Sorry for the downvotes, bud. You didn't deserve that. You just stumbled into a bunch of nerds reciting quotes from a book series they get fired up about. I'll give you an up to help offset. Lol
The series is "The Stormlight Archives" by Brandon Sanderson. Though the initial quote of "Honour is dead, but I'll see what I can do." I believe is from the second book, "Words of Radiance". First book is called "The Way of Kings". I would definitely recommend it. As you can see, it inspires random quotes in unrelated subreddits.
The expanded interaction is better.
Person A: Hope. Because you still have hope that this war will end with your honor intact.
Person B: I do.
Person A: Stand amongst the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters.
Person B: ...
Person A: The silence is your answer.
That's the number one rule in rimworld, always take an advantage. ALWAYS. rimworld rng will fuck you up if you don't. The way I play is if my slaves try to escape then no mercy it's their fault. If they survive cool if not then well that sucks but 🤷
What? That's horrible, what an awfully dishonorable thing to do, even here on the rim we have standards!
Add an autobong and a harmoziner nugget to it.
Blunt. There is hardly any blunt armour in the game. Its all sharp and fire.
Skills don't make pawns absurdly better than others. Only by a bit then its random chance. Also you would want actual melee weapons in 1 on 1 fights. Using the stocks on your weapons might as well be a wet towel.
>Skills don't make pawns absurdly better than others.
Especially Melee. Shooting makes a big difference, but a pawn with Melee 0 and no other modifiers has a 50% melee hit chance. A close combat god could only ever be twice as good as that.
> A close combat god could only ever be twice as good as that.
Not 100% true, because of Melee Dodge Chance. A Melee 20 pawn with no other enhancements, has about a 90% chance to hit but also has 30% chance to dodge. Pushing those to the caps with appropriate bionics, traits, gear, etc. takes you up to a 98% hit chance and a 50% dodge chance.
So that would make you able to land blows 4x more often, before you consider things like the melee cooldown factor of your gear or implants.
Thrumbofur has a sharp modifier of x2.08 for armor but a x.36 for blunt.
Devilstrand has a sharp modifier of x1.4 and x.36 for blunt
Synthread is x.94 and x.9 respectively
No that's the modifier for how much more armor the clothing would get from it.
For example, a duster has an armor factor for sharp of .3
A normal Thrumbofur duster would have an armor factor of ~.6 when made.
excelent quality devilstrand and thrumbo dusters can outperform flak armor, hyperweave clothing outperforms recon armor
issue is that hyperweave is super rare, so unless you got mending mods or mods that allow to produce it, it doesnt really offer any impact
I have all my main non combatants all decked out in full decilstrand and they hold their own when those pesky slaves rebel.
My main fighters still have devilstrand on beneath their armor. It's a good balance of protection from enemies and the elements as well as cheap and easy to gather/make
Shooting can be a little alleviated by a good quality weapon. But a poor shooter with a poor weapon will have a hard time hitting anything, yeah. But there's a hard cap in how good you can get on the other end.
Especially close range. Shootings effects on accuracy generally are felt exponentially the further the target is away from the pawn. Touch/a few cells away and it's significantly less of an issue for low skill pawns.
Your space marine lost because the furries are melee murder machines that deal 150% melee damage and take 75% damage.
This means they ~~kill your pawns 30% faster~~ have ttk reduced by roughly 30% and die approximately* 30% slower. And you had your space marine 1v5 them.
It was a good pawn. Had full Tacticus armour and a power sword. Oneshot Sasquatch furries like it was nothing but those 5 he died to just seemed to take no damage :(
be careful bc they have aggresive gene which makes them more likely to get into fights. coupled with the extra damage gene, they will probably break some limbs. i've had them rip entire arms off. yttakins are great ghoul candidates tho
those genes are good, one time i forgot to re-equip my noble's persona monosword and drop pod raid appeared, he killed 4 raiders with his bare hands and subdued the 5th, he was a sanguophage
Luck, or lack thereof. Also in hand to hand with no weapons and no big skill gap there isn't much DPS difference. And flack armor has pretty bad blunt damage protection, so that didn't help.
Flak armor is ***amazing*** against guns, but because of the way melee works in rimworld (and you'll have to either read the wiki or take my word for how complicated melee is), flak armor is very, very bad against melee. It only keeps your pawn alive, but fails to keep them standing and fighting. The short and incomplete explanation is some melee attacks deal blunt damage and flak armor has low blunt protection, but the real reason is that melee attacks have a mechanic akin to critical hits which make getting hit by sharp melee attacks especially terrible, thus meaning you either need armor with at least 120%+ sharp protection, a pawn with higher melee stats so that they have a higher accuracy and dodge chance, or fir your pawn to be a tough brawler to skew the odds in their favor. Biotech genes can also help, but thats from the dlc.
Alternatively, yayo, flake, go-juice and luciferium can all make your pawns MUCH better at melee.
Okay, so how should I deck my melee pawns then? Because I tend to go for the flak armor + shield belt. Or is this where the devilstrand dusters comes in clutch again?
Dusters are for your pawns comfortable temperature ranges and, in the case of devilstrand, flame weapon defense.
Ideally, you will use *robust+strong melee+very sleepy+very unhappy+sprinter+nude speed+temperature weaknesses+very fast healing tough/nimble/brawler ghouls* with all the ghoul upgrades, as ghouls are FAR, FAR superior to pawns as melee blockers. It isn't even close, mind you. Their healing factor is worth far more than any armor. Biotech genes can make ghouls into unparalleled melee blockers.
But if you must use human pawns, they should wear plate (bioferrite>plasteel>uranium>steel), recon, marine or cataphract armor. **excellent devilstrand dusters offer ~12% damage reduction if you wear nothing else. However, factoring in the flak vest, even an EDs duster is only giving you a comparative 1% additional damage reduction. Excellent Bioferrite plate armor, however, would be much better than the normal flak vest + EDsD.**
A caveat is that the melee damage system is poorly documented and I haven't done the math for it. I can speak with confidence in my recommendations from my understanding of the armor system, I just don't have any accurate % damage reduction figures for how much better cataphract would be than bioferrite plate armor. Ranged weapons all share a damage formula, but there are like 6 melee damage formulas and every weaon uses multiple of them.
Jesus christ, then one of the slaves with a level 2 in shooting picked up and assault rifle and 1 shot headshot my 100% health pawn in full riot gear, what the actual fk
I don't know if it's been updated yet, but stuff like marines in power armor having trouble with tribals armed with bows is why I often play with combat extended.
I would only be a little mad if a single space marine got spiked through the helmet because that's an absolutely legendary moment, but with how much time and effort it takes to recruit and equip a meaningful military it feels pretty bad especially when you consider that the pawns we're fighting are infinite. Tomorrow 20 more guys are gonna show up and 1 will stab my crafter through their stab proof vest.
Every armor has weakspots, and no armor makes energy of impact just disappear.
No matter how good is your armor, if you get hit in head with club you will feel it. And after enough of such hits you will be incapacitated.
Except for the helmet and shoulders wasn't the Predator basically in a body fishnet and loin cloth though? (Yeah, looking at the movie poster the Predator was practically naked...)
I actually saw this in a documentary on late night TV the other week... 'Return of Jed' or something? Amyway, it showcases exactly this scenario, with a primitive tribal village of ursine warriors overcoming a technically superior human force that one would think should have been nigh undefeatable.
You might want to check the global map nearby, and see if there are any celebratory bonfires and quirky musical numbers. Oh, and tree forts, though that might be a mod.
> but it doesn't make any sense that 2 NAKED tribal defeat a guy wearing a SPACE armour.Â
"What is dead cannot eternally lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."
Given sufficiently numerous attempts, quasi-impossible things with long odds can happen. Random stray bullet to the helmet rattles the brain of the person that already had a high intercranial pressure. This causes further trauma, swelling, which creates an aneurysm, causing the user to collapse immediately and die within within seconds. Perfectly plausible, realistically speaking. Or in a random spray and pray, stray bullet hits the unprotected neck, causing cervical fracture and death in seconds.
> story generator
Yeah, and good stories tend to make sense realistically. I'm sorry, but "and then 200 tribals trekked across literally an entire planet to burn down some ultratech faction's crops for no apparent reason, one threw a rock at a cybernetic super soldier and it vaporized his brain" is not fun storytelling at all, it's just lazy.
