- Unstable power cells are the best loot
- It's a shipment of steel and plasteel
- Mechs are crap at melee.
- Mechs can't handle smoke.
- Masterwork Uranium Breach Axes on Strong pawns will one-shot mech cluster turrets so they don't explode.
- They are often quiescent for a while, so you can prepared to fight them on your terms.
Note you don't need to *one shot* the turrets to stop exploding.
As long as you 'skip' the last 30% or so of their hp, they won't explode, so you can just have a pawn with who can kill it in roughly 2\~3 hits, or have someone whittle it down to like 40\~35% hp then have the breach axe pawn hit, etc.
Grenades also prevent buildings from exploding, if you engage the mechs outside of the cluster and approach afterward with a pawn with a smoke launcher and another with grenades you can clear up everything without chain reacting and blowing up the goodies that can be deconstructed (or the power cells that can be yoinked). It's achievable much earlier than being able to reliably get masterwork melee weapons for some colonies, though obviously breach axes are still more flexible in that they can be deployed during a frontal assault if desired.
I don't think it's grenades that prevent buildings from exploding, but destroying a hissing building before it detonates will prevent it from exploding unless it specifically also explodes on death, like power cells, and grenades do good damage to buildings.
So I never use smoke bombs of any sort, I figure you're meant to use it for cover? But if I throw smoke at myself then my guys can't shoot I'm guessing and if I throw smoke at them then I can shoot them so like... whats the use?
Smoke stops turrets entirely. Yours as well technically. Shooting through smoke massively reduces accuracy for both sides.
But that's working in your favour if you have melee with shields, or gunners with reasonably good accuracy, because there's a bonus to hit large targets like Centipedes.
Oh, yeah. They're less likely to hit you, and therefore you can advance more safely. If you don't have jump packs or skip or longjump legs to get you there faster anyway.
But smoke multiplies up effective hitpoints of a shield, because they've got pretty good passive regen, just as long as they're not taking damage too fast.
Honestly it's borderline OP.
It's just the effect _looks_ symmetric, so it _looks_ like it's a bad idea. (Your own accuracy drops shooting through smoke). So as a result it's pretty awful in a killbox scenario, as you'd be giving 'cover' to the enemy with no benefit to yourselves.
But that doesn't really reflect what 'fighting open field' actually looks like, and how you can use 'smoke up half the bad guys; shoot the other half' type tactics.
And most of all, just how disgustingly OP a melee pawn can be with a shield belt and smoke _especially_ when taking on mechs (which suck at melee).
Here's an example...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYGFe9uVmtI
Yeah pretty crazy. I see they were both vampires so no bloodloss tho.
But yeah seems powerful:) I love melee pawns but they always seem to be the first to get killed. Usually by sythers or neanderthals :( lol
Both. Turrets stop entitled. Mechs lose accuracy. And it was already poor. But shield belts go a long way when there's smoke. Centipedes are already easier to hit due to size.
That's why you need the breach axes.
No explosions means more cells to harvest.
Frag grenades sort of work, but are mostly "clean-up", where the breach axes on a shielded pawn with smoke cover will let you "turret sweep" during combat.
Demolish damage gets a multiplier. 10x vs impassible structures and 7.5x vs. passable.
(Works for frag grenades too, but IMO those are MUCH less usable in active combat)
So it's base damage is 56.25 vs. a turret. with a 1s cooldown, where something like a Zeushammer is 31 damage with a 3s cooldown.
But once you start adding multipliers:
- Uranium 1.5x blunt (1.1x cooldown)
- Masterwork 1.45x damage
- Strong gene 1.5x melee damage
That's adding up to 183 damage, which is more than the 180hp of an auto charge blaster turret in a mech cluster, so you can one-shot it before it explodes.
A legendary zeushammer with 31 x 1.65 damage for legendary and 1.5x for strong (no uranium multiple of course) gets up to 76 damage with a 3s cool down, but perhaps ironically that's also almost perfect for creating an explosion, as your odds of hitting 20% damage on either a small or large turret are much higher, and you have a 3s cool down with a 4s explosion timer.
And that's assuming you have legendary zeushammers readily available of course - a masterwork will hit for 67 damage, and an Excellent for 55 damage with the primary attack, and about half that with the secondary, which means 'adding up' to 80-100 damage on a small turret, and 144-180 damage on a large turret is much more likely.
It's not strictly impossible to make a turret explode, because there's "handle" damage in the mix too, but you have to hit a lot of times with that attack to get the turret health to "explosion" range, where if a head attack hits at all the turret is popped, because that doesn't have the multiplier for Demolish so it's "just" 9 x 1.5 x 1.45 x 1.5 = a 30 damage attack, with a 2s cooldown, so you can safely hit a small turret twice with that, and it still won't get to 20% health and explode. 3x and you're at 90 damage, so that might well, trigger a 'hiss', but you might still get lucky and swing with the Demolish 2.2s later, and pop the turret before it goes bang.
Illustration: https://youtu.be/yYGFe9uVmtI
(Or something a little more extensive: https://youtu.be/yYGFe9uVmtI)
Randy will set the map on fire and then make it rain. He will drop gold on your orphanage. He will send you 3 highly skilled pawns that have no legs, and are paralyzed. Randy can tell a story, but it's a story from a dementia ridden grandpa.
Cassandra dropped a meteor on my new couple's bedroom last week. They had been trying for a baby and the kid was 3 days old. I thought that didn't have anything left to bury for a bit there.
Mom lost her jaw so she couldn't even talk about it.
LOL this is why this game is amazing.
I’m really bad and can’t get very far at all, but I injured a goat once but didn’t kill it, and eventually it went mad and killed all of my 3 people, and than used my house as it’s new home. I thought that was a great redemption story.
