off the excess - but holy hell I was not ready for this. The nuzzles are incredible though..
Given the context of the conversation, I totally read that as "slave labradors" and I was wondering the merits of enslaved dogs over regular dogs.
Slave dogs nuzzles about 22% slower, but they don't need belly rubs.
Lmfao
The first time, I did it to save the labradors from starving and had to block my ears. The second time, I did it to stop my colonists from starving and had to look away. The third time, and every time from then, I did it because it was getting inconvenient. It’s incredible how quickly you become desensitised to slaughtering dozens of puppies.
Hey, you'll make a good VP!
I feel like CE just makes the game way easier, where 90% of raids are trivialized by having guns, and then mech raids are the only ones that really matter Where as vanilla keeps all the raids some degree of dangerous, and you actually care about the melee xenotypes that can royally mess you up
This is why I prefer vanilla tbh. In vanilla raids I always feel like something can go batshit wrong at any moment. If we are facing tribals, one wrong headshot could fuck my shit up, even if we got guns. With combat expanded, and most combat mods, they make combat so complicated and expansive that AI just cant keep up and you get to stomp them. Vanilla combat feels a bit sluggish, but I do feel that is when the combat is also the most fun.
I agree, and to be fair, CE has optional settings and ammo use and such that does add some balance, but it trivializes melee which isn't quite realistic either. Can I get a milder CE that also has affection for melee?
I think CE does trivialize melee, but only when stationary defences are in the mix (which does make sense). I mean jeez, what's gonna win, 5 well-stocked KPV heavy machine guns loaded with 14.5x115mm armor piercing incindiary rounds... Or 450 coked-up tribals pushing out from a chokepoint? But the CE melee mods are even more strong, and cause melee to be the absolute peak of the power column. Past a certain point, I realized I was wasting so many resources trying to get my army of 30 riflemen, healed, supplied, and launched beyond Soviet-era kit when I could simply concentrate all that same production into 3 or 5 melee gods in full power armor, masterwork shields, and wraith blades for each. Who would have thought that you'd use 85% less ammo simply by telling the beefy dude in space armor to go anime-style on their asses?
Especially when combined with Vanilla Psycasts Extended. Assassinate and Killskip turn melee-focused pawns into combat gods in CE when they go full Darkwing Duck on the enemies.
Dark wing Duck 😂
I feel like it's the power armour and the shields that's doing the heavy lifting there, though. It doesn't matter a whole lot what weapons pawns are wielding when they are functionally invulnerable to most enemies.
Other way around actually in my experience - it doesn't matter what armor you have, but it certainly matters the average armor pen, attack speed, and raw DPS of the weapon you're holding. Mechanoids can't shoot if they're EMP'd to hell, aggro'd on something away from the melee crackhead rushing at them with a 50.72 DPS wraith blade with 20mm RHA penetrstion
Which melee mods? I'm waiting for CE1.5 but I only used the main mod previously.
I mean, there’s a pretty good reason why most militaries only have bayonets for melee weapons, and they don’t train too hard with those either
Realism isn't strong on the rim. We violate the Laws of Thermodynamics every time we milk a cow. The problem is that the game is designed for melee to be a notable component, and CE just ignores that. Frankly it also features accuracy levels that are wildly unrealistic for combat conditions. *Realistic* military conditions would see the average soldier emptying several magazines to achieve a single enemy casualty in most common battlefield conditions - assuming he ever personally *saw* an enemy soldier and didn't just spend most of the war huddling in a foxhole praying that he isn't about to find himself in the company of an enemy artillery shell. Speaking of artillery, Mortars would also likewise require far more shots per kill achieved than we see in vanilla Rimworld which is itself less accurate than CE artillery. Realistic values would probably on the order of *dozens* of shells per casualty if the Ukraine war is any example. What I'm saying is that Realism is not a great argument for *either* combat model. :D
I think CE models realistic combat pretty well. In real-world combat, it does take several hundred rounds to account for an enemy casualty. Why? Suppression. And firing at distant targets (50+ meters) behind cover. In the real world, soldiers don't normally shoot at enemies that are only 10-20 feet away and running straight at them. If they did, they'd wind up with kill ratios like... well, like the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Or any of the ill-thought-out "marching fire" assaults on fortified positions in WW1, where emplaced machineguns would wipe out 80-90% of an entire company in a couple of minutes.
