RimWorld "It has been an honor sir"

I know this is something I can change for myself in the Scenario Editor and somewhat with mods. I just wanted to bring it up as it's something I noticed after losing a Cataphract-Clad Cyborg wielding a plasteel longsword and mounted atop an Armored Grizzly Bear to 8 manhunter Fennec foxes. He had a painstopper and they pulped his torso through his armor before he could finish the last 3.

I want to be clear, this post is to start a discussion about an element of the vanilla game I feel is immersion-breaking, I'm not soliciting advice about my playstyle (I know, should've used a killbox, painstoppers are a trap, always use advanced combined arms tactics and fight Fennec Foxes with overwhelming numbers and mortars, etc.) and I'm not interested in discussing the bizarre "alternate facts" that pop up on these types of posts about armor ("ACKKSHUALLLY, in real life the Fennec fox has a bite PSI of 7,000,000 and 4 could eat a tank", "sticks were ACKKSHUALLLY highly effective against plate armor and could easily crush the height of renaissance metallurgy"...)

Armor has come a long way since Rimworld started, but in my opinion it still is in need of some balancing to avoid breaking immersion, particularly heavy armor.

To be fair, plate and the power armor variants (especially of high quality) currently do a serviceable job of mitigating Sharp type damage. The issue in my opinion is that there is almost no way to reduce the damage incoming from direct blunt damage or mitigated blunt damage.

To start with, even the best type of armor in the game is rendered mostly impotent against even the lowest quality blunt weapons. Let's use normal quality cataphract armor vs a club for example(numbers pulled from the wiki if they're wrong let me know):

Cataphract Blunt Armor: 50%

Wooden Club Armor Piercing: 17% average AP (20% from strikes with the head)

This means Cataphract armor vs. a wooden club will be reduced to 33% on average. This effectively breaks down to the following: 16.5% chance of no damage, 16.5% chance of half damage, 67% chance of receiving full damage.

Club strikes with the head of the weapon do 12 damage. This means a naked tribal pawn with basically the cheapest weapon in the game can 1 hit kill an imperial cataphract fairly easily. Any hit impacting the brain, heart, liver, etc. has a 67% chance of going straight through the armor and flat out killing your pawn.

Possibly worse, this means a group of 2-3 naked tribals with the weakest weapons in the game will be statistically basically unbeatable by an imperial cataphract in melee range and will likely maim and down them in seconds because they have a 83.5% chance of dealing solid damage with each successful hit.

To make matters worse, if your armor is mitigating sharp damage and inflicting .5 of the value as blunt there is very little that can be done to resist this type of damage. Let's evaluate cataphract armor vs. the humble short bow.

Cataphract Sharp Armor: 120%

Short Bow AP: 15%

This means Cataphract armor will be reduced to 105% and breaks down to the following:

55% chance of no damage

45% chance of half as blunt damage

The blunt damage received per shot is 5.5, which while not allowing for a 1 hit kill is still a non-negligible amount and will result in a downed pawn pretty quickly.

The final nail in the coffin of my immersion is that there are almost no reasonable personal defensive options (I know, shield packs, shield belt, killbox etc.) available in vanilla to avoid turning your power armored super soldier into a messy goop inside his armor from repeated strikes by neolithic-era short bows.

This is because there is almost no second layer or skin layer items that have enough blunt damage % to be meaningful. The best clothing item available would be a hyperweave button-down shirt at 10.8% (basically useless). There is also the skin bionics. Of the three, they are all pretty much useless for this purpose.

The best is the Stoneskin Gland which will provide 30% Blunt Resistance. My understanding is that damage converted to blunt and halved has zero AP. This means that this would provide an additional 15% deflection and 15% halving (effectively quartering). While this is non-negligible, it's definitely not high enough to be reliable.

My proposal to help fix these issues would be to include a "padding" layer in all heavy armors that occupies the mid slot and provides a significant increase to second layer blunt %. I would also buff the current blunt % of heavy armors significantly, as you can see now it does basically nothing against even the weakest weapon ( you could set it from 50% to 0% without much of a meaningful difference) and does absolutely nothing against the stronger blunt weapons like maces, warhammers and Zeushammers. This would drastically reduce the power of weak enemies against late-game pawns, and leave strong enemies relatively strong.

I know there are balance considerations with this type of change, but am I alone in finding the above extremely immersion breaking?

TLDR; Heavy armor is extremely expensive (astronomical resource, labor, and research costs) and seems underwhelming for what you get because there's no way to stop blunt damage. This should be addressed in vanilla because it breaks player immersion.

submitted by /u/VirtuitaryGland
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The only time I regretted making Human Leather Armchair

Posted: 05 Dec 2020 10:13 AM PST

submitted by /u/Kuirem
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How come wounds dont heal naturally but instead never close and let the host bleed out?

Posted: 05 Dec 2020 09:35 AM PST

It just seems really stupid how little wounds dont heal themselves. Like lets say a rat bites a colonist ONCE and creates a small bleeding wound it doesnt close on its own. The blood doesnt clot on the wound like as if every creature has Haemophilia

submitted by /u/Kumiankka1
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WHAT HAVE I DONE!?!?

Posted: 05 Dec 2020 07:15 AM PST

https://preview.redd.it/z0wk6d4lxd361.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=567076df136460c698b094d5b0db570a6629d297

submitted by /u/Little-Monitor
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Look, we could have been best friends Waldo but you just HAD to go and betray me. *puts out cigarette*

Posted: 05 Dec 2020 08:05 AM PST

submitted by /u/Lannagin
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sure. give me an extra 30 colonists to manage while fighting off every centipede on the planet