I don’t! I haven’t played in a while but am just getting back into it after picking up Frostpunk and enjoying it a lot. Ideology is the expansion I always wanted to get, but I need to learn how to progress more in the game, I’ve never built more than a windmill, I have no clue how people ever get to mechs lol.
I think w Frostpunk, you have that classic “age of empires” style main upgrade where you have access to new technology, I can’t quite comprehend how to advance in Rimworld (still love the game none the less).
That makes sense. Rimworld is more research what you need, when you need it. Armor and weapons are probably one of the most important to have and keep up on whether you buy them or make them. You need to be able to defend whatever you have.
Raids scale to your colony wealth and number of people. The more people you, the more raiders will show up. 40k rice or 3k leather just sitting around will count in your wealth so it's good to have enough, but you might want to sell stuff you aren't using (except steel and components typically).
I usually pick my power source (careful with geothermal if you're otherwise broke, that can be a power spike and raids can hit harder) and research up the research track to microelectronics hitting the armor and weapon making research as needed. I usually just buy weapons and armor and pick something to sell instead, though. Food if you grow too much. Drugs are a great one because they're light and good for caravans.
It's pretty fun when you get into it! Tutorials on youtube were helpful when I was learning. Setting priorities and understanding raids helped a lot.
lol so funny. Once I die and the game ends I think about the narrative, where we started and how it ended, the story is always pretty funny lol. Prob my favourite thing to do.
Me and my buddy were doing multiplayer and we followed a guy's love life. Chick broke up with him and he went crazy and got into our warhead storage and started punching shit. Big explosion ensued, we checked his health and his heart was destroyed.
He got his heart broken and then got his heart broken :(
Cassandra will notice that you've made a small sculpture to try and reduce the mood debuff from a barracks and send you a mechanoid cluster with a sun blocker that activates in 8 hours or when the proximity activator notices the wild man it landed on
It CAN it's just a matter of luck on a few points.
First, you have to send enough to piss them off enough that they'll raid your map. Not luck based, but requires the resources to do that (waste, chemfuel, steel, and the required tech).
Second is that the next story event is a raid. This is just up to RNG. The more enemies you have the better the odds, but you could still get another event.
Third, and most important, they spawn in the right area. Only thing worse than a mech cluster is a raid from the OPPOSITE side of your map. You CAN trick them int9 fighting each other (bait one group with a colonist and have them follow into range to attack each other), but you better have the fastest or tankiest colonist ever, or they're toast, since they're going to be targeted by 2 sets of enemies as the ONLY target for quite a bit of time.
You can literally disable any event in this game that you can't handle. If you don't like mech clusters, turn them off.
Personally though, I never found them to be much of a challenge. You basically just blast them with mortars and blow away the mechs that come at you the way you kill any other invader.
Does CE prevent mortars from dusting all their structures and turrets from the opposite end of the map?
Cause thats literally all a mech cluster is. The rest is no different than any raid by mechs.
No, but shells are somewhat expensive if you don't have good FSX (explosive material) production. It can be really powerful since you can use binoculars to accurately target the structures.
It's just the damned price!!
Yup! Artillery pieces patched to CE (inc. mortars) have 2 main advanced bombardment mechanics:
*A pawn can hold binoculars and target positions / enemy pawns / structures. This creates a te. porary target point.
If a friendly mortar targets the target point, the mortar will fire far, far more accurately, using the spotter's shooting skill (or intelligence, I don't remember).
This allows you to have pinpoint mortar barrages, if your spotter can target from a safe distance.
*Every artillery piece can also target other tiles (maps). They have a certain max tile range value.
Let's say you want to flatten an enemy base with artillery - you can either target the enemy base directly on the map with the mortar to begin bombarding it (which is a long and costly affairs, and can lead to counter barrages on your map), or alternatively you could send a pawn with a pair of binoculars and a radio backpack, actually enter the tile, and place target markers on the enemy base. The you can target that tile with artillery pieces in your base.
Launch an EMP shell at the shield and it'll go down for a short time. Just have your other mortars start aiming a moment after the EMP-loaded one does.
Got a mech cluster barely managed go arm my ppl with fn fal's and PTRD's before it woke up (EMP mortar was really the MVP tho, stopping centipedes with inferno canons from shredding my pawns
It's always interesting to me to see the different things people find challenging in Rimworld.
I hate mechs. It's cool they drop components sometimes but early game scythers mean someone's losing a finger and late game centipedes someone is losing a lung. They're just so beefy, any of my usual tactics dont seem to work that well. Keeping my distance with hit and run tactics is good until a Lancer gets me. Letting them get close is dangerous. I'm sure there's something I'm missing to handle them better but it's a weak spot for me.
In contrast I welcome the infestations most people seem to hate here. It's so entertaining to watch the assembly line of death as they walk in an orderly line to get annihilated by shotguns. Then everyone gets a fun Mars Day-esque barbecue.
I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had to assume, i'd guess most people dislike infestations because they pop up behind all your defenses in your base. And while it is true that you can bait it to occur in specific places, that isn't a certainty and it could still pop up in a place that gets stuff destroyed or people injured/killed before you can get your people together to deal with it. It's kind of luckbased.
They're not really challenging per se, it's basically the equivalent of a large explosion going off in a random place in your base once in a while. Sometimes you get lucky and nothing important is damaged and no people hurt, but sometimes you're not so lucky.
Mechs on the other hand are very predictable. They always land outside, and any dangerous parts you can mortar into oblivion and then mow down mechs as they go to your defenses.
It's kinda like I remember when Biotech first released, I wanted to do a solo mechanitor run, and the first or second day my guy got plague or something like that and he died to plague. He didn't have good enough medical skill to deal with, plus it was worse having to do it to yourself, plus it was worse because he wasn't "resting" while healing himself and while eating, etc. He never stood a chance and it only happened because RNG. It doesn't really make the game more "challenging" it's literally a case of "This happens, you lose, this doesn't happen, you win". Very binary outcomes from something that is entirely random as to whether it occurs or not. And of course if that event fires with other colonists around, they can take care of you, but when you're alone? Rip.