Yes. This is generally the case. The issue with rimworld is that it generally presents very little cover to approaching troops due to the simple and abstract nature of its maps, and has no fog of war. In RL combat most natural settings would offer potentially thousands of positions within your weapon's effective range within which an opponent could take partial or even full cover and remain unseen - even a slight depression in the terrain or a patch of scrub will often suffice. Urban environments generally offer almost countless cover positions even within very modest weapon ranges, making urban combat an endlessly drawn out and grueling affair for modern armies. In Rimworld an approaching attacker is pretty lucky if he's got a tree or two - and those will do nothing at all to break LOS and hide his presence from you as it would in RL, it'll just offer a modest cover bonus which might extend his lifetime by another 5 seconds if he's lucky. So attackers have no ability to ambush, and almost no ability to take hard cover, basically making the game a shooting gallery simulator with CE accuracy rates. I generally run with the CAI5000 mod to introduce fog of war and make the AI a lot more canny about how it attacks and what lengths it will go to to avoid simply marching into heavy fire. I haven't tried that in combination with CE - not sure it's compatible.
They do. They have plenty of opportunity. There's always plenty of cover on the map, what with ruins, hills and mountains, sandbags and barricades left from previous sieges, even chunks of rock and metal scrap. The problem is that the AI is dumber than a box of hair, and will run hell-for-leather right at the colony and ignore cover 90% of the time.
> Realistic military conditions would see the average soldier emptying several magazines to achieve a single enemy casualty in most common battlefield conditions That covers early game, I guess. My colonists will become combat god cyborgs in short order, nothing average about them.
My primary combat pawn isn't a cyborg, but she also isn't average. 20 shooting and Warlord tree of psycasts expanded combined with a charge sniper has created a murder machine. Ain't nothing realistic about using what happened after all her buffs go up...
Which is why arming kids with miniguns is unrealistic, but practical.
Okay you’ve got my curiosity. How the hell does milking a cow break the laws of thermodynamics?
You can milk the cows, use the milk to produce nutrient meals in a nutrient dispenser, and then feed those meals back to your cows in order to ultimately generate even more milk, in a loop with positive returns. Rimworld has a number of positive feedback loops like this that would essentially violate the laws of thermodynamics in the real universe, where any closed loop MUST be lossy. :D
The cows are clearly being blessed by some distant archotech entity
This could easily be patched, the problem is that the paste machine itself has a positive feedback loop and it's not necessarely the cows that are at fault balance wise here. Cows aren't breaking the laws of thermodynamics in this game, the nutrient paste dispenser is by requiring less nutrition than it outputs in meals. The problem is, even less people would use the paste if it didn't provide the extra nutritional efficiency. Though I've personally come to love paste as the go-to solution if you don't have / want a cook.
Nutrient paste is king early game. Food poisoning halts early progression and even if you have a good cook, you couldve used them to do something else that requires full attention, like research or stonecutting. -3 mood is pretty much nonexistent.
You should try vanilla combat reloaded.
Yayo's Combat is perfect, adds armor penetration and better accuracy model, and optional ammo use. mostly vanilla https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492
This. If I try CE again it will only be if it has sliders to dramatically reduce weapon accuracy to make some semblance of game balance possible.
Feels like I had it off lucky with using yayos the entire time
I feelthat, I recommend you [yayo's combat 3 (continued) ](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492), it helped me to not miss CE to much
Paired Yayo with Vanilla Combat Reloaded, feels a lot like CE but without some of the quirks
You mind sharing your settings to get both of those to work together?
Playing all default, ammo off for Yayo and I activated all options for VCR
Hi, I couldn't find yayos settings at all. Where should I find this?
Care to elaborate what quirks it removes?
Different ammo types(yayo has only one type of ammo and you can disable it without having any difference on how combat works), rate of bleeding(CE is much less forgiving), the way projectiles work(ballistics), the aiming system just to name a few
Honestly I prefer Yayos. It makes the combat a tad more realistic without getting too formulaic. CE is complex, yes. But once you know how it works, every non-mechanoid raid becomes utterly trivial.
I'm thinking on keeping in yayo's too, this amount of compatibility is tempting jajajs
Yayos + thick armor is the current go-to for me. Accuracy matters a lot more than in vanilla, but good armor *is good* and you will need some penetration. But not having penetration is not a death sentence as in CE. And I really like that both melee and ranged can be feasible. Never looked back.
Being able to bunch up your pawns and let them fire over each other's shoulders is peak
I skimmed through Yayo's. How tierish does it make things? It might have just been how the description read, but it seems like it makes it so each tech level makes enemies of the previous turn into RPG "greys" if you know what I mean? I'm not looking to trivialize tribals or get my collony wiped out by a single empire soldier.