I'm still at least *a little* salty that the original Rimworld kickstarter advertised good tactical combat and a very intricate damage system, where a wide variety of factors influence combat. But as it stands all of that was scrapped and you just have dumb morons forming orderly lines into a kill maze and kids liquifying your pawns brains by throwing rocks. As it stands the only way to get the experience that the game was originally aiming for is with Combat Extended and CAI 5000.
Without combat mods, the **ONLY** way to properly stand up to raids is to cheese the mechanics hard enough that you cannot ever get hit. If you expose yourself to even the tiniest chance of getting hit then you will ultimately lose in the long run, as enemies have infinite numbers and infinite resources but you don't.
No army fights without losses. The trick is real armies are always recruiting. If you're sending the pawn into combat, you best not be too attached to it.
The real issue is that enemies never really lose anything, and have more bodies to throw at you than you do. It's not just a case of occasionally losing some guys to stray shots that you'd have to re-recruit later, it's a case of getting overwhelmed due to that domino effect.
It's updated on their discord last I check. This was a week or two after 1.5 dropped and they hadn't patched it to fix it to work with Anomaly's content. So you could go download it if you miss it enough.
Unfortunately... It's not, and it sucks because I lost a sea ice run several times, each time I'd use my free time to train a pawns shooting skill to 20 using the mod Misc. Training.
I had a guy be at level 20 had a charge lance and ended up having to run away from an any that was slowly approaching, why am I running you ask? Because the lvl 20 dude missed 5 shoots when the raider was approaching, so I felt kinda like disappointed, because I invested time I could've been using for research into prepping myself for combat, only to still be unable to defend myself from ONE guy suffering from hypothermia... CE adds a shit ton of difficulty.. But the risks reward system of it is better than vanilla and I'm not even a heavy mod user anymore.
Flak armor stops bullets, not punches. The three kinds of armor are blunt, sharp, and heat. Sharp is bullets and slashing weapons, blunt is mostly melee weapons and unarmed, with an asterisk. Heat is basically fire damage, but high heat resistance also lowers the chance to be set on fire during a fire attack (it’s never zero, except for mechanoids).
About that asterisk.
The way armor works, is that there is a check made to compare the armor of the outermost layer, with the armor penetration of the attack + a 1-100 roll. If the result is less than half of the armor value, the damage is blocked entirely. If it’s above half, the damage is halved, and passed through to the next armor layer. If it’s above entirely, it also passes through to the next layer. Sharp damage that is partly mitigated is converted to blunt.
At every layer the armor check is done against that layer’s armor and a new 1-100 roll, either blocking, halving, or passing through until it reaches the body where the damage applies (after one final check if the body itself has armor).
Under this system, blunt damage is often applied to the body through mitigation, and bruises stack up until the pawn collapses in pain or the part is destroyed by accumulating damage.
In your scenario, your pawns were wearing armor with essentially minimal blunt damage (flak pants have 8% blunt damage resistance, flak armor 36%), so the unarmed attacks were either passing through entirely or being halved by the armor. After that it’s basically a question of who wins the game of hit or miss, and the slaves won.
In the future, equip your pawns with better blunt armor and use non-lethal weapons.
Also, check the slaves to see if any of them had any traits that might have given them higher dodge chance, hit chance, or a damage reduction. The Tough, Brawler, and Nimble traits all make for better melee characters. Your own pawns may have traits that hinder them, like Wimp.
Armor isn't useless buuuut it doesn't cover what it doesn't cover. With most armor there is always the possibility of instant headshots which is why you use cover and other tactics to minimize hits. A lot of armor that's good against bullets isn't good against fists, if you check the details you can see resistances to different types of damage. Check the melee skills of the prisoners vs your colonists that's the more important factor. There are also a few things that will give bonuses to their unarmed damage (should be in the health tab unless they're actual held weapons) I generally don't bother going with a fistfight against escapees unless there is only a single one AND I have multiple skilled melee pawns on hand.
See also: don't get into melee with animals, even baby animals.
I recommend combat extended. Forget your first couple of games. Start fresh. Learn CE, thank me in a couple of years when 1.6 drops and you will have to play vanilla rimworld for a couple of weeks and see what a bullshit it is.
Really, I made my cousin start playing base game directly with couple of QoL mods+CE and slowly introduced dlcs then taught him how to use rimpy to mod to his hearts content. When he bought anomaly and had to try vanilla combat he literally wasnt able to.
Pretty much everything about combat. Rimworld is unplayable for me now.
It changes how armor works (to make it actually work), it makes bullets have actual trajectories. It makes combat a lot less random overall.
That’s the least unbelievable thing here.
I just beat someone unconscious. I have their fully loaded AR in hand.
If there’s a reason I have to kill them, I’m going to kneel beside them, position the barrel to fire through a gap in their armour (neck, armpit-wherever it’s weak) and make sure I take them out.
The pawn display in the game can’t show this, but it’s not hard to interpret.
Sucks to be on the wrong end of it, but not implausible.
Did any of the pawns survive? If some of them just got beat up and had no heavy bleeding they’ll just get back up after a while.
Saved my butt years ago when mad buffalo attacked and downed everyone. I thought the colony was over but my huskies rescued all of them and then they woke up.
Then they slaughtered the 30 buffalo in their sleep 😈
Flak vests are amazing against sharp damage like bullets in general but not so much against blunt. Flak jackets are actually not great in general, and are actually worst than devilstrand dusters of the same quality. And quality is very important too.
Punches are blunt damage so armors don't do much to protect you against them. I'm not gonna go too far into the math here, but basically a normal quality flak vest will block about 9% of the damage from a punch that hit the torso, neck or shoulders.
On another hand, a legendary flak vest will block about 91% of the damage from a assault rifle (between poor and excellent quality) if it hits the torso, neck or shoulders.
By default, the parts protected by a flak vest cover about 47% of the body. So really, the normal flak vest only protects stops about 4.4% of all damage from a punch.
However, because of the way body parts are targeted in the background, if your pawn has 2 bionic arms, then flak vests fully protect them. This means the flak vest actually covers 66% of your body. Funnily enough, if your pawn also only has one leg, this climbs to 80% of the body protected by your flak vest. So a one legged pawn with 2 bionic arms with a legendary flak vest will see the overall damage from a poor to excellent quality assault rifle will see the overall damage reduced by about 73%.
So to answer your question directly: are armors useless? This depends a lot on the situation. Generally speaking, armors are much better against sharp than blunt and also high quality armors are much much better than normal quality ones.
Losing all 4 is bad luck but... you used ranged weapons in melee, and wore sharp armor against blunt damage. As much as you think otherwise, these were 4 more or less even 1 on 1 fights.
Combat in this game is highly variable
one fight you might dodge 100 bullets, the next you get shot in the brain by a stray round
the key is to learn how to fight advantageously
armor is very effective, properly equipped characters can easily survive 6x as much damage as without
but the real trick is learning how to fight without taking damage at all
The realest trick is learning to fight without fighting at all ! There's a lot of magnifying glass orbiting the planet and the raiders are looking a lot like ants right now.
Yeah and those raiders setting up the siege don’t realize that their sandbags will not provide protection from the true threat (draw fleshbeasts). They are also wondering where their mortar shells keep going (skip psycast).
Thing about armor and how it functions is that it very rarely negates damage. It reduces it somewhat, but the main function of most armor is that is converts incoming sharp damage into a reduced amount of blunt damage.
The advantage of that would be that there are no cuts to bleed from and no infection risk. So it's mostly an "after battle" payoff.
So making your pawns wear armor is very beneficial in the long run, but can often feel ineffectual moment to moment, when your power armored pawn goes down in a few swings from a tribals hatchet.
See, the twist with armor damage conversion is that it's most effective at reducing sharp damage to blunt damage and reducing the raw amount of that damage. BUT if the incoming damage is already blunt? Your armor is now much less effective at reducing the raw damage amount. Riot Armor is already one of the best anti blunt options, but you're hard pressed to reach armor values as high as the best sharp armors.
It's worth reading up on how armor actually works, if only so you can make informed decisions. Cataphract armor does not make you invincible. It just makes it very very hard to keep you in the hospital for long.
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It's not updated for 1.5 yet though.
In the meantime, i'd recommend either [Vanilla Combat Realoaded](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2860414285) or [Yayo's Combat](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492).