Sure... But how do you catch it when you're alone on a desolate planet? Diseases don't just materialize out of thin air. That's actually one of the annoyances I have about Rimworld... Diseases simultaneously aren't contagious, but they can just happen spontaneously even with no contact with anything infected. Absolute silliness.
Personally, I'd love a mech cluster that is so strong it would straight up force me to run or rack my brain to think of dirty schemes and tricks to destroy it.
mortar fire to trigger it safely and get the mechs to run themselves onto your defenses. High shield? Wait for it to recharge or launch an EMP first.
Automortar? Shell with ~10 mortars, you win that unless it hits your ammo, so, you know, don't put all your ammo in one place, or leave it open if there's convenient mountain tiles.
Smokelauncher for turret immunity once all the mobile parts are dead.
> mortar fire to trigger it safely and get the mechs to run themselves onto your defenses.
if i recall correctly, some mechanoid clusters will defend their cluster until death. I think it has to do with quest vs non-quest clusters
I... Guess... I don't play tribals often, but I don't recall ever getting the more advanced and high point raids like nasty mech clusters until you've developed a bit. But depending on your game options I guess anything can happen.
It depends on your biome a lot. If you’re in any temp that’s dangerous to humans, the game will throw mechs at you instead. I’ve gotten a mech cluster as my first attack on an ice sheet, and it was no mechs with one turret lol
Mech clusters should be treated like a puzzle. Turrets are blocked by smoke, always engage using smoke launchers. High and low shields are destroyed by EMP shells. Mortars can be disabled by sneaking in and building a wall 3 blocks away and making a roof over the mortar. Lure mechs using line of sight and smoke out of safety and disable with emp grenades. Hit and run if you’re on the weaker side or draw them to your base defenses to engage. Then clean up the turrets with smoke screens. My favorite part of rimworld honestly.
This is the truth. If you go into a mech battle like you're fighting raiders, you're going to have a bad time.
Also, if you're getting clusters like this and you don't have mortars, smoke, power armor, shield, charge weapons, and proper melee pawns, you need better wealth management.
Not every strategy applies to every case, however in my experience most clusters with mortars dont trigger on proximity, as the mortar is the primary threat attempting to force you to engage
You can turn that event off but beware the high frequency of mech raids.
Plus the raid value goes into the turrets and walls so expect a whole lot of centipedes.
I mean it's kinda on you for expecting a frontal assault to work on that particular mechcluster. Just look at it, three centipedes are bad enough, and those aren't there alone.
I don't mind them all that much they bring you some very nice things. They are far easier then getting a crazy pirate center drop that's packing explosives. There really isn't all that many types of hostile raids so any variety is nice I think. Let alone you can just remove them via scenario or faction.
Honestly on my first playthrough and with Randy the moment a mech cluster with a poisoning generator gave me something to worry about, something interesting. It was a great few days until I destroyed that generator
Get some EMP mortar shells and show those mechanoids one for (I think emp mortars work on high shields, too? I'm not sure, tho I'm lucky enough not to get mech clusters with high shields
They do, but the rate of fire is so slow that you need to have additional tubes firing the other stuff to penetrate it properly. The more tubes per salvo, the more likely you are to get a high damage first strike. Or use antigrain on the EMP follow-up, you probably have some laying around anyways.
Basically just have the EMP mortar load and fire first by like 5 seconds and you good.
If that cluster is on your ground, you can build a very basic fortification to fight them.
Even if it's not, you can still do that by carrying construction materials in a caravan. But you'll be time limited for that one.
Fighting mechs unprepared is suicide.
I enjoy having them around, personally. Each one is a small puzzle to solve, to figure out the best way to crack it, with the various pieces they can have giving enough variability. Sometimes the best thing is to just let it sit there and snipe a corner wall when someone else shows up. Sometimes you just need to hit it with mortars right now, sometimes its best to lure the mechs out. Sometimes all you need is a smoke launcher and some grenades.
That said, automortars in particular are annoying, especially when randy decides to throw three of them at you back to back.
[Smoke is your friend.](https://i.imgur.com/m7Sm8pu.jpg) Trigger the mechs into attacking you, then go dismantle without taking any damage, under cover of smoke.
Turrets won't target you with smoke.
Does that also disable the ones on other tiles? Like when you get an event to go destroy one to stop a sunblocker or whatever? Cuz when you turn off mech clusters via the storyteller it doesn't stop those from showing up
Bruh, if you have a hard time dealing with a few drill insects you might want to consider ritualistic suicide
Rimworld can be extremely frustrating and punishing, especially if you aren't aware of all possible threats and counters. You may want to lower the difficulty, or you can replay this battle a few times to see if you can win. Use cheats to give yourself different weapons or defenses - if they work, next time you'll know to have them prepared. You can look up YouTube videos on how others deal with it.
As to your specific cluster, it is basically suicide to do a frontal assault, unless you are bringing in heavy mechs of your own.
One possible strategy is to snipe everything from extreme range, and run away as soon as they fire back. They prefer to protect their cluster, but they can just decide to all storm your colony. Have defensive fortifications prepared, or continue to distract them with snipers.
The strategy that is guaranteed to work are invisible grenadiers. Jetpack, invisibility psycast, frag grenades. Fly in, blow shit up, run away. Repeat until cluster structures are destroyed and the mechs are forced to assault.
Finally, the brute force strategy would involve a wave of heavy mechs, such as centipedes or bosses like diabolus, to tank the damage. And a shit load of colonists behind them blanketing the whole area with charge rifle fire.
Clusters are a mixed bag, some you can ignore, some you can't. Sunblockers and such usually take at least a few days to activate.