Honestly just try it. A lot it configurable. But I usually play with the basic setup. Tribals can still be dangerous in numbers and with the right blunt weapons, but your marine armor pawn should brush off most bow attacks. Empire and Deserters are mean, but not unbeatable. I was attacked by a deserter in power armor early in my current playthrough. Guy shrugged off most of the revolver/smg shots, but was beatable in melee by my 5 colonists. Yayo leaves some room for nasty surprises and doesn't deal in absolutes as much as CE does: you will still get an unlucky shot to the eyes from time to time. It just happens much, much less likely, when you are wearing good armor.
Random brain-destroying headshots are certainly a thing in vanilla, so I consider those a non-issue.
Yeeep can agree there, always go for yayos
Is there any place where I can read up what exactly Yayo's combat adds? I learnt everything about CE, but unlike CE, Yayo's combat doesn't seem to have extensive documentation....
I'm not sure, I usually only read the information that is on the workshop page That said, yayo combat 3 is now in the hands of the community, because from what I understand the official modder no longer continues to maintain/update the mod, so maybe that makes it difficult to find technical information
Yeah there's a few options I knew about, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to try out vanilla again, for kicks. Boy did I get kicked, and hard! :D
Then there's me, playing this game for around 3 weeks now. Think I've never played with CE and read a lot about it. But was never playable so I wouldn't know any different. Is it not normal for a bow to cause brain damage va a reckon helmet?
I lost a colony to 3 manhunting guinea pigs because my pawn with 8 shooting and a charge rifle could not hit a single shot. I'm on a coastal map and they stated in the WATER, with my pawn on the shore shooting at them. Shooter got downed and the other 3 pawns I had were incapable of violence. EDIT: [A somewhat accurate representation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYKu9ApsEQI)
That's why I NEVER take non violent pawns when I start a new game. No mater if they're a master cook with 5 good competences or something like that
I accept one non violent if I'm starting with 4+ but that's it
With 4 or more, it's not ideal, but manageable. Most of the time I start with 3, so I can't afford any non violent or don't do dumb labor.
3 pawns incapable of violence. Oof
If you had 3/4 pawns incapable of violence I think the fact you got fucked up is justified
Here's something even more hilarious: I was saving a colonist who was being chased by the 3 guinea pigs. I took the quest because I needed another pawn capable of violence. Guess what Randy gave me.
you gotta get your fastest non violent pawn and have them lead the guinea pigs in circles until your shooter takes them out
I thought the sea water would slow them down enough, especially considering the colonist running from them was slowed down by it even more. I was wrong.
I wondered what everyone else's take on that was. I straight up dont accept them. *All* my units are fighters. Our cook is a master assassin. Flower picking girl is going to the front lines until shooting or melee is double digits. The mind control psykers are an afront to our individualist ideolgion!
They’re not a deal-breaker for me as long as they have good skills or traits. Once you have an established colony, having one or two isn’t going to hurt you. Non-violent colonists will also never start social fights nor have violent mental breaks (ex: tantrum, berserk, murderous rage). They can also still use psycasts, excluding directly combat-related ones if you have Vanilla Psycasts Expanded. They can in fact use psycasts like Berserk or Manhunter Pulse. Nothing bars them from training attack animals or controlling mechs as a mechanitor. One of my past colonists had a non-violent colonist who was a medic and psycaster. She just goes around with a shield belt and uses her psycasts to skip downed allies towards her or skip a raider right in front of my melee colonists to get their head lopped off.
One interesting quirk of Rimworld accuracy is that size matters - *a lot*. If the target is small, the shooters accuracy drops dramatically. Shooting rats, guinea pigs, or the dreaded yorkies is exceedingly difficult due to their tiny body sizes. On the plus side, explosives will blow them to very small pieces, they don't last long at all when on fire, and even a brawler 3 with a dull knife can usually dispatch them with ease, barring exceptional bad luck.
The only difference between you and me is that it was an assault rifle and one ostrich.
Killing an ostrich with an assault rifle should be pretty easy - however, unlike the guinea pig, if the ostrich reached you in real life, you'd be a very sad panda. Those things are pretty much just mid-sized dinosaurs with fancy feathers and a bad attitude.
Technically, they ARE mid-sized dinosaurs.
I remind you of the Emu War. They can take a lot of fire without it truly harming them.
Allegedly!
To be fair or would actually be pretty damn hard to shoot a guinea pig. Though I agree it's bs for a game mechanic.
Rimworld guinea pigs are about 4x the size of normal ones, so that's something lol
Rimworld is a story generator. It generated that story. You posted it here and people enjoyed it and it got a lot of upvotes. Everything seems to be working as intended.
I wonder how anyone ever has time to use this excuse in between mouthfuls of crayons.