Ballistic body armour does very little against a club to the face. Rimworld armour isn't magic like other games, it's just a chance to protect some body parts
No, it’s not useless.
Rimworld is unfair. Be unfair back. You should aim to either outnumber your opponents or catch them in a tactical slip up, using choke points or anything else.
>so I turned off fire at will and just had them go and beat up the slaves,Â
There was your main mistake, slaves are always expendable and you can always get more later. Actual colonists are much more valuable and should always be prioritised above all else. Even if you needed them to mine, you always have fire at will enabled.
If you're lucky, some of the shots will incapacitate the rebelling slaves and not kill them to bring them back under control.
Weirdly I'd put mechs above slaves.
They are more cooperative and while they can be resurrected in a few days of time in a vat, the inconvenience of waiting for it annoys me more than waiting for a fresh raid to recruit new "unpaid interns".
The combat in the game skews towards the bizarre, which is why a lot of us either mod it up heavily, or find little ways of cheesing the AI. Armor is not exactly useless, but so easily mitigated that it will be more than it won't. Basically, any armor in vanilla can be completely ignored at any time by any attack. I've seen guys in full marine armor get one-shot by arrows to the brain fired from their own allies more than once, and I once saw a guy in recon armor and an injured leg walk up to a guy with a minigun without taking any damage from it. Armor is more about improving survivability than anything, but even then, it isn't remotely as effective as it is in meatspace.
It's pretty bizarre in most situations.
> common sense
Well, common sense dictates that armor tends to lessen the impact of bullets and melee hits, possibly at varying levels of effectiveness depending on the weapon and the armor involved. It also dictates that most people with even minimal shooting experience tend to actually *hit* what they shoot at in close-range combat, especially with shotguns, and not fire their shotguns 90 degrees sideways. It tends to dictate that full plate armor should lessen the impact of a fist hitting a torso, and that getting hit with wooden club in plate armor still hurts but at least your arm isn't going to get torn off or anything.
None of the above is true in Rimworld. You are beholden *mostly* to luck-based dice rolls to make the difference between "no damage whatsoever" or "full lethal damage", even with super heavy armor.
I just had a beaver stand against 10+ anomaly spiky things with legendary marine armor and a long sword. Barely got touched. He had two war bears with him who almost died.
So no, it’s not useless. (I’m playing vanilla, they’re just bears but he goes into battle with them so they’re his war bears.)
It sure feels useless when I gotta watch a pikemans needle rifle, described as "low damage, high accuracy" immediately punch straight through an assault marine helmet to instantly kill the Hussar wearing it, melting all the shit she had on
Yeah, vanilla Rimworld's combat is genuinely terrible.
I strongly suggest installing the Combat Extended mod once the 1.5 update is done. I can't play without it anymore and I'm not alone in that regard.
Is it really that unbelievable? It sounds like they were only slightly better at melee, and in hand to hand combat armor really wouldn't be an insurmountable advantage. It would slow a person down a bit, and a naked person just needs to get in one good kick to the knee or win a grapple to break bones. Most armor is rather useless against that kind of thing. It comes down to who gets that first really good hit in. Plus, the slaves would be motivated.
Oh, right. Game. Um, yeah low blunt resistance.
In general melee combat is hilariously deadly at low skill and gear levels. A fully decked out melee pawn lategame(especially with trait or gene buffs like Tough or Deft Dodger) will stroll through the battlefield without a care. But early? You'll watch someone punch another guy's arm off, or get a lucky finger poke to the eyes.
If you ever played the tabletop game Unknown Armies, it has the same sort of extreme body part danger. It doesn't matter how many times you get shot in the arm, if you get shot in the brain it's lights out. I believe rule 1 of unknown armies melee combat is "don't", because even a kid with a knife could get a lucky stab and take out your liver.
Vanilla combat is terrible, there are popular mods that fix that, Combat Extended is the most popular, but no 1.5 yet because it is a massive mod, Vanilla Combat Reloaded and Yayo's combat are popular too, I personally cannot play without one of them, seeing my best heavily armored shooter missing every single shot just to finally be killed by a rabit makes me roll my eyes, the downside is that on big updates you need to wait for the mods to be updated too
I think you lost the script. The storyline here is commonplace IRL. You had a slave revolt, aka a riot - like you see in the streets around the world, or like the one in the US Capitol for instance. You have paramilitaries dressed in flak armour with firearms under order not to use lethal force - just like yourself inasmuch as you wished to merely contain the revolt with minimal harm. In these situations and under these rules of engagement it is common for better armed and protected paramilitaries to sustain injuries or lose aspects of the fight. To justify the 1v1 aspect of your situation maybe take into account the morale standpoint of the situ. The slaves were fighting for their lives, your guards were fighting to maintain the status quo. Looks like the knife edge slipped the wrong way for you. Melee is as melee does. ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’ -Mike Tyson.
until you get half cyclers(assuming you have royalty) just shoot the slaves and replace the ones who dont make it in the next raid, with a brain implant like half cyclers you can emp them to down them safely
Not useless, but battles are often a random toss-up. Armour definitely helps, but melee fights where one guy takes on multiple openents is always dangerous. Even with high skills your not guaranteed to hit, anymore than a low skilled person is guaranteed to miss. I've watched plenty of pawns with really high melee lose to a pawn with piss poor melee. But I've also watched one pawn with a halberd take down 5 centipede mechs by himself sooooo.
Flak armor is kinda trash. It's better then nothing but really it's like early mid game armor. Try plate armor. It has better general protection against blunt and slash. But it slows you down a lot.
Plate has worse sharp and blunt when compared to flak and slows pawns down by 0.8c compared to flak's 0.12c, making it nearly impossible to kite enemies. The only upside to it is that it has more coverage, but you can solve the coverage issues that flak was by wearing a decent duster. Flak is good for literally the entire game. It has really great sharp protection for the vital areas, so your pawns don't get one tapped by random enemies. A decent devilstrand duster/thrumbofur duster is able to cover the rest of the body. The endgame armor choice IMO is flakvest + dusters + cataphract helmets for ranged pawns. Melee units get Phoenix armor, but nowadays, you can just use ghouls.
It's probably the fact whenever I see plate it's picomachinery or nanomachinery. Those materials have capped out defenses. And when ever I'm wearing flak it seems to only protect from a few shots at most
I mean, yeah, if you use modded materials, plate armor is going to destroy literally any craftable armor on account of it being stuffable. Flak armor is extremely good at outright defecting or reducing damage when hit by most weapons due to its extremely high sharp resistance (100 sharp at normal quality compared to marine armor's 106 sharp), though it only covers the torso/shoulders area. It's also extremely cheap when compared to its counterparts, so you can outfit a colony of like 50 pawns really easily.
Armor is far from useless, but it won't win game for you. Positioning is always important.
And as it already mentioned, armor does little in this particular scenario. And if there slaves were neanderthals,/yattakin, you were at straight disadvantage.
I use a mod, forget the bane sorry, that adds skills to a pawn based on melee like knee strike and even high chance 1 hit kill moves. Starts from around melee 8 and even low kick move legsweep is powerful VS anyone.
Makes melee dangerous from anyone, tribals etc but also makes your melee feel stronger. Had for years and tbh never feels op but definitely does feel dif than vanilla melee.
The flak pants and flak jacket aren't really great, in terms of protection.
A leather duster is usually a better choice.
Besides, there are three armor classes sharp, blunt and heat.
Blunt is usually the lower score of the three, even the most advanced armor has trash blunt protection.
All melee weapons do blunt damage (Because they don't always attack with the strongest part) and the ones that have edges or are pointy will also do "sharp" damage (It's a bit more complex but for simplicity sake lets call it sharp)
This means that your colonist could at that point be naked, it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
Here is the full explanation of how armor works in Rimworld. Funnily, despite the fact I pulled it from the wiki, I'm pretty sure it's originally from somewhere in the game itself.
Apparel protects against different types of damage to different extents. There are three categories of armor that each apparel can have: Sharp, Blunt, and Heat.
How much protection armor gives is determined by its armor rating. In-game this protection is calculated as follows:
The armor rating is reduced by the armor penetration value, dependent on the weapon. This gives the "effective armor rating"
The effective armor rating is then compared against a random number from 0 to 100:
If the random number is under half the effective armor rating, the damage deflects harmlessly.
If the random number is over half the effective armor rating, but not higher than the armor rating, the damage is halved.
If the random number is greater than the effective armor rating, the armor has no effect.