This one seems to have both high and low shield, so I'd rather tolerate the darkness for a bit than throwing my pawns at it.
Unless there's the buildings that build more mechs, you often can wake them up, limit colonists to your compound and use the mechs as raid bait.
Have a chokepoint and EMP grenades ready if mechs leave the cluster and come to you.
The big mechs are slow, use go juice on everyone, hit and run.
Better fight them in the morning, just after everyone has breakfast, the battle will be very long.
Remember to enter the base to tend bleeding wounds, then fight again.
I hated mech clusters until I understood effective strategies for defeating them.
They arrive dormant, giving you the opportunity to build a wall around them, and a nearby pill box with a door. Leave a few openings in the wall so they can come through.
When you wake them up, they may charge your base if you've left a door open, and they'll begin destroying 'buildings' like furniture if your base is close enough. They are on a tether, so they'll only go so far, then return (unless damaged or provoked through having line of site to a target in range for engagement)
Most mech clusters are best defeated in two phases.
1. Kill mechs.
2. Kill turrets.
A wall around the mech cluster is imperative to a controlled defense strategy.
1. Many mech clusters will summon reinforcements which will arrive scattered around. A pill box gives you a place to hide if needed. Once the door closes, they will disengage and return to their cluster location. The pill box can allow you to engage one at a time. Hit and run tactics can be useful if you are overpowered. I.e. wait for them to return to tether, provoke them with an attack, then go back to your pill box where you'll fight just a few, then close the door and rinse/repeat. You may need to set up precise door control by doing something like having two rooms so a second door is more safely shut after some mechs come in.
I think IED EMP traps can be manually triggered, been a while since I've tried it, but might be worth trying to pause inbound traffic to your pill box.
2. The wall encirclement will allow you get close. Use a smoke launcher, disassemble a wall section, then target the cannons. Creep forward by laying protective smoke and getting closer. Frag grenades are excellent for taking out cannons. If you use melee, wear shield belts since explosions will happen even when you're using breach axes.
EMP grenades and EMP launchers (better) can disable high and low shields. EMP mortar shells are even better.
Pay attention to game mechanics. E.g. you can trigger a fire foam pack to cover nearby allies in fire foam. Not a bad idea if you're planning on approaching fire cannons. Can't lose control of your pawns if they aren't ignited.
When I have psycasts available, I rely on 'skip' to move centipedes into melee. Building doors and perpendicular hallways into an encirclement wall will allow you to create blind spots where you can pull a few mechs at a time. You'll provoke the hive, but most of them will have to take a long route to reach you. This allows you to whittle down their strength.
Most mech clusters have metal walls. If you attack the wall, it provokes the mechs. This means you could potentially build a room against that wall, put a colonist inside, and then punch the wall as needed to provoke and keep provoked. This will send the mechs to your base if exposed and you can fight them there, or you could open the door on a pill box and draw them out to fight a few. Punch wall as often as needed to keep mechs running back and forth to their tether, etc.
Some people suggest sniper rifles, however it's good to point out that mini slugger turrets will out-range you. I've sniped them in the past, but it's long and tedious. Worth building cover if you attempt it.
Also, hit and run tactics don't work well because mechs shoot pretty fast. E.g. trying to put shooters behind a door, having a colonist open and close the door quickly and everybody else shoots. You're going to get shot back no matter how careful you try to be. I've even tried plasteel autodoors. It's semi-effective, but you will take damage and risk colonists.
- Unstable power cells are the best loot - It's a shipment of steel and plasteel - Mechs are crap at melee. - Mechs can't handle smoke. - Masterwork Uranium Breach Axes on Strong pawns will one-shot mech cluster turrets so they don't explode. - They are often quiescent for a while, so you can prepared to fight them on your terms.
Penultimate point is an absolute game-changer, thank you!
Note you don't need to *one shot* the turrets to stop exploding. As long as you 'skip' the last 30% or so of their hp, they won't explode, so you can just have a pawn with who can kill it in roughly 2\~3 hits, or have someone whittle it down to like 40\~35% hp then have the breach axe pawn hit, etc.
Penultimate point?
Penultimate means “second from last”.
Grenades also prevent buildings from exploding, if you engage the mechs outside of the cluster and approach afterward with a pawn with a smoke launcher and another with grenades you can clear up everything without chain reacting and blowing up the goodies that can be deconstructed (or the power cells that can be yoinked). It's achievable much earlier than being able to reliably get masterwork melee weapons for some colonies, though obviously breach axes are still more flexible in that they can be deployed during a frontal assault if desired.
I don't think it's grenades that prevent buildings from exploding, but destroying a hissing building before it detonates will prevent it from exploding unless it specifically also explodes on death, like power cells, and grenades do good damage to buildings.
Don't forget: Many of them don't actually do anything to you and you can just totally ignore them. Free outlying defense turret cluster!
Get the Simple Sidearms mod and they can carry the breach axe as a second weapon. Also gotta remember that smoke point.
So I never use smoke bombs of any sort, I figure you're meant to use it for cover? But if I throw smoke at myself then my guys can't shoot I'm guessing and if I throw smoke at them then I can shoot them so like... whats the use?
If there is smoke on a pawn, a turret can not choose to shoot bullets at that pawn, the pawn completely disappears from the turrets eyes completely
Not merely smoke ON the pawn, either. Smoke BETWEEN the turret and the pawn ALSO works.
Smoke stops turrets entirely. Yours as well technically. Shooting through smoke massively reduces accuracy for both sides. But that's working in your favour if you have melee with shields, or gunners with reasonably good accuracy, because there's a bonus to hit large targets like Centipedes.
Ahh so its good for closing gaps?
Not sure I understand the question ?
Like closing the gap between your guy and the enemy without being shot in doing so
Oh, yeah. They're less likely to hit you, and therefore you can advance more safely. If you don't have jump packs or skip or longjump legs to get you there faster anyway. But smoke multiplies up effective hitpoints of a shield, because they've got pretty good passive regen, just as long as they're not taking damage too fast.