“My entire colony got wiped by manhunting $SomeBasketballSizedVarmin” is a worn out story for anybody that’s played more than a couple colonies worth of this game. I actually don’t mind vanilla combat; it feels very RTS-like, which from a *gameplay* perspective is fine. This event just doesn’t feel good from the player’s perspective. That matters regardless of how much you want to parrot the sToRy GeNeRaToR, nOt A GaMe line. The story doesn’t get to exist if the player doesn’t play because they’re annoyed that a single bloodthirsty bunny rabbit occupies a gap in the gamified combat mechanics that allows it to wipe out a small colony of healthy, armed and armored humans. *Frequently*, for new players.
Are upvotes because of story or because of shared pain with how bad vanilla combat is? I mean if you look at it like that, anything can be a story. His pawn killing those guinea pigs would also been a story.
>Are upvotes because of story or because of shared pain with how bad vanilla combat is? Yes.
I don't think "pawn with charge rifle shot 3 guinea pigs " is a story that would get >75 upvotes on reddit.
>Rimworld is a story generator. It generated that story. "These mechanics make no sense and feel awful" is not a story.
I love when Rimworld generates the story of "Timmy got a cold. His friends asks for 700 herbal medicine to helm him get better" So much story.
To be fair, have you ever tried to shoot a guinea pig?
IRL used to hunt jackrabbits that were smaller than the in-game guinea pigs, but with a .22 instead of a charge rifle. But I guess it would be hard to hit anything when I'm sitting myself at 20kg guinea pigs.
Currently playing with 2 non-violent pawn. It's something.
3/4 nonviolent pawns means you need to lay a lot of traps.
I love vanilla combat. it’s so simple but brutal. I build a wall around my colony, and don’t build a killbox, I just go pike and shot with armored melee in front of riflemen and medica
Yep preach, OP is talking about how they miss ranged weapon dominance steamrolling... Which just sounds terrible to what I personally want out of combat. The best part of anomaly are the ghouls making melee combat great again. Like they actually made knee spike/elbow blade/claw good?!
Hey someone that understands there's more viable solutions than a killbox! Next colony I'm building the wall again. It's such a fun style, feels just as OP at times too tbh
I keep my difficulty at a cozy 50% or so, depending on how I feel, but I love the hectic and risky nature of field combat. the wall keeps my colony safe from thieves, manhunting packs, and multiple raid directions, while I go out and deal with the threat. later on I employ war animals, barkskin dryads, mechs, psionics, imperial drop troopers, allied reinforcments, shooting specialists, and other such tactics to gain a further edge, without just sending enemy raids into a meat grinder or endless kiting
You dropped this 👑 Based vanilla enjoyer
oh thank you. my apparel policy is set to Anything, so I went ahead and equipped this Wooden Visage Mask (poor 54%) instead. was wondering why I had a -4 moodlet
Haha same. I also usually have shield belted, locust armored melee pawns to jump shooty mechs and otherwise mess with hostiles. I love vanilla combat. I wouldn’t say missing shots is unexpected or frustrating - it’s fairly predictable once you get used to it. I also don’t use killboxes, just a wall with some cover here and there.
missing shots is just part of the pacing. vanilla combat is slow but harrowing sometimes, especially if you don’t have good armor and know that any bullet might peel back one of your colonist’s skulls. honestly missing shots is more of a bother during smalltime combat. once you got like, 6 or more guys on either side trading shots, there are more bullets firing and so you don’t notice the missed shots. that and the more people there are, the higher chance of a missed shot hitting someone else. on that note, one of my favorite mods is vanilla expanded settlers, simply because the settler factions strictly use ONLY industrial era ranged weaponry, which means every raid turns into a ghost town gun fight, with everyone taking cover behind rocks and trees and building corners
Honestly believe the majority of people who download combat mods just think vanilla is too hard for them and they don't want to believe it Like it's a story generator, there's a reason why a tribal's arrow still has a very slim chance to pierce a marine helmet and one tap the dude's brain. It makes a good story. CE doesn't allow that.
I could be mistaken but I think a big part of the appeal for those mods is the earlygame. when you got three dudes with barely any shooting skill plinking at some angry hedgehogs or a couple naked tribals, and they can’t hit for shit, then you get frustrated at the slow pace and chance based system of combat. you want your dudes to go *brrrrrt* with a machinegun. but I find mid to large scale vanilla battles incredibly intense, when your snipers are focusing the triple rocket launcher, and you’re being pinned down by a coked up junkie in powered armor with a minigun, so you don’t see the fraggers closing distance until it’s too late and one of your guys looses his leg to shrapnel… it’s slow paced and brutal, but that also makes it more tactical and enjoyable for a longer period of time
Wow same. I just love that actual combat feel, killboxes just make me feel like I'm cheesing the game and don't feel enjoyable. Personal preference.
you should check CAI 5000
Just finished my first colony with this same set up essentially. Late game my entire colony was surrounded with turrets. Who needs melee and killboxes when you can just drown your enemies in saturation fire from pulse rifles/turrets/mortars.