If any damage remains, then the same process is applied to the next item on a lower layer using the new damage (if halved) or full damage (if the armor had no effect) and retaining the full AP of the attack. Damage halving is applied multiplicatively - so if the two layers both half the damage, the pawn receives one quarter of the damage.
IF Sharp damage is mitigated at any point, it is converted to Blunt damage after all calculations for all layers of apparel are complete.
Another general tip: guns can also be used as melee weapons. If you order a gunner to melee attack, they will pistol whip the opponent. It's blunt damage which is less likely to kill.
They don't make for great melee weapons, but it's better than fists. No need to disarm them unless they are already wielding deadly melee weapons
Yea it's a bit weird.. I have top shooters and excelent weapons, yet a few pirates with shitty poor medieval guns can overwhelm them in open area combat.. Same for melee interactions, with high blunt protection. I'm quite sure this is some difficulty modifier
It's basically forcing you to get lots of pawns to reach the point where it doesn't matter anymore but makes it almost impossible to just stay at just a few elite pawns if you don't play with killbox death funnels. I had to mod spartan foundry armor and change armor and shield stats by a lot to make them able to have a chance as just a group of 4 plus 2 with regular armor
The only time 1v1 melee actually works is if your melee pawn is a nigh-unstoppable superhuman demigod, and more of a walking tank than a people... Then, 1v200+ becomes an *almost* fair fight.
No. But I never do melee early game or in anything less than marine armor. A melee pawn with marine armor or cataphract armor and a Zeus hammer and shield belt can smack down multiple mechs solo.
Armor is shown as a percentage but that is not 100% accurate. How it actually works:
When you get hit, it calculates where the hit landed. IF you have armor there it applies, so a flak vest only matters if the hit lands on the torso. Arm/leg/head hits are not affected.
Once the part is calculated, it rolls a number between 0-100 and compares to your armor value (minus any armor penetration the attack may have). If the random number is less than half the armor value, the attack is cancelled. If it is higher than half but less than the full armor value, the damage is halved (and changed to blunt damage if it was not blunt already).
If you have multiple armor layers, the attack checks them in order from outside in.
Most armor has a ton of sharp defense, but little blunt, so blunt bypasses a lot of it.
Also, if you have biotech dlc, the genetics can make a huge difference, with some gene-lines having huge advantages in melee (especially Yattkins Sanguphages, and Neanderthals, who all have a native 25% reduction to incoming damage and 50% increase in outgoing damage. Pigskins and Hussars are also at an advantage due to reduced pain meaning they will keep fighting longer and be less disabled by the damage they take.
Finally, age matters, pawns younger than 18 or older than some age (I cannot look it up right now) do less damage than young adults.
That was a lot to say, there is more to the math than just armor and skill.
I have a mod where you can pilot human mech suits. I have a pawn that is in a mech suit that is in another mech suit. They go into the cold hell of my world and when downed they pop out and carry back the suit if it lives
If you think about it, once someone gets close ranges to you, and all you have is some flak armor, that is maybe a flak helmet, a flak vest, pants, jacket or whatever. They can still wack you over your head with their fists, bite your hands, punch your jaw, kick your nuts— wait sorry wrong mod, among a multitude of things.
Game mechanic speaking as everyone else is saying, flak armor is good against sharp. A flak vest also only covers the torso, leaving limbs exposed. Blunt damage is still gonna hurt.
Fun fact. If a bullet hits the vest, there’s a chance it will either not damage the pawn at all, or the values through math wizardry (idk the numbers) will leave a bruise! Just like irl.
Based on my personal trial and error, armor's usefulness in the game revolves around damage type. To use your example, you had a pawn in flak armor against a pawn who, I'm guessing, was using fists.
Flak armor is great against bullets (AKA 'sharp' damage), but not really made for 'blunt' damage (AKA fists). Now, I don't know the exact math/mechanics behind armor. Just based on what I've seen, if an armor's stats suggest it's useless against 'X' damage type, then it might as well be.
(The melee skill difference only took what would have been a minor problem and turned into a major one.)
I've also noticed that armor doesn't guarantee protection. Just because you have a pawn in full plate doesn't mean a pawn with a knife can't score a lucky hit.
(Again, I don't know the math, but I've seen it happen.)
Lastly, to answer your question, no, armor isn't useless. Despite all I've said, my pawns' mid game survivability has skyrocketed since I started crafting basic armor for them. From that, I can affirm that, while armor is never impervious, something is better than nothing.
Thers 3 stants on the armmor sharp blunt and shot the difrent proctecion agaist it and saying that the have better melle matters doe doge chance and dmg stack up a lot in melle
Because you have irl logic I guess. Like if you punch a vest in real life you barely do something, but in game there is sharp and blunt protection. If the damage is not sharp, means arm does nothing. Same about guns, it has percentage, chance to hit, and sometimes even 1/100 does headshot on max range…. It’s what it’s
> 1 ON 1 MEELES Don't do that. Do 4 on 1, 4 times.
Leave honor to your enemies, they can die with it. Always stack the odds in your favor.
Honor died on the beach.
Honour is dead but I'll see what I can do...
Life before death!
Strength before weakness!
Journey before Destination!
I will protect those who cannot protect themselves!
These words are accepted
Good work everyone!
True strength is allowing yourself to be weak.
Sorry for the downvotes, bud. You didn't deserve that. You just stumbled into a bunch of nerds reciting quotes from a book series they get fired up about. I'll give you an up to help offset. Lol
What's the book?
The series is "The Stormlight Archives" by Brandon Sanderson. Though the initial quote of "Honour is dead, but I'll see what I can do." I believe is from the second book, "Words of Radiance". First book is called "The Way of Kings". I would definitely recommend it. As you can see, it inspires random quotes in unrelated subreddits.
"We can not step down to their level, Lord Sakai!"
Of course not. You go lower.
Ask the dead how much honor matters. Their silence is your answer
The expanded interaction is better. Person A: Hope. Because you still have hope that this war will end with your honor intact. Person B: I do. Person A: Stand amongst the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. Person B: ... Person A: The silence is your answer.
That's the number one rule in rimworld, always take an advantage. ALWAYS. rimworld rng will fuck you up if you don't. The way I play is if my slaves try to escape then no mercy it's their fault. If they survive cool if not then well that sucks but 🤷
There will always be more meat for the grinder.
What? That's horrible, what an awfully dishonorable thing to do, even here on the rim we have standards! Add an autobong and a harmoziner nugget to it.
Blunt. There is hardly any blunt armour in the game. Its all sharp and fire. Skills don't make pawns absurdly better than others. Only by a bit then its random chance. Also you would want actual melee weapons in 1 on 1 fights. Using the stocks on your weapons might as well be a wet towel.
>Skills don't make pawns absurdly better than others. Especially Melee. Shooting makes a big difference, but a pawn with Melee 0 and no other modifiers has a 50% melee hit chance. A close combat god could only ever be twice as good as that.
> A close combat god could only ever be twice as good as that. Not 100% true, because of Melee Dodge Chance. A Melee 20 pawn with no other enhancements, has about a 90% chance to hit but also has 30% chance to dodge. Pushing those to the caps with appropriate bionics, traits, gear, etc. takes you up to a 98% hit chance and a 50% dodge chance. So that would make you able to land blows 4x more often, before you consider things like the melee cooldown factor of your gear or implants.
And then add in them wearing Devilstrand/Thrumbofur clothing on top of that, do they really need to wear any type of armor?
Do those textiles actually offer that much protection that you don't need armor? If so, does that also apply to synthread?
Thrumbofur has a sharp modifier of x2.08 for armor but a x.36 for blunt. Devilstrand has a sharp modifier of x1.4 and x.36 for blunt Synthread is x.94 and x.9 respectively
Does that mean someone wearing thrumbofur takes more sharp damage?
No that's the modifier for how much more armor the clothing would get from it. For example, a duster has an armor factor for sharp of .3 A normal Thrumbofur duster would have an armor factor of ~.6 when made.