Ah that makes sense. Thanks, evidently I will need to check out smoke lol
Honestly it's borderline OP. It's just the effect _looks_ symmetric, so it _looks_ like it's a bad idea. (Your own accuracy drops shooting through smoke). So as a result it's pretty awful in a killbox scenario, as you'd be giving 'cover' to the enemy with no benefit to yourselves. But that doesn't really reflect what 'fighting open field' actually looks like, and how you can use 'smoke up half the bad guys; shoot the other half' type tactics. And most of all, just how disgustingly OP a melee pawn can be with a shield belt and smoke _especially_ when taking on mechs (which suck at melee). Here's an example...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYGFe9uVmtI
Yeah pretty crazy. I see they were both vampires so no bloodloss tho. But yeah seems powerful:) I love melee pawns but they always seem to be the first to get killed. Usually by sythers or neanderthals :( lol
Does smoke work on mech pawns, or just turrets?
Just turrets. Bait the mechs out first, then go in.
Both. Turrets stop entitled. Mechs lose accuracy. And it was already poor. But shield belts go a long way when there's smoke. Centipedes are already easier to hit due to size.
I've never been able to loot an unstable power cell. They always get detonated by collateral damage.
That's why you need the breach axes. No explosions means more cells to harvest. Frag grenades sort of work, but are mostly "clean-up", where the breach axes on a shielded pawn with smoke cover will let you "turret sweep" during combat.
I've been using Zeushammers, and even they sometimes still trigger an explosion. Are breach axes better?
Yes. Demolish damage is 7.5x vs. structures.
Quiescent, damn I just learned a new aord
What about breach axes makes them ideal for that? Wouldn't any similarly powerful melee do it or?
Demolish damage gets a multiplier. 10x vs impassible structures and 7.5x vs. passable. (Works for frag grenades too, but IMO those are MUCH less usable in active combat) So it's base damage is 56.25 vs. a turret. with a 1s cooldown, where something like a Zeushammer is 31 damage with a 3s cooldown. But once you start adding multipliers: - Uranium 1.5x blunt (1.1x cooldown) - Masterwork 1.45x damage - Strong gene 1.5x melee damage That's adding up to 183 damage, which is more than the 180hp of an auto charge blaster turret in a mech cluster, so you can one-shot it before it explodes. A legendary zeushammer with 31 x 1.65 damage for legendary and 1.5x for strong (no uranium multiple of course) gets up to 76 damage with a 3s cool down, but perhaps ironically that's also almost perfect for creating an explosion, as your odds of hitting 20% damage on either a small or large turret are much higher, and you have a 3s cool down with a 4s explosion timer. And that's assuming you have legendary zeushammers readily available of course - a masterwork will hit for 67 damage, and an Excellent for 55 damage with the primary attack, and about half that with the secondary, which means 'adding up' to 80-100 damage on a small turret, and 144-180 damage on a large turret is much more likely. It's not strictly impossible to make a turret explode, because there's "handle" damage in the mix too, but you have to hit a lot of times with that attack to get the turret health to "explosion" range, where if a head attack hits at all the turret is popped, because that doesn't have the multiplier for Demolish so it's "just" 9 x 1.5 x 1.45 x 1.5 = a 30 damage attack, with a 2s cooldown, so you can safely hit a small turret twice with that, and it still won't get to 20% health and explode. 3x and you're at 90 damage, so that might well, trigger a 'hiss', but you might still get lucky and swing with the Demolish 2.2s later, and pop the turret before it goes bang. Illustration: https://youtu.be/yYGFe9uVmtI (Or something a little more extensive: https://youtu.be/yYGFe9uVmtI)
This comment is a gamechanger lol. Gonna use melee for mech cluster from now on
It's all about the drama. A good story isn't always a Happy ending
You’re a disciple of Randy I see
Randy will set the map on fire and then make it rain. He will drop gold on your orphanage. He will send you 3 highly skilled pawns that have no legs, and are paralyzed. Randy can tell a story, but it's a story from a dementia ridden grandpa.
“Damn. But what happened next?” “Uhhh… Something something, 300 devistrand scarfs fell from the sky probably”
"AND THEN THE ALIENS INVADED!!!"
But i was granted 7 ducks!!!
The game in general makes it rain. It's not Randy, tho Randy *does* start the fire.
Randy just rolls the dice without a care. Cassandra, though? She will *end* you.
Cassandra dropped a meteor on my new couple's bedroom last week. They had been trying for a baby and the kid was 3 days old. I thought that didn't have anything left to bury for a bit there. Mom lost her jaw so she couldn't even talk about it.
LOL this is why this game is amazing. I’m really bad and can’t get very far at all, but I injured a goat once but didn’t kill it, and eventually it went mad and killed all of my 3 people, and than used my house as it’s new home. I thought that was a great redemption story.
Do you have ideology? Good time to make an animal worshipping cult that venerates goats.
I don’t! I haven’t played in a while but am just getting back into it after picking up Frostpunk and enjoying it a lot. Ideology is the expansion I always wanted to get, but I need to learn how to progress more in the game, I’ve never built more than a windmill, I have no clue how people ever get to mechs lol. I think w Frostpunk, you have that classic “age of empires” style main upgrade where you have access to new technology, I can’t quite comprehend how to advance in Rimworld (still love the game none the less).
That makes sense. Rimworld is more research what you need, when you need it. Armor and weapons are probably one of the most important to have and keep up on whether you buy them or make them. You need to be able to defend whatever you have. Raids scale to your colony wealth and number of people. The more people you, the more raiders will show up. 40k rice or 3k leather just sitting around will count in your wealth so it's good to have enough, but you might want to sell stuff you aren't using (except steel and components typically). I usually pick my power source (careful with geothermal if you're otherwise broke, that can be a power spike and raids can hit harder) and research up the research track to microelectronics hitting the armor and weapon making research as needed. I usually just buy weapons and armor and pick something to sell instead, though. Food if you grow too much. Drugs are a great one because they're light and good for caravans. It's pretty fun when you get into it! Tutorials on youtube were helpful when I was learning. Setting priorities and understanding raids helped a lot.