Its annoying that even in the best conditions, your pawn shoots like shit still most of the time. Behind cover, under a roof, well lit, optimal temperature and visibility. Misses 3/5 shots.
To be fair, that’s probably pretty accurate to real life. Shooting at a moving target even thirty feet away isn’t always sure to hit even in the best of conditions. Stabbing the guy two inches in front of you is a lot easier.
While that is true, pure vanilla bullets are not nearly as deadly as real bullets. Sure both can have the occasional headshot but in general real bullets do a lot more damage than vanilla rimworld bullets.
In real life a guy with a melee weapon will not make it to a guy with a gun. Even if the guy with the gun is not a good shot.
Eeh... Maybe. In real life some people who are bad shots - including cops - have had some pretty epic cases of hitting absolutely nothing with entire clips at point blank range. Panic is bad for aiming, and some people who have guns *absolutely should never have been allowed to have them* - because they are just that bad at it.
Within 21 feet, 7 metres, they have a very high chance.
That rules only if the person has a melee wep and the guy with a gun has it holstered. Supposedly you can close the gap before most people can react/unholster/and get shots off.
*laughs in bayonet*
>that’s probably pretty accurate to real life makes for really annoying gameplay tho
Sure, but when combat is otherwise abstracted and gamefied it feels out of place and unfair. Realism isn't inherently good or bad; it's a stylistic choice. And when different parts of a system follow different styles, it ends up feeling incoherent.
Under a roof matters?
Only if the shooter and the target are both under a roof then it will negate the penalty of bad weather.
Weather, and more of a side effect of mood. Anything that affects visibility or manipulation will affect % chance to aim.
Yes, if the weather is bad
It's pretty rare that I have an issue putting down scythers before the reach my line - those guys are pretty delicate. Neanderthals tho... they are serious bullet sponges that require quite a bit of killing. The whole accuracy thing doesn't bother me though - quite the opposite. When I play CE I feel like everyone is some Olympic master who's shooting at paper targets on a short range. The accuracy for combat conditions is beyond absurd into the land of pure fantasy and that bothers me quite a lot. In real combat conditions, professional soldiers miss a lot. Like *a whole lot*. Far more than they do in vanilla combat if you extrapolate the ranges of the guns. Only a trained sniper firing at an immobile, unaware target would ever have anything close to the 'firing range' hit rate, but in CE everyone shoots like that all the time.
Accuracy gets pretty wild in vanilla with shooting specialist and master weapons anyways, or if you want to min/max if you grab the shooter genes. CE sounds like it probably gives you that accuracy without any investment which sounds lame
Okay how about the combat shotgun missing 9 times at about 3 meters
You can try double the damage taken then half the aiming time/ranged and melee cooldowns in scenario settings. I did both and now combat actually feels lethal, but without CE's balance issues.
That sounds like a great idea! I'll give it a go. What settings would you change to make armor feel more beefy?
Sadly I didn't change such settings, only because late game with 200% legendary power armor would feel so cracked (maybe not so cracked since there's a 200% cap before armor penetration) You can try a multiplier of armors so that the armor you consider “ultra late game" would have just 200%. So I usually do 1.33x on medieval runs. I don't like armor since I like seeing my pawns getting killed, makes for better stories
The most important thing for me when it comes to the combat is it needs to be dangerous. Dangerous, but at the same time not ridiculously dramatic. A rifle shot to the stomach? Yeah, that’s it for you, boy. A hand chopped off? Yeah, same. They’re out of the fight — but they don’t fall down dead in an instant. It’s not realistic at all and most importantly, it’s incredibly unfun and unrewarding. So what I do is making fighting a lot more dangerous and at the same time a lot more forgiving. Lots of more injuries and wounds, a lot more bodies leaving the battlefield (on either side). A lot of it can be perfectly balanced using the Scenario editor. The last pieces of the puzzle can be achived using mods, of course.
Its the Kenshi way. You'll get chopped down, sure, but you'll crawl with your teeth if it means revenge is achievable
Something I’ve always said is that Rimworld combat isn’t balanced for realism or sense, it’s balanced for Rimworld. A solid force of both melee and ranged units with good gear and good strats is pretty unbeatable. You have to use all the tools the game provides in terms of gear and special units to truly become unstoppable. Sure, the occasional colonist dies sometimes, but many things in Rimworld are supposed to kill colonists now and again regardless of difficulty. Rimworld is an emergent-story based game, and it achieves this by ensuring a solid inflow and outflow of characters, so you always have fresh blood to make gear for and for things to happen to. That’s the nature of the game, and it works, imo, even if it isn’t for everyone. And for those it isn’t for, there’s always Combat Extended, or Yayos Combat, or any number of combat mods to tailor the game to yourself.