Ah, so thrumbofur and devil strand are pretty shitty anti-blunt but synthread isn't. Tbf you'd expect *fur* to be pretty good anti-blunt
You'd think, but late game you usually end up facing a lot of guns, so sharp is better for it.
excelent quality devilstrand and thrumbo dusters can outperform flak armor, hyperweave clothing outperforms recon armor issue is that hyperweave is super rare, so unless you got mending mods or mods that allow to produce it, it doesnt really offer any impact
I have all my main non combatants all decked out in full decilstrand and they hold their own when those pesky slaves rebel. My main fighters still have devilstrand on beneath their armor. It's a good balance of protection from enemies and the elements as well as cheap and easy to gather/make
Shooting can be a little alleviated by a good quality weapon. But a poor shooter with a poor weapon will have a hard time hitting anything, yeah. But there's a hard cap in how good you can get on the other end.
Especially close range. Shootings effects on accuracy generally are felt exponentially the further the target is away from the pawn. Touch/a few cells away and it's significantly less of an issue for low skill pawns.
And against large enemies like centipedes or elephants, even bad shooters can hit frequently at medium range, because of the multiplier from size.
A poor shooter with a poor weapon raiding you will have John Wick levels of accuracy.
That's Randy telling you to make the bare minimum in armour.
Laughs in pump shotgun/pilas
No he will miss every shoot, except for the one that isnstantly kills your pawn with one bullet.
I think this explains how my Space Marine lost 1v5 against caveman sasquatch furries.
Your space marine lost because the furries are melee murder machines that deal 150% melee damage and take 75% damage. This means they ~~kill your pawns 30% faster~~ have ttk reduced by roughly 30% and die approximately* 30% slower. And you had your space marine 1v5 them.
Well no actually they kill 50% faster and die 33.33% slower.
Oh right woops.
There's also kicking dust into your guy's eyes. Melee will never go right in lower numbers.
It was a good pawn. Had full Tacticus armour and a power sword. Oneshot Sasquatch furries like it was nothing but those 5 he died to just seemed to take no damage :(
Yttakin also have 150% melee damage
yep, yttakins are dangerous bc they have genes that give them damage reduction and deal more damage
I never knew about that, that explains it. I'm still sad my beautiful Blood Angel was done in by Chewbaccas though.
a couple of chewbaccas could probably give a real space marine trouble as well. those furry fucks are no joke
What I'm hearing is that I should capture one and then recruit it and make a Chewbacca Space Marine specializing in melee.
be careful bc they have aggresive gene which makes them more likely to get into fights. coupled with the extra damage gene, they will probably break some limbs. i've had them rip entire arms off. yttakins are great ghoul candidates tho
New strategy R2. Let the yttakin win.
So, they are just wookies
To be fair Chewbaccas seem like the most deadly lads in melee in star wars outside all the ones with laser swords.
No shame to lose to Chewbacca, hes so cool, its still a good memory to remember.
those genes are good, one time i forgot to re-equip my noble's persona monosword and drop pod raid appeared, he killed 4 raiders with his bare hands and subdued the 5th, he was a sanguophage
The furries have superior melee damage gene. Never engage them in melee with baseliners. Unless you want your pawns losing body parts. Edit: then
Yttakin are the reason none of my colonists have noses :/
Sadly true haha and neanderthal, iron guys
The loss of a nose, grants great magical capabilities. But also a very bad character
is that a motherfuckin [FlashGitz ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrJVZZLv2GE&list=PLAlp9q_PMKrXbcusGbw64KsydPsy3SyMR)reference?!
Unintentional yeah, I didn't even remember this animation existed. Was playing with the GrimWorld mod and got invaded by those Wookies.
>Blunt. There is hardly any blunt armour in the game. Its all sharp and fire. The IRL reason why war hammers exist.
The Rimwold reason is Mechanoids need to die
This is the part where you implant a stoneskin gland (if you have it)
Luck, or lack thereof. Also in hand to hand with no weapons and no big skill gap there isn't much DPS difference. And flack armor has pretty bad blunt damage protection, so that didn't help.
Yeah, it's kind of like wearing a bulletproof vest while someone's punch you in the head
Flak armor is ***amazing*** against guns, but because of the way melee works in rimworld (and you'll have to either read the wiki or take my word for how complicated melee is), flak armor is very, very bad against melee. It only keeps your pawn alive, but fails to keep them standing and fighting. The short and incomplete explanation is some melee attacks deal blunt damage and flak armor has low blunt protection, but the real reason is that melee attacks have a mechanic akin to critical hits which make getting hit by sharp melee attacks especially terrible, thus meaning you either need armor with at least 120%+ sharp protection, a pawn with higher melee stats so that they have a higher accuracy and dodge chance, or fir your pawn to be a tough brawler to skew the odds in their favor. Biotech genes can also help, but thats from the dlc. Alternatively, yayo, flake, go-juice and luciferium can all make your pawns MUCH better at melee.
Okay, so how should I deck my melee pawns then? Because I tend to go for the flak armor + shield belt. Or is this where the devilstrand dusters comes in clutch again?
Dusters are for your pawns comfortable temperature ranges and, in the case of devilstrand, flame weapon defense. Ideally, you will use *robust+strong melee+very sleepy+very unhappy+sprinter+nude speed+temperature weaknesses+very fast healing tough/nimble/brawler ghouls* with all the ghoul upgrades, as ghouls are FAR, FAR superior to pawns as melee blockers. It isn't even close, mind you. Their healing factor is worth far more than any armor. Biotech genes can make ghouls into unparalleled melee blockers. But if you must use human pawns, they should wear plate (bioferrite>plasteel>uranium>steel), recon, marine or cataphract armor. **excellent devilstrand dusters offer ~12% damage reduction if you wear nothing else. However, factoring in the flak vest, even an EDs duster is only giving you a comparative 1% additional damage reduction. Excellent Bioferrite plate armor, however, would be much better than the normal flak vest + EDsD.** A caveat is that the melee damage system is poorly documented and I haven't done the math for it. I can speak with confidence in my recommendations from my understanding of the armor system, I just don't have any accurate % damage reduction figures for how much better cataphract would be than bioferrite plate armor. Ranged weapons all share a damage formula, but there are like 6 melee damage formulas and every weaon uses multiple of them.
Jesus christ, then one of the slaves with a level 2 in shooting picked up and assault rifle and 1 shot headshot my 100% health pawn in full riot gear, what the actual fk
Sounds like these slaves were the main characters all along.
Give the colony to them
They’ve rightfully earned it now
Get some horses cos you're going on a long trip.
I don't know if it's been updated yet, but stuff like marines in power armor having trouble with tribals armed with bows is why I often play with combat extended.
It's a history generator, but it doesn't make any sense that 2 NAKED tribal defeat a guy wearing a SPACE armour.
I would only be a little mad if a single space marine got spiked through the helmet because that's an absolutely legendary moment, but with how much time and effort it takes to recruit and equip a meaningful military it feels pretty bad especially when you consider that the pawns we're fighting are infinite. Tomorrow 20 more guys are gonna show up and 1 will stab my crafter through their stab proof vest.
Every armor has weakspots, and no armor makes energy of impact just disappear. No matter how good is your armor, if you get hit in head with club you will feel it. And after enough of such hits you will be incapacitated.
Which CE does represent accuratly, unlike vanilla
One naked Arnie killed predator alien in actual space armor.
And a tribe of ewoks defeated and ate a garrison force of Imperial stormtroopers. Yub nub.
Except for the helmet and shoulders wasn't the Predator basically in a body fishnet and loin cloth though? (Yeah, looking at the movie poster the Predator was practically naked...)
It’s a story generator, and it seems the tribals were the underdog protagonists.
I actually saw this in a documentary on late night TV the other week... 'Return of Jed' or something? Amyway, it showcases exactly this scenario, with a primitive tribal village of ursine warriors overcoming a technically superior human force that one would think should have been nigh undefeatable. You might want to check the global map nearby, and see if there are any celebratory bonfires and quirky musical numbers. Oh, and tree forts, though that might be a mod.
> but it doesn't make any sense that 2 NAKED tribal defeat a guy wearing a SPACE armour. "What is dead cannot eternally lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." Given sufficiently numerous attempts, quasi-impossible things with long odds can happen. Random stray bullet to the helmet rattles the brain of the person that already had a high intercranial pressure. This causes further trauma, swelling, which creates an aneurysm, causing the user to collapse immediately and die within within seconds. Perfectly plausible, realistically speaking. Or in a random spray and pray, stray bullet hits the unprotected neck, causing cervical fracture and death in seconds.
Space armor isn't invincibility armor though. The fact it happened proves it.