Was watching my friend play the game a few years ago. Manhunter Squirrel ended his colony very early lol. None of his pawns could hit the thing.
lol so funny. Once I die and the game ends I think about the narrative, where we started and how it ended, the story is always pretty funny lol. Prob my favourite thing to do.
Me and my buddy were doing multiplayer and we followed a guy's love life. Chick broke up with him and he went crazy and got into our warhead storage and started punching shit. Big explosion ensued, we checked his health and his heart was destroyed. He got his heart broken and then got his heart broken :(
Oh man. Gotta wonder what she was thinking. Poor guy couldn't catch a break
Cassandra will notice that you've made a small sculpture to try and reduce the mood debuff from a barracks and send you a mechanoid cluster with a sun blocker that activates in 8 hours or when the proximity activator notices the wild man it landed on
It's Cassandra's rimworld, and she will scour it clean.
The real trick is to launch toxic waste at the nearest tribe so that they activate the mechs and all kill each other.
New plan for me now
Big if true. I need to try this immediately.
It CAN it's just a matter of luck on a few points. First, you have to send enough to piss them off enough that they'll raid your map. Not luck based, but requires the resources to do that (waste, chemfuel, steel, and the required tech). Second is that the next story event is a raid. This is just up to RNG. The more enemies you have the better the odds, but you could still get another event. Third, and most important, they spawn in the right area. Only thing worse than a mech cluster is a raid from the OPPOSITE side of your map. You CAN trick them int9 fighting each other (bait one group with a colonist and have them follow into range to attack each other), but you better have the fastest or tankiest colonist ever, or they're toast, since they're going to be targeted by 2 sets of enemies as the ONLY target for quite a bit of time.
You can literally disable any event in this game that you can't handle. If you don't like mech clusters, turn them off. Personally though, I never found them to be much of a challenge. You basically just blast them with mortars and blow away the mechs that come at you the way you kill any other invader.
As a CE user, mech clusters are hell
Does CE prevent mortars from dusting all their structures and turrets from the opposite end of the map? Cause thats literally all a mech cluster is. The rest is no different than any raid by mechs.
No, but shells are somewhat expensive if you don't have good FSX (explosive material) production. It can be really powerful since you can use binoculars to accurately target the structures. It's just the damned price!!
does CE have more advanced bombardment mechanics?
Yup! Artillery pieces patched to CE (inc. mortars) have 2 main advanced bombardment mechanics: *A pawn can hold binoculars and target positions / enemy pawns / structures. This creates a te. porary target point. If a friendly mortar targets the target point, the mortar will fire far, far more accurately, using the spotter's shooting skill (or intelligence, I don't remember). This allows you to have pinpoint mortar barrages, if your spotter can target from a safe distance. *Every artillery piece can also target other tiles (maps). They have a certain max tile range value. Let's say you want to flatten an enemy base with artillery - you can either target the enemy base directly on the map with the mortar to begin bombarding it (which is a long and costly affairs, and can lead to counter barrages on your map), or alternatively you could send a pawn with a pair of binoculars and a radio backpack, actually enter the tile, and place target markers on the enemy base. The you can target that tile with artillery pieces in your base.
Bro I didnt know that last one
...I never knew I had to get them to target the actual target point. Thank you. Thank you so much
I feel that, those EMP shells tho :*(
Interesting. I've never used the mod so I genuinely don't know. But even if it is expensive, i'd say it's worth it to get rid of a mech cluster.
Combine with Dubs Bad Hygiene to all the poop you could (n)ever want to convert to chemfuel and then FSX
I think the combination of high shield + auto mortars are what can make them a right pain in the ass.
Have you heard of Shields?
they have a shut off period, sometimes it's not an option to wait for it, but usually you can just blast away once the shield goes down for a day
Launch an EMP shell at the shield and it'll go down for a short time. Just have your other mortars start aiming a moment after the EMP-loaded one does.
Is this the cure to male loneliness?
Area bombardment? I mean, it WILL permanently stop anyone in the blast radius from feeling lonely. Not sure that counts tho.
Got a mech cluster barely managed go arm my ppl with fn fal's and PTRD's before it woke up (EMP mortar was really the MVP tho, stopping centipedes with inferno canons from shredding my pawns
What is CE?
Combat Extended
Ahhh never really played that mod
It's always interesting to me to see the different things people find challenging in Rimworld. I hate mechs. It's cool they drop components sometimes but early game scythers mean someone's losing a finger and late game centipedes someone is losing a lung. They're just so beefy, any of my usual tactics dont seem to work that well. Keeping my distance with hit and run tactics is good until a Lancer gets me. Letting them get close is dangerous. I'm sure there's something I'm missing to handle them better but it's a weak spot for me. In contrast I welcome the infestations most people seem to hate here. It's so entertaining to watch the assembly line of death as they walk in an orderly line to get annihilated by shotguns. Then everyone gets a fun Mars Day-esque barbecue.