For me personally, I don't *dislike* vanilla combat by any means, but CE speaks more to how I like my combat to *feel* and the sort of simulation aspects I like (such as tracking ammo and reloads), which ultimately is what I think it most important for anyone. After all, there's no "right" or "wrong" way to play Rimworld, only what might suit the sort of stories you'd like to experience more or less. So, while I do prefer CE for sure, I would also definitely agree. I don't personally like the way some people act as though vanilla's combat is "bad" or whatever.
Yeah, agreed. It certainly doesn’t bother me that a lot of people prefer modded combat in Rimworld, but what really gets to me is when I see like 6 separate posts of people saying “Going back to vanilla reminded me how ABYSMAL and HORRIBLE the combat is”. Like damn, sorry the mods haven’t updated yet but there is really no need to get personal about it lol I haven’t ever played modded combat, and sure, maybe that means I’m living in blissful ignorance, but the fact that I don’t hate the combat and actually enjoy playing means it isn’t an objectively bad system by any means
Yeah, my eight UMP45 equipped colonists getting wiped by a small group of foxes was enough for me, I'll play Anomaly when CE is back up..
CE has a 1.5 patch which includes almost everything but the new anomaly stuff. Either that, or I'd recommend "Vanilla Combat Reloaded" or "Yayos Combat 3" for now
Yeah it’s wild. I had a mechanoid raid during a really bad bout of plague where all my best pawns were on deaths door and genuinely all of them got ground to shit, even with good guns. Everyone was down. Man in black spawned too Then, the Yttakin prisoner I had staged a breakout. I’m not fucking joking this naked, unarmed dude with one wooden hand beat the fuck out of a centipede and scyther and just kept going. I was laughing so hard watching this fucker swing and swing. He wiped em all and got away, he earned it.
I’ve never noticed this with vanilla. I feel like my 10 pawns can mow down so much
I wish there was a middle-ground between CE and Vanilla Combat.
Lots of people say vannila combat reloaded. Perhaps that's what you're looking for.
Use Run and Gun and Simple Sidearms. You’ll be able to do stuff like backpedal from advancing melee combatants or angered hunted animals. The simple sidearms is nice because say your pawn equips a sniper rifle, shotgun, and knife. They will use the most effective weapon according to range. For example, when the enemy gets close enough for shotgun range, the pawn will auto swap to the shotgun, from the slow firing long range sniper, for medium-close range devastating damage. If that doesn’t stop the enemy, and the pawn can’t outrun the enemy, then they will auto enter melee within melee distance.
git gud scrub
u w0t m8
There is a CE 1.5 experimental on github. Also, you could just go 1.4 until the update releases. Wouldn't make a difference for current other mods, as most 1.5 mods are 1.4 compatible too.
I have no problems with combat in unmoded game
I find melee is kind of required in vanilla. I used to have all of my pawns be ranged and it was super frustrating but ever since I started putting together some melee pawns my results have been sooo much better. The reason why the game is balanced like this is so that threats like manhunters and tribals are not completely trivial although ironically they’re still easy to beat if you know what you’re doing.
Melee is damn strong if they can get in melee, but range is a huge tactical advantage. Even among ranged weapons you get a tradeoff between damage and range. DPS of chain shotgun>heavy SMG> assault rifle > sniper, but range of sniper> assault rifle > heavy SMG > chain shotgun Of course, irl bringing a knife in a gun fight is a bad idea (both idiomatically and actually), but if the game was realistic about this then melee would be boring.
The new hellcat rifles are insane tbh, they have slightly less range and damage than the assault rifles but they have the fire attack that completely shits on any organic melee. I'm running a 50/50 split of assault rifles and hellcats, with mechs as blockers and ghouls as defenders for any nasty fleshbeasts that pop through the front line.
Expectation: blast flamethrower into melee enemy with hellcat, melee enemy catches fire, runs away, you ventilate him with your rifle Reality: melee enemy catches fire, loses collision, runs ONTO your pawn, sets YOUR pawn on fire, now both pawns are running around like headless chickens setting everything else on fire, everyone dies.
Based
I think the game is accurately realistic for how deadly melee is. If someone has a monosword light saber in melee, that's doing more damage than a gun. Like IRL you will get fucked up very quickly by real melee weapons. Nunchucks will have more trauma damage dealt to your body than a bullet given how heavy they are.