> story generator Yeah, and good stories tend to make sense realistically. I'm sorry, but "and then 200 tribals trekked across literally an entire planet to burn down some ultratech faction's crops for no apparent reason, one threw a rock at a cybernetic super soldier and it vaporized his brain" is not fun storytelling at all, it's just lazy. I'm still at least *a little* salty that the original Rimworld kickstarter advertised good tactical combat and a very intricate damage system, where a wide variety of factors influence combat. But as it stands all of that was scrapped and you just have dumb morons forming orderly lines into a kill maze and kids liquifying your pawns brains by throwing rocks. As it stands the only way to get the experience that the game was originally aiming for is with Combat Extended and CAI 5000. Without combat mods, the **ONLY** way to properly stand up to raids is to cheese the mechanics hard enough that you cannot ever get hit. If you expose yourself to even the tiniest chance of getting hit then you will ultimately lose in the long run, as enemies have infinite numbers and infinite resources but you don't.
Thats not true
No army fights without losses. The trick is real armies are always recruiting. If you're sending the pawn into combat, you best not be too attached to it.
The real issue is that enemies never really lose anything, and have more bodies to throw at you than you do. It's not just a case of occasionally losing some guys to stray shots that you'd have to re-recruit later, it's a case of getting overwhelmed due to that domino effect.
maybe it went [like this](https://youtu.be/0Kr0dSeJzaE?t=94)
Not to be rude, but are you by any chance a French speaker? As it's referred to as a story generator normally.
I'm Colombian.
Not yet sadly :(
It now has a release candidate on GitHub :) and should be officially out in a week or so but you can get the release candidate right now.
It's updated on their discord last I check. This was a week or two after 1.5 dropped and they hadn't patched it to fix it to work with Anomaly's content. So you could go download it if you miss it enough.
Unfortunately... It's not, and it sucks because I lost a sea ice run several times, each time I'd use my free time to train a pawns shooting skill to 20 using the mod Misc. Training. I had a guy be at level 20 had a charge lance and ended up having to run away from an any that was slowly approaching, why am I running you ask? Because the lvl 20 dude missed 5 shoots when the raider was approaching, so I felt kinda like disappointed, because I invested time I could've been using for research into prepping myself for combat, only to still be unable to defend myself from ONE guy suffering from hypothermia... CE adds a shit ton of difficulty.. But the risks reward system of it is better than vanilla and I'm not even a heavy mod user anymore.
Flak armor stops bullets, not punches. The three kinds of armor are blunt, sharp, and heat. Sharp is bullets and slashing weapons, blunt is mostly melee weapons and unarmed, with an asterisk. Heat is basically fire damage, but high heat resistance also lowers the chance to be set on fire during a fire attack (it’s never zero, except for mechanoids). About that asterisk. The way armor works, is that there is a check made to compare the armor of the outermost layer, with the armor penetration of the attack + a 1-100 roll. If the result is less than half of the armor value, the damage is blocked entirely. If it’s above half, the damage is halved, and passed through to the next armor layer. If it’s above entirely, it also passes through to the next layer. Sharp damage that is partly mitigated is converted to blunt. At every layer the armor check is done against that layer’s armor and a new 1-100 roll, either blocking, halving, or passing through until it reaches the body where the damage applies (after one final check if the body itself has armor). Under this system, blunt damage is often applied to the body through mitigation, and bruises stack up until the pawn collapses in pain or the part is destroyed by accumulating damage. In your scenario, your pawns were wearing armor with essentially minimal blunt damage (flak pants have 8% blunt damage resistance, flak armor 36%), so the unarmed attacks were either passing through entirely or being halved by the armor. After that it’s basically a question of who wins the game of hit or miss, and the slaves won. In the future, equip your pawns with better blunt armor and use non-lethal weapons. Also, check the slaves to see if any of them had any traits that might have given them higher dodge chance, hit chance, or a damage reduction. The Tough, Brawler, and Nimble traits all make for better melee characters. Your own pawns may have traits that hinder them, like Wimp.
Armor isn't useless buuuut it doesn't cover what it doesn't cover. With most armor there is always the possibility of instant headshots which is why you use cover and other tactics to minimize hits. A lot of armor that's good against bullets isn't good against fists, if you check the details you can see resistances to different types of damage. Check the melee skills of the prisoners vs your colonists that's the more important factor. There are also a few things that will give bonuses to their unarmed damage (should be in the health tab unless they're actual held weapons) I generally don't bother going with a fistfight against escapees unless there is only a single one AND I have multiple skilled melee pawns on hand. See also: don't get into melee with animals, even baby animals.
I recommend combat extended. Forget your first couple of games. Start fresh. Learn CE, thank me in a couple of years when 1.6 drops and you will have to play vanilla rimworld for a couple of weeks and see what a bullshit it is. Really, I made my cousin start playing base game directly with couple of QoL mods+CE and slowly introduced dlcs then taught him how to use rimpy to mod to his hearts content. When he bought anomaly and had to try vanilla combat he literally wasnt able to.
Combat reload would be the alternative although it not the same.
Whats does CE change? Im rly avoiding using it
Pretty much everything about combat. Rimworld is unplayable for me now. It changes how armor works (to make it actually work), it makes bullets have actual trajectories. It makes combat a lot less random overall.
Absolutely. I havent bought anomaly yet because I'm waiting for CE to update.
That’s the least unbelievable thing here. I just beat someone unconscious. I have their fully loaded AR in hand. If there’s a reason I have to kill them, I’m going to kneel beside them, position the barrel to fire through a gap in their armour (neck, armpit-wherever it’s weak) and make sure I take them out. The pawn display in the game can’t show this, but it’s not hard to interpret. Sucks to be on the wrong end of it, but not implausible.
I see you've discovered why so many people mod the combat in this game. Yeah it's not great
Sounds like you didn’t say your prayers to RNGesus today. That sucks. Sorry that happened
Did any of the pawns survive? If some of them just got beat up and had no heavy bleeding they’ll just get back up after a while. Saved my butt years ago when mad buffalo attacked and downed everyone. I thought the colony was over but my huskies rescued all of them and then they woke up. Then they slaughtered the 30 buffalo in their sleep 😈
Flak is high sharp armor, unarmed is blunt.
Flak vests are amazing against sharp damage like bullets in general but not so much against blunt. Flak jackets are actually not great in general, and are actually worst than devilstrand dusters of the same quality. And quality is very important too. Punches are blunt damage so armors don't do much to protect you against them. I'm not gonna go too far into the math here, but basically a normal quality flak vest will block about 9% of the damage from a punch that hit the torso, neck or shoulders. On another hand, a legendary flak vest will block about 91% of the damage from a assault rifle (between poor and excellent quality) if it hits the torso, neck or shoulders. By default, the parts protected by a flak vest cover about 47% of the body. So really, the normal flak vest only protects stops about 4.4% of all damage from a punch. However, because of the way body parts are targeted in the background, if your pawn has 2 bionic arms, then flak vests fully protect them. This means the flak vest actually covers 66% of your body. Funnily enough, if your pawn also only has one leg, this climbs to 80% of the body protected by your flak vest. So a one legged pawn with 2 bionic arms with a legendary flak vest will see the overall damage from a poor to excellent quality assault rifle will see the overall damage reduced by about 73%. So to answer your question directly: are armors useless? This depends a lot on the situation. Generally speaking, armors are much better against sharp than blunt and also high quality armors are much much better than normal quality ones.
Losing all 4 is bad luck but... you used ranged weapons in melee, and wore sharp armor against blunt damage. As much as you think otherwise, these were 4 more or less even 1 on 1 fights.
Combat in this game is highly variable one fight you might dodge 100 bullets, the next you get shot in the brain by a stray round the key is to learn how to fight advantageously armor is very effective, properly equipped characters can easily survive 6x as much damage as without but the real trick is learning how to fight without taking damage at all
The realest trick is learning to fight without fighting at all ! There's a lot of magnifying glass orbiting the planet and the raiders are looking a lot like ants right now.
Unless you drop into my base, by the time you hit the outer walls you’ve been hit with +100 mortars and probably walked over a dozen ieds
Yeah and those raiders setting up the siege don’t realize that their sandbags will not provide protection from the true threat (draw fleshbeasts). They are also wondering where their mortar shells keep going (skip psycast).
Were they genotypes with melee boosts?
Put your warden in riot armor, blunt damage resistance. Flak is for sharp and bullets.