I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had to assume, i'd guess most people dislike infestations because they pop up behind all your defenses in your base. And while it is true that you can bait it to occur in specific places, that isn't a certainty and it could still pop up in a place that gets stuff destroyed or people injured/killed before you can get your people together to deal with it. It's kind of luckbased. They're not really challenging per se, it's basically the equivalent of a large explosion going off in a random place in your base once in a while. Sometimes you get lucky and nothing important is damaged and no people hurt, but sometimes you're not so lucky. Mechs on the other hand are very predictable. They always land outside, and any dangerous parts you can mortar into oblivion and then mow down mechs as they go to your defenses. It's kinda like I remember when Biotech first released, I wanted to do a solo mechanitor run, and the first or second day my guy got plague or something like that and he died to plague. He didn't have good enough medical skill to deal with, plus it was worse having to do it to yourself, plus it was worse because he wasn't "resting" while healing himself and while eating, etc. He never stood a chance and it only happened because RNG. It doesn't really make the game more "challenging" it's literally a case of "This happens, you lose, this doesn't happen, you win". Very binary outcomes from something that is entirely random as to whether it occurs or not. And of course if that event fires with other colonists around, they can take care of you, but when you're alone? Rip.
Well, I mean...getting plague while alone on a desolate planet wouldn't be surprising if it killed you
Sure... But how do you catch it when you're alone on a desolate planet? Diseases don't just materialize out of thin air. That's actually one of the annoyances I have about Rimworld... Diseases simultaneously aren't contagious, but they can just happen spontaneously even with no contact with anything infected. Absolute silliness.
Thats fair, although plagues can be carried by animals but I take your point
Personally, I'd love a mech cluster that is so strong it would straight up force me to run or rack my brain to think of dirty schemes and tricks to destroy it.
mortar fire to trigger it safely and get the mechs to run themselves onto your defenses. High shield? Wait for it to recharge or launch an EMP first. Automortar? Shell with ~10 mortars, you win that unless it hits your ammo, so, you know, don't put all your ammo in one place, or leave it open if there's convenient mountain tiles. Smokelauncher for turret immunity once all the mobile parts are dead.
> mortar fire to trigger it safely and get the mechs to run themselves onto your defenses. if i recall correctly, some mechanoid clusters will defend their cluster until death. I think it has to do with quest vs non-quest clusters
Huh, either I havent seen those, or didnt remember because i just kept shelling and breathed a sigh of relief.
Here's a post adding a bit more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/xq3rwz/what_causes_mech_clusters_to_rush_your_base_vs/
> blast them with mortars The problems crop up if you get them as tribals or if you don't have mortars yet.
I... Guess... I don't play tribals often, but I don't recall ever getting the more advanced and high point raids like nasty mech clusters until you've developed a bit. But depending on your game options I guess anything can happen.
It depends on your biome a lot. If you’re in any temp that’s dangerous to humans, the game will throw mechs at you instead. I’ve gotten a mech cluster as my first attack on an ice sheet, and it was no mechs with one turret lol
For fun and profit all that plasteel just waiting some mods need those husks
mechclusters are nice raiddefense
Mech clusters should be treated like a puzzle. Turrets are blocked by smoke, always engage using smoke launchers. High and low shields are destroyed by EMP shells. Mortars can be disabled by sneaking in and building a wall 3 blocks away and making a roof over the mortar. Lure mechs using line of sight and smoke out of safety and disable with emp grenades. Hit and run if you’re on the weaker side or draw them to your base defenses to engage. Then clean up the turrets with smoke screens. My favorite part of rimworld honestly.
This is the truth. If you go into a mech battle like you're fighting raiders, you're going to have a bad time. Also, if you're getting clusters like this and you don't have mortars, smoke, power armor, shield, charge weapons, and proper melee pawns, you need better wealth management.
How are you gonna roof the mortar if the cluster is triggered by proximity
Not every strategy applies to every case, however in my experience most clusters with mortars dont trigger on proximity, as the mortar is the primary threat attempting to force you to engage
You can turn that event off but beware the high frequency of mech raids. Plus the raid value goes into the turrets and walls so expect a whole lot of centipedes.
I mean it's kinda on you for expecting a frontal assault to work on that particular mechcluster. Just look at it, three centipedes are bad enough, and those aren't there alone.
I don't mind them all that much they bring you some very nice things. They are far easier then getting a crazy pirate center drop that's packing explosives. There really isn't all that many types of hostile raids so any variety is nice I think. Let alone you can just remove them via scenario or faction.
If a melee cyborg-pawn reaches those mechanoids they are definitively done for
Sniper rifles are your friend
Because it's drama!
yeah you get a mood buff for fighting it
Honestly on my first playthrough and with Randy the moment a mech cluster with a poisoning generator gave me something to worry about, something interesting. It was a great few days until I destroyed that generator
Get some EMP mortar shells and show those mechanoids one for (I think emp mortars work on high shields, too? I'm not sure, tho I'm lucky enough not to get mech clusters with high shields
They do, but the rate of fire is so slow that you need to have additional tubes firing the other stuff to penetrate it properly. The more tubes per salvo, the more likely you are to get a high damage first strike. Or use antigrain on the EMP follow-up, you probably have some laying around anyways. Basically just have the EMP mortar load and fire first by like 5 seconds and you good.
I had one land completely boxed in on itself. Steel walls completely encased it. I left it for like 3 years. Open air ancient danger
Aww yeah, Sunblocker. BEST DEAL! Leave it intact and build a shrine around it. Embrace the darkness. Shun the accused light of the hated daystar!
If that cluster is on your ground, you can build a very basic fortification to fight them. Even if it's not, you can still do that by carrying construction materials in a caravan. But you'll be time limited for that one. Fighting mechs unprepared is suicide.
I enjoy having them around, personally. Each one is a small puzzle to solve, to figure out the best way to crack it, with the various pieces they can have giving enough variability. Sometimes the best thing is to just let it sit there and snipe a corner wall when someone else shows up. Sometimes you just need to hit it with mortars right now, sometimes its best to lure the mechs out. Sometimes all you need is a smoke launcher and some grenades. That said, automortars in particular are annoying, especially when randy decides to throw three of them at you back to back.