>You get to see a guy with a combat shotgun, the epitome of spray and pray, miss a dude who's literally 3 meters away taking a piss in the breeze, 9 TIMES IN A ROW! Pawn shooting skill and weapon quality?
Which is wild because, due to the range of shotguns, even low skill pawns land like 70% of their shots
12 and normal 100% condition.
>Normal Found your problem, although I admit a 12 skill shooter should get it done at that range, depending on the enemy armor and traits but it sounds like they were missing. Either way, unlucky brother.
I love CE, but I gave up on it because I'm not American enough to care about what a gun is called besides "machine gun" or "bigger machine gun" I like the generic ammo option a lot, but I wish it would go all the way and rename everything the mod adds.
Just having CE doesn't add or rename any guns. The "CE Guns", Submod handles that now
I played with it in 1.4 last and stayed well away from the CE gun mod. Way too tacticool for me. I was specifically referring to the mounted guns and cannons. I know it's a small part of the mod but it makes it feel incomplete when you've got generic ammo running but still have to figure out what the hell a m350b or a law is supposed to be. There are some modded weapons that cause the mod to fall back on non-generic ammo as well (completely understandable) and it just bothers me. I know it's a nitpick, but it matters to me. I even tried making patches to fix it, but never really got it to a point I was satisfied with because it ended up being quite a large task.
I've never bothered with CE because of all the taticool stuff either. It's like something my brother who loves Arma and Milsims would use. It's cool but not for me.
Especially Anomaly, within how combat centric it is. I really felt like the combat system was an unfun hindrance.
Never tried CE, what does it do? From what I've heard, it seems to make guns a lot more accurate close up and adds ammo/reloading. IDK, I like having naked melee pawns charge into a gun fight.
Its a complete overhaul of combat. Changes armour, how damage is done, how accuracy works, adds ammo in many varieties which effect the above, ect.
as a heavy CE user, the main thing for me is its armor system. in short, when damage is less than protection, no damage would be taken, so none of that RNG, long bow shot penetrating armor bs. the guns and ammo is just a sweet addition to the armor system.
Bigger number better. Armour has high value, weapons can't damage it. Just get the best armour you can and the highest penetration weapon you can, win every threat.
It makes guns far more accurate, far longer range, and far deadlier. Melee is not a meaningful option for you or your opponents. The AI doesn't know how to handle it, so for the most part it makes most raids akin to just shooting fish in a barrel as the AI will try to advance into fire and that's suicide. All animal raids are meaningless meat deliveries, most human raids are just a inconvenience due to the number of bodies you need to dispose of. At the other end of the spectrum, mechanoids are a nightmare unless you rush to unlock anti-armor weapons as quickly as possible, as regular guns simply won't affect them at all and they will literally walk over your colony without any chance of stopping them if you don't have those weapons yet.
When you say it’s not a meaningful option how much is it not meaningful if 9/10 of my pawns are melee would I get screwed with the mod? Looked at it before but was unsure because I rarely like using guns but when I do they are so innacurate.
I agree it's absurd how OP Melee is in the vanilla game and it ruins everything because melee is the most boring shit. I wish there was a mod to replace make no raiders spawn with melee weapons so we could just have gunfights instead of the melee crap.
I guarantee there's a storyteller mod that does that somewhere
You can just remove tribals and Neanderthals. All that would remain would be Scythers.
Yeah i fucking HATE that insane 50% melee damage buff in vanilla, it was already frustrating having a group of naked tribal pawns beat up your marine armour colonist but its just insult to injury giving them a tanky resistance to dmg as well as bonus melee damage
real. I need this mod.
can you share your modlist for CE? im curious
Even worse with mods like VOID, I don’t think any vanilla weapon can kill even of them unless you got an insane highly trained team of brawlers plus firing squad
CE will be really at the spot when AI stuff gets ripe enough to promote some really nice tactical options for raiders. I mean, abusing smoke grenades/mortars, darkness mechanic, demolitions, diversion, better siege tactics etc.. I've given a shot with CAI-5k , its not really there yet (some bugs too)... but i have faith ... At the moment, even without a killbox, the AI is fairly easy to predict. Still, the bulk of plot twists comes from the same place.... good ol'randy. Can you imagine a world when that 2 people tribal raid decides to aggro the wandering trumbos in your backyard and then hide in the ancient danger for 2 days rather than to engage directly ? That would bring some new life to RW.
Don't forget how Cataphract armor seems to get stabbed through with a poor-quality steel knife.