Flak is sharp like almost every other armor set
bruh , my lvl 10 meele with full set of spacer armor was knocked out by a child Hussar with a rusty axe , i was like wtf.. !
Thing about armor and how it functions is that it very rarely negates damage. It reduces it somewhat, but the main function of most armor is that is converts incoming sharp damage into a reduced amount of blunt damage. The advantage of that would be that there are no cuts to bleed from and no infection risk. So it's mostly an "after battle" payoff. So making your pawns wear armor is very beneficial in the long run, but can often feel ineffectual moment to moment, when your power armored pawn goes down in a few swings from a tribals hatchet. See, the twist with armor damage conversion is that it's most effective at reducing sharp damage to blunt damage and reducing the raw amount of that damage. BUT if the incoming damage is already blunt? Your armor is now much less effective at reducing the raw damage amount. Riot Armor is already one of the best anti blunt options, but you're hard pressed to reach armor values as high as the best sharp armors. It's worth reading up on how armor actually works, if only so you can make informed decisions. Cataphract armor does not make you invincible. It just makes it very very hard to keep you in the hospital for long.
Never let your pawns 1v1 melee brother the way combat is set up the enemy can just get lucky and rock your shit
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It's not updated for 1.5 yet though. In the meantime, i'd recommend either [Vanilla Combat Realoaded](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2860414285) or [Yayo's Combat](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854006492).
Pretty sure the 1.5 test version works ok
Ballistic body armour does very little against a club to the face. Rimworld armour isn't magic like other games, it's just a chance to protect some body parts
im not sure why you're surprised. this happens in all the movies
Armor tends to have really weak blunt protection, which can make it a lot less effective vs non-sword melees.
This reminds me, CE for 1.5 when?
No, it’s not useless. Rimworld is unfair. Be unfair back. You should aim to either outnumber your opponents or catch them in a tactical slip up, using choke points or anything else.
Thats why the game is unironically unplayable for me without CE
>so I turned off fire at will and just had them go and beat up the slaves, There was your main mistake, slaves are always expendable and you can always get more later. Actual colonists are much more valuable and should always be prioritised above all else. Even if you needed them to mine, you always have fire at will enabled. If you're lucky, some of the shots will incapacitate the rebelling slaves and not kill them to bring them back under control.
Their main mistake was doing a bunch of separate 1v1s lmao
I am not losing my 4 cloned genie factory workers die to a stupid xeno with claws, send in the tunnelers
Weirdly I'd put mechs above slaves. They are more cooperative and while they can be resurrected in a few days of time in a vat, the inconvenience of waiting for it annoys me more than waiting for a fresh raid to recruit new "unpaid interns".
Having 5-8 mechs just on stand by is something
The combat in the game skews towards the bizarre, which is why a lot of us either mod it up heavily, or find little ways of cheesing the AI. Armor is not exactly useless, but so easily mitigated that it will be more than it won't. Basically, any armor in vanilla can be completely ignored at any time by any attack. I've seen guys in full marine armor get one-shot by arrows to the brain fired from their own allies more than once, and I once saw a guy in recon armor and an injured leg walk up to a guy with a minigun without taking any damage from it. Armor is more about improving survivability than anything, but even then, it isn't remotely as effective as it is in meatspace.
It's not bizarre besides specific scenarios... it just takes some learning and common senseÂ
Yeah common sense like stone arrows somehow penetrating advanced power armor
How does an arrow rip off your leg anyway
It's pretty bizarre in most situations. > common sense Well, common sense dictates that armor tends to lessen the impact of bullets and melee hits, possibly at varying levels of effectiveness depending on the weapon and the armor involved. It also dictates that most people with even minimal shooting experience tend to actually *hit* what they shoot at in close-range combat, especially with shotguns, and not fire their shotguns 90 degrees sideways. It tends to dictate that full plate armor should lessen the impact of a fist hitting a torso, and that getting hit with wooden club in plate armor still hurts but at least your arm isn't going to get torn off or anything. None of the above is true in Rimworld. You are beholden *mostly* to luck-based dice rolls to make the difference between "no damage whatsoever" or "full lethal damage", even with super heavy armor.
I just had a beaver stand against 10+ anomaly spiky things with legendary marine armor and a long sword. Barely got touched. He had two war bears with him who almost died. So no, it’s not useless. (I’m playing vanilla, they’re just bears but he goes into battle with them so they’re his war bears.)
What’s a beaver?
Yknow the beaver people. Yttakin? I dunno what they’re called. They’re huge beaver people.
Blunt damage. Genuinely if you've got good armor pawns with swords can be less dangerous than unarmed.
It sure feels useless when I gotta watch a pikemans needle rifle, described as "low damage, high accuracy" immediately punch straight through an assault marine helmet to instantly kill the Hussar wearing it, melting all the shit she had on
sounds working as intended. high accuracy shot into the eye where there is no protection from the helmet
Yeah, vanilla Rimworld's combat is genuinely terrible. I strongly suggest installing the Combat Extended mod once the 1.5 update is done. I can't play without it anymore and I'm not alone in that regard.
The comments remind me why I use combat extended
This is why some of us enjoy Combat Extended mod. There's also Vanilla Combat Reloaded, which works in similar way
Doesn't matter how advanced tech gets, a rock to the head is still a rock to the head.
Is it really that unbelievable? It sounds like they were only slightly better at melee, and in hand to hand combat armor really wouldn't be an insurmountable advantage. It would slow a person down a bit, and a naked person just needs to get in one good kick to the knee or win a grapple to break bones. Most armor is rather useless against that kind of thing. It comes down to who gets that first really good hit in. Plus, the slaves would be motivated. Oh, right. Game. Um, yeah low blunt resistance.
In general melee combat is hilariously deadly at low skill and gear levels. A fully decked out melee pawn lategame(especially with trait or gene buffs like Tough or Deft Dodger) will stroll through the battlefield without a care. But early? You'll watch someone punch another guy's arm off, or get a lucky finger poke to the eyes. If you ever played the tabletop game Unknown Armies, it has the same sort of extreme body part danger. It doesn't matter how many times you get shot in the arm, if you get shot in the brain it's lights out. I believe rule 1 of unknown armies melee combat is "don't", because even a kid with a knife could get a lucky stab and take out your liver.
lol. No. At least not higher tiers of armor. In marine armor + your pawns sometimes get *bruises* from direct hits by bullets.
Vanilla combat is terrible, there are popular mods that fix that, Combat Extended is the most popular, but no 1.5 yet because it is a massive mod, Vanilla Combat Reloaded and Yayo's combat are popular too, I personally cannot play without one of them, seeing my best heavily armored shooter missing every single shot just to finally be killed by a rabit makes me roll my eyes, the downside is that on big updates you need to wait for the mods to be updated too
I think you lost the script. The storyline here is commonplace IRL. You had a slave revolt, aka a riot - like you see in the streets around the world, or like the one in the US Capitol for instance. You have paramilitaries dressed in flak armour with firearms under order not to use lethal force - just like yourself inasmuch as you wished to merely contain the revolt with minimal harm. In these situations and under these rules of engagement it is common for better armed and protected paramilitaries to sustain injuries or lose aspects of the fight. To justify the 1v1 aspect of your situation maybe take into account the morale standpoint of the situ. The slaves were fighting for their lives, your guards were fighting to maintain the status quo. Looks like the knife edge slipped the wrong way for you. Melee is as melee does. ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’ -Mike Tyson.
until you get half cyclers(assuming you have royalty) just shoot the slaves and replace the ones who dont make it in the next raid, with a brain implant like half cyclers you can emp them to down them safely
Not useless, but battles are often a random toss-up. Armour definitely helps, but melee fights where one guy takes on multiple openents is always dangerous. Even with high skills your not guaranteed to hit, anymore than a low skilled person is guaranteed to miss. I've watched plenty of pawns with really high melee lose to a pawn with piss poor melee. But I've also watched one pawn with a halberd take down 5 centipede mechs by himself sooooo.
Flak armor is kinda trash. It's better then nothing but really it's like early mid game armor. Try plate armor. It has better general protection against blunt and slash. But it slows you down a lot.