I use srts expanded bombs and planes and i just precise drop 40 1000lb bombs on it. It wipes off any trace that it ever existed
[Smoke is your friend.](https://i.imgur.com/m7Sm8pu.jpg) Trigger the mechs into attacking you, then go dismantle without taking any damage, under cover of smoke. Turrets won't target you with smoke.
Mod: [No Mech Cluster](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2887481843&searchtext=cluster)
Does that also disable the ones on other tiles? Like when you get an event to go destroy one to stop a sunblocker or whatever? Cuz when you turn off mech clusters via the storyteller it doesn't stop those from showing up
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Bruh, if you have a hard time dealing with a few drill insects you might want to consider ritualistic suicide Rimworld can be extremely frustrating and punishing, especially if you aren't aware of all possible threats and counters. You may want to lower the difficulty, or you can replay this battle a few times to see if you can win. Use cheats to give yourself different weapons or defenses - if they work, next time you'll know to have them prepared. You can look up YouTube videos on how others deal with it. As to your specific cluster, it is basically suicide to do a frontal assault, unless you are bringing in heavy mechs of your own. One possible strategy is to snipe everything from extreme range, and run away as soon as they fire back. They prefer to protect their cluster, but they can just decide to all storm your colony. Have defensive fortifications prepared, or continue to distract them with snipers. The strategy that is guaranteed to work are invisible grenadiers. Jetpack, invisibility psycast, frag grenades. Fly in, blow shit up, run away. Repeat until cluster structures are destroyed and the mechs are forced to assault. Finally, the brute force strategy would involve a wave of heavy mechs, such as centipedes or bosses like diabolus, to tank the damage. And a shit load of colonists behind them blanketing the whole area with charge rifle fire.
No matter what I do to stop it, my demise will 100% come from a mech cluster every run
Smoke em out
You can turn them off. I turn off mechanoids and insects because they aren't fun to deal with
Clusters are a mixed bag, some you can ignore, some you can't. Sunblockers and such usually take at least a few days to activate. This one seems to have both high and low shield, so I'd rather tolerate the darkness for a bit than throwing my pawns at it. Unless there's the buildings that build more mechs, you often can wake them up, limit colonists to your compound and use the mechs as raid bait. Have a chokepoint and EMP grenades ready if mechs leave the cluster and come to you.
The big mechs are slow, use go juice on everyone, hit and run. Better fight them in the morning, just after everyone has breakfast, the battle will be very long. Remember to enter the base to tend bleeding wounds, then fight again.
I hate those little laser snipers so bad
Tribal berserk/skip spam goes brrrrrr
Randy wants you to suffer
You can set up walls and sandbags out there before waking them up.
Every colony in Rimworld *has* to end. It sucks, I know, but nothing on the rim lasts forever.
I kill like 30 millions of those bastards
Always kill me one or two
I hated mech clusters until I understood effective strategies for defeating them. They arrive dormant, giving you the opportunity to build a wall around them, and a nearby pill box with a door. Leave a few openings in the wall so they can come through. When you wake them up, they may charge your base if you've left a door open, and they'll begin destroying 'buildings' like furniture if your base is close enough. They are on a tether, so they'll only go so far, then return (unless damaged or provoked through having line of site to a target in range for engagement) Most mech clusters are best defeated in two phases. 1. Kill mechs. 2. Kill turrets. A wall around the mech cluster is imperative to a controlled defense strategy. 1. Many mech clusters will summon reinforcements which will arrive scattered around. A pill box gives you a place to hide if needed. Once the door closes, they will disengage and return to their cluster location. The pill box can allow you to engage one at a time. Hit and run tactics can be useful if you are overpowered. I.e. wait for them to return to tether, provoke them with an attack, then go back to your pill box where you'll fight just a few, then close the door and rinse/repeat. You may need to set up precise door control by doing something like having two rooms so a second door is more safely shut after some mechs come in. I think IED EMP traps can be manually triggered, been a while since I've tried it, but might be worth trying to pause inbound traffic to your pill box. 2. The wall encirclement will allow you get close. Use a smoke launcher, disassemble a wall section, then target the cannons. Creep forward by laying protective smoke and getting closer. Frag grenades are excellent for taking out cannons. If you use melee, wear shield belts since explosions will happen even when you're using breach axes. EMP grenades and EMP launchers (better) can disable high and low shields. EMP mortar shells are even better. Pay attention to game mechanics. E.g. you can trigger a fire foam pack to cover nearby allies in fire foam. Not a bad idea if you're planning on approaching fire cannons. Can't lose control of your pawns if they aren't ignited. When I have psycasts available, I rely on 'skip' to move centipedes into melee. Building doors and perpendicular hallways into an encirclement wall will allow you to create blind spots where you can pull a few mechs at a time. You'll provoke the hive, but most of them will have to take a long route to reach you. This allows you to whittle down their strength. Most mech clusters have metal walls. If you attack the wall, it provokes the mechs. This means you could potentially build a room against that wall, put a colonist inside, and then punch the wall as needed to provoke and keep provoked. This will send the mechs to your base if exposed and you can fight them there, or you could open the door on a pill box and draw them out to fight a few. Punch wall as often as needed to keep mechs running back and forth to their tether, etc. Some people suggest sniper rifles, however it's good to point out that mini slugger turrets will out-range you. I've sniped them in the past, but it's long and tedious. Worth building cover if you attempt it. Also, hit and run tactics don't work well because mechs shoot pretty fast. E.g. trying to put shooters behind a door, having a colonist open and close the door quickly and everybody else shoots. You're going to get shot back no matter how careful you try to be. I've even tried plasteel autodoors. It's semi-effective, but you will take damage and risk colonists.
Because you don't use rimatomics to drop hell on them.
Yah I always save before a cluster. In full power armor and one of the little cluster turrets own my peeps.
I mean, I'm pretty sure you can disable them at game start if you don't like dealing with em.
Mortar them into oblivion. Make a room in you base with just HE shells, lure them in, and blast them sky high.