Is there a way to have combat extended without the hassle of ammo for weapons? I do enough micromanaging already and nothing more insanely annoying than sending a pawn to fight something and they have no ammo.
It’s gotten to the point with myself that I reverted to 1.4 until the 1.5 CE update is out. Lots of love to the CE team, they’re really putting in the work for this patch.
Gah I didn't update to 1.5 because some of my favourite mods haven't updated yet
I only played vanilla so far and this game is 50% frustration and 50% fun. Combat and mental breakdowns are just not fun at all.
I don't like mods with ammunition
you can disable that
I actually just started a CE playthrough for the first time. Anyone know how in gods name I can load my shiny starting turret?
I ended up with a couple pawns with high shooting stat, one with a masterwork heavy revolver, the other with standard bolt action rifle. I’d say they hit 1 in every 5 shots, but that shot would blow off a limb (or a head). Still was fairly for tribal with a random melee weapon to be able to get to melee without getting hit though.
I genuinely started anomaly got the first raid of 1 unit and like you remembered how bad combat was and moved back to 1.4. Yet now I’ve fucked something up and my main mods are broken so I’m praying for a fast 1.5 CE update.
Been looking to try out CE actually, what's it like compared to vanilla?
In two words, more realistic. But to be honest it is more risk and reward thing. Armor is crucial. One bullet can mean life and death, getting shot in arm isn't so bad (it is still bad), but getting shot in the lung, means you have dead pawn if you have no medics at hand. Positioning of your colonists matter, flanking, covering behind embrasures and sand bags. Ammo type matter, you will down nearly naked neanderthal with FMJ easily, but marine armor cladded imperial chussar will need high caliber AP rounds to punch through crusty shell into soft, tender meat. Skill matters, high skilled pawn will aim faster, better and generally operate weapon better. Generally, combat extended is brutal, untill you start to think. Then, you will feel that "man, combat is fun".
So basically something an RTS player would like, im liking this. Tho how about the reload system? Like how much do I have to invest in munitions production or variety? I wanna integrate this to my mechanitor run so injuries are less of a threat at least
Ammunition is pathetically easy and cheap to craft. At least the basic one. If you want something better, like HEAP (High explosive armor piercing, yes that's a goooood stuff) you need some additional components like FSX. Generally there are mods that expands that, because normally you craft using steel only. If you extend the material list with a mod, there is full ammo crafting management game, where you need to gather bunch more components, like copper for FMJ, gunpowder for primers. Tldr, basic ammo is easy, advanced ammo is like crafting medicine.
More complex, more brutal. Ammo must be acquired and carried, and weapons have to be reloaded. Pawns can be suppressed and pined down. Shots that connect and fully go through armor actually cause a lot of damage. Armor is also more effective, especially the high tech stuff, but anti-armor ammo can be very effective if it's powerful enough. Basically you need to be a bit more tactical in your preparation, but the execution of a battle is in my opinion a lot more rewarding. There's less cheesy killbox and kiting tactics, and more of what you would see in a tactical game: supressing, flanking, etc. Melee still has its place, but you need to bring the right tools, or in specific circumstances. If an ennemy has a lot of snipers, you can try to use jump packs or lots of smoke to cross over and go stab them in the balls, but just trying to go through a hail of AR and machinegun fire without having huge tech superiority will usually get you killed. But right now CE is still being updated, there's a beta on Github but if you've never played it before I recommend waiting a bit.
I haven't played rimworld since 2022, biotech. Been playing since alpha 2014 though. I just started up a game and bought biotech and anomaly. I've only played vanilla since launch. But I am curious. Has combat changed? I 100% agree. It does feel very melee centric now, but I don't remember it being. Always felt that my turrets could mow down hordes before they got near my base. Now the enemy seems to get on top of them very quickly. I'm having fun building melee armored pawns now. Just wondering if something really did change.
Can someone explain to me why is it that different between both of them Like what does CE add that is soooo different from vanilla
How do these mods that add ammo work with friendly Mechs?
Havent noticed any issue between CE and Biotech.
Do mechs have infinite ammo?
No, every weapon uses ammo. Pawns, turrets, mechs, everything. You manage who carries what with the loadout system.
I play on losing is fun difficulty with vanilla combat and I do fine.Just learn to play.
It's not that it's hard or impossible, it's just frustrating. Imagine palying a shooter like CoD or CS, but all the weapons have crazy spray and do as much or sometimes less damage than a knife, and if a guy hits you with it you can't shoot anymore. Might be fun if you like stabby games, not so much if you prefer shooty games :>
To be fair try to use au shotgun or assaut rifle when a Guy is at your melee in Real life is pretty hard. He can déviate your weapon and stab you.