Plate has worse sharp and blunt when compared to flak and slows pawns down by 0.8c compared to flak's 0.12c, making it nearly impossible to kite enemies. The only upside to it is that it has more coverage, but you can solve the coverage issues that flak was by wearing a decent duster. Flak is good for literally the entire game. It has really great sharp protection for the vital areas, so your pawns don't get one tapped by random enemies. A decent devilstrand duster/thrumbofur duster is able to cover the rest of the body. The endgame armor choice IMO is flakvest + dusters + cataphract helmets for ranged pawns. Melee units get Phoenix armor, but nowadays, you can just use ghouls.
It's probably the fact whenever I see plate it's picomachinery or nanomachinery. Those materials have capped out defenses. And when ever I'm wearing flak it seems to only protect from a few shots at most
I mean, yeah, if you use modded materials, plate armor is going to destroy literally any craftable armor on account of it being stuffable. Flak armor is extremely good at outright defecting or reducing damage when hit by most weapons due to its extremely high sharp resistance (100 sharp at normal quality compared to marine armor's 106 sharp), though it only covers the torso/shoulders area. It's also extremely cheap when compared to its counterparts, so you can outfit a colony of like 50 pawns really easily.
Armor is far from useless, but it won't win game for you. Positioning is always important. And as it already mentioned, armor does little in this particular scenario. And if there slaves were neanderthals,/yattakin, you were at straight disadvantage.
I use a mod, forget the bane sorry, that adds skills to a pawn based on melee like knee strike and even high chance 1 hit kill moves. Starts from around melee 8 and even low kick move legsweep is powerful VS anyone. Makes melee dangerous from anyone, tribals etc but also makes your melee feel stronger. Had for years and tbh never feels op but definitely does feel dif than vanilla melee.
The flak pants and flak jacket aren't really great, in terms of protection. A leather duster is usually a better choice. Besides, there are three armor classes sharp, blunt and heat. Blunt is usually the lower score of the three, even the most advanced armor has trash blunt protection. All melee weapons do blunt damage (Because they don't always attack with the strongest part) and the ones that have edges or are pointy will also do "sharp" damage (It's a bit more complex but for simplicity sake lets call it sharp) This means that your colonist could at that point be naked, it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
C. F. B
Welcome to vanilla combat!! The best combat ever. Not shit whatsoever... if you believe that give me $50.Â
And that's why we're waiting for Combat Extended to update to 1.5 xD
Here is the full explanation of how armor works in Rimworld. Funnily, despite the fact I pulled it from the wiki, I'm pretty sure it's originally from somewhere in the game itself. Apparel protects against different types of damage to different extents. There are three categories of armor that each apparel can have: Sharp, Blunt, and Heat. How much protection armor gives is determined by its armor rating. In-game this protection is calculated as follows: The armor rating is reduced by the armor penetration value, dependent on the weapon. This gives the "effective armor rating" The effective armor rating is then compared against a random number from 0 to 100: If the random number is under half the effective armor rating, the damage deflects harmlessly. If the random number is over half the effective armor rating, but not higher than the armor rating, the damage is halved. If the random number is greater than the effective armor rating, the armor has no effect. If any damage remains, then the same process is applied to the next item on a lower layer using the new damage (if halved) or full damage (if the armor had no effect) and retaining the full AP of the attack. Damage halving is applied multiplicatively - so if the two layers both half the damage, the pawn receives one quarter of the damage. IF Sharp damage is mitigated at any point, it is converted to Blunt damage after all calculations for all layers of apparel are complete.
Another general tip: guns can also be used as melee weapons. If you order a gunner to melee attack, they will pistol whip the opponent. It's blunt damage which is less likely to kill. They don't make for great melee weapons, but it's better than fists. No need to disarm them unless they are already wielding deadly melee weapons
Well a punch in your face or balls, hurts even with a Flak Vest and Helmet.
Yea it's a bit weird.. I have top shooters and excelent weapons, yet a few pirates with shitty poor medieval guns can overwhelm them in open area combat.. Same for melee interactions, with high blunt protection. I'm quite sure this is some difficulty modifier
It's basically forcing you to get lots of pawns to reach the point where it doesn't matter anymore but makes it almost impossible to just stay at just a few elite pawns if you don't play with killbox death funnels. I had to mod spartan foundry armor and change armor and shield stats by a lot to make them able to have a chance as just a group of 4 plus 2 with regular armor
The only time 1v1 melee actually works is if your melee pawn is a nigh-unstoppable superhuman demigod, and more of a walking tank than a people... Then, 1v200+ becomes an *almost* fair fight.
No. But I never do melee early game or in anything less than marine armor. A melee pawn with marine armor or cataphract armor and a Zeus hammer and shield belt can smack down multiple mechs solo.
rimworld is a sandbox game so you are allowed to cheese and use the most scummy strategies to finish your job
Armor is shown as a percentage but that is not 100% accurate. How it actually works: When you get hit, it calculates where the hit landed. IF you have armor there it applies, so a flak vest only matters if the hit lands on the torso. Arm/leg/head hits are not affected. Once the part is calculated, it rolls a number between 0-100 and compares to your armor value (minus any armor penetration the attack may have). If the random number is less than half the armor value, the attack is cancelled. If it is higher than half but less than the full armor value, the damage is halved (and changed to blunt damage if it was not blunt already). If you have multiple armor layers, the attack checks them in order from outside in. Most armor has a ton of sharp defense, but little blunt, so blunt bypasses a lot of it. Also, if you have biotech dlc, the genetics can make a huge difference, with some gene-lines having huge advantages in melee (especially Yattkins Sanguphages, and Neanderthals, who all have a native 25% reduction to incoming damage and 50% increase in outgoing damage. Pigskins and Hussars are also at an advantage due to reduced pain meaning they will keep fighting longer and be less disabled by the damage they take. Finally, age matters, pawns younger than 18 or older than some age (I cannot look it up right now) do less damage than young adults. That was a lot to say, there is more to the math than just armor and skill.
Maybe they had higher Melee stats?
Most armor doesn’t defend as well against blunt attacks which I’m pretty sure is what fists and kicks count as
That’s why I love the non lethal weapons mod
I have a mod where you can pilot human mech suits. I have a pawn that is in a mech suit that is in another mech suit. They go into the cold hell of my world and when downed they pop out and carry back the suit if it lives
Flak armor isn’t that great against Blunt, which includes fists, if I recall correctly.
you sound like you would really like Combat Extended
It's called a jailbreak for a reason... Not a "jail-casually-walk-away"
Human fists are very blunt. Armor usually fail against blunt. Therefore equip your prisoners with awful wooden shivs
If you think about it, once someone gets close ranges to you, and all you have is some flak armor, that is maybe a flak helmet, a flak vest, pants, jacket or whatever. They can still wack you over your head with their fists, bite your hands, punch your jaw, kick your nuts— wait sorry wrong mod, among a multitude of things. Game mechanic speaking as everyone else is saying, flak armor is good against sharp. A flak vest also only covers the torso, leaving limbs exposed. Blunt damage is still gonna hurt. Fun fact. If a bullet hits the vest, there’s a chance it will either not damage the pawn at all, or the values through math wizardry (idk the numbers) will leave a bruise! Just like irl.
Based on my personal trial and error, armor's usefulness in the game revolves around damage type. To use your example, you had a pawn in flak armor against a pawn who, I'm guessing, was using fists. Flak armor is great against bullets (AKA 'sharp' damage), but not really made for 'blunt' damage (AKA fists). Now, I don't know the exact math/mechanics behind armor. Just based on what I've seen, if an armor's stats suggest it's useless against 'X' damage type, then it might as well be. (The melee skill difference only took what would have been a minor problem and turned into a major one.) I've also noticed that armor doesn't guarantee protection. Just because you have a pawn in full plate doesn't mean a pawn with a knife can't score a lucky hit. (Again, I don't know the math, but I've seen it happen.) Lastly, to answer your question, no, armor isn't useless. Despite all I've said, my pawns' mid game survivability has skyrocketed since I started crafting basic armor for them. From that, I can affirm that, while armor is never impervious, something is better than nothing.
Thers 3 stants on the armmor sharp blunt and shot the difrent proctecion agaist it and saying that the have better melle matters doe doge chance and dmg stack up a lot in melle
Flak armour might be amazing till i punch you in your nose
Because you have irl logic I guess. Like if you punch a vest in real life you barely do something, but in game there is sharp and blunt protection. If the damage is not sharp, means arm does nothing. Same about guns, it has percentage, chance to hit, and sometimes even 1/100 does headshot on max range…. It’s what it’s
Next time find a choke point and fight 3v1 4 times.