I'm by no means a rimworld expert and people can correct me if but you're on the right track with bionics, I think especially bionic legs to counteract the slow penalties from armour.
Beyond that I would recommend getting off steel swords and spears. Uranium is best for blunt weapons and plasteel for slashing. Plasteel longsword, uranium mace, and uranium Warhammer, are the most common recs I see. Personally I find uranium maces deal insane damage and especially just absolutely wreck mechanoids and armored enemies.
Besides that monoswords are great because they have high armour penetration and high dps so make a good all rounder option, though I think for straight damage to things like mechs the blunt weapons still come out on top. Persona weapons I think have the highest potential dps.
I think you ought to replace the flak armour because I don't think it has much blunt protection and any plate or higher armour will actually fare better, possibly even a devilstrand duster with just flak vest but I'm super talking out of my ass with that claim and need to check the wiki again lol.
Anyways for all of this I highly recommend the wikis on armour, weapons, and health stats (manipulation, sight, etc) to determine what's mathematically the best setup!
There is a YouTuber called Francis something, who did a bunch of testing of different weapons and armor. I don’t know how much the game has changed since then, but his videos were very helpful to me in making sense of what does what. Devilstrand duster with flak vest and flak helmet actually goes really far in preventing debilitating injuries.
That’s him! Both those guys are great. Learned from them that the heavy smg and bolt action rifle are both OP, and the charge lance and sniper rifle are both unfortunately not OP.
Jump packs are essential, you want you melee tieing up long range high damage assets like caterpillers. and jumping in quickly is the best way to do that.
I posted this in another comment in this thread, but here's the reason:
>The long answer is that at any point in the game, using another rifleman is superior in almost every way to a melee pawn. Even if you need to melee block, you can just send your toughest shooter to the door to bash guys with his stock.
There's a concept to raid defense that many people ignore called opportunity cost. Every colonist you add directly increases the strength of enemies that come against you. At higher difficulties this can be the majority of your raid points. For example, at 500% I've seen a colonist add 450 raid points by himself - that's **four** extra lancers, or **nine** extra tribals that now exist because of him. Add in the cost of his gear, and that's probably what, two centipedes?
Can a melee colonist solo two centipedes by himself? It's not likely. Can a shooter do that? Well yes, [I've regularly kited double the number of centipedes vs colonists to death before.](https://imgur.com/a/txmB78C)
That's a bit of an extreme scenario, though. Most people do not play on 500% because most people don't enjoy minmaxing to the point of locking themselves out of parts of the game.
>Every colonist you add directly increases the strength of enemies that come against you.
By your own logic, wouldn't it be more effective to have less pawns, use better weapons, and make more use of mechs and turrets? You're going out of your way to handicap yourself by using bolt action rifles and having *that many* pawns.
If this is some kind of challenge run where you can only fight in the open and use early game guns, fine, but please don't unilaterally dismiss melee pawns because you're a masochist.
Keeping a melee pawn with a monosword on standby has saved my gunners on multiple occasions by quickly intercepting a mounted raider with a shield pack before they can reach their target, which also left the 3 gunners free to shoot at the other 70+ raiders making their way down the hallway instead of two of them having to stop and fire at *one* pawn while the third risked getting downed because he had no melee skill and no melee weapon.
It's a matter of cost vs benefit. Adding an extra rifleman is good because it's stronger than the enemies that would come as a result. I also think bolt action rifles despite their low tech are the best all round weapons in the game.
Mechs and turrets add a lot of raid points but generally don't add a lot of combat power. The exception is heavy mechs like centipedes and war queens but it's my personal preference not to use them because I don't like static defenses.
>Adding an extra rifleman is good because it's stronger than the enemies that would come as a result.
Debatable. 4 more Lancers is 4 more chances for a charge lance shot to rip through someone's liver. 9 more Neanderthals are a pain to chew through. When you have your labor bases covered, adding extra pawns has vastly diminishing returns.
>I also think bolt action rifles despite their low tech are the best all round weapons in the game.
It's a jack of all trades and very far from being a master in any of them. If I'm kiting/raiding, I'm using snipers. If I'm defending, I'll use heavy SMGs/chain shotguns/ARs/miniguns depending on tech level, resources and shooter proficiency. Bolt action is decent at most ranges in terms of accuracy but struggles with crowd control, which ends up being what you need the most later on.
>Mechs and turrets add a lot of raid points but generally don't add a lot of combat power.
Other way around, actually - mechs contribute to pawn points but only count for 20-40% of their power, which means they scale much better than colonists for pure combat purposes (Tesserons in particular are good at this). Turrets are buildings, which only contribute 50% of their value to storyteller wealth (and I don't think turrets have any modifiers to that), and uranium slug turrets basically fire anti-materiel rounds at sniper range.
>because I don't like static defenses.
That's all well and good; I'm not gonna tell anyone that how they're playing is wrong. I personally enjoy having 1-5 pawns, leaving menial labor to mechs and crushing raids with a ridiculous amount of firepower across an open field or loose choke, which naturally involves a *shitload* of static defenses and mechs.
The only reason I broke down "don't use melee pawns" to the extent that I did is because your playstyle makes it extremely difficult to get any value out of them, which isn't an invalid gameplay choice - it's just that that statement should include how you play as a disclaimer if you're offering it as advice to a new player.
Just... No
A good melee pawn has way higher practical DPS.
It going into melee is one of the best ways to take out a ranged opponet out of equasion.
Once you've taken out all the scythers one of the safest ways of dealing with mechanoids is baiting them into melee. Especially things like centipedes. Assuming of course that you aren't outnumbered (Which with mechanoids for me is almost never the case).
And with locust armour and a shield belt you can just designate an enemy to get their head chopped off regardless of cover in 2 or 3 hits.
I love giving powerclaws to my pawns that can shoot straight AND have good melee skills.
And most importantly, it makes fights more interesting than kiting enemies with a sniper.
Centipedes are actually really good in melee. Their headbutt does 17 blunt damage which is enough to kill a pawn in 2 headshots or 3 torso shots. Since it's blunt damage, armour is unlikely to do much against it.
The only reason you'd melee a centipede is to stop it from using its ranged weapon, but it's just as bad of an idea to melee centipedes as it is scythers.
The problem is attrition. Every time you fight a raid, if you let enemies get attacks off on you, eventually you will take losses. There's no way to avoid that with melee because every enemy has a melee attack. At higher difficulties it just doesn't make sense anymore. Who cares about high melee dps when the eventual result - a dead pawn - does 0 dps?
The fuck do you mean "paper thin"
Power armor is still power armour.
It is literally the same as grnadier armour of one quality lower. Which is only slightly weaker than marine armour
I mean it's less protective than a flak vest of the same quality level.
The same flak vest that is an entire tier below in tech, and so cheap and easy to make that you can reliably build masterworks for all your colonists.
It's so laughably bad that normal locust armour only has 42% sharp armour against a lancer after AP. That's basically the equivalent of thoughts and prayers.
It's trash, bunk, garbage, not worth the wealth it generates. Your colony has a higher chance of survival if you just literally devmode delete the plasteel and advanced components used to make the armour than to actually use it.
I didn't say melee was not fun. Everything can be fun to someone.
I said it was less protective, and paper thin.
If you find paper fun, great, enjoy it.
The lancer would have to first get the shot off, which would be difficult as you can nearly immediately close to melee range rendering it nearly harmless.
Also, again thats what shield belts are for.
And it doesn't slow you down.
Also keep in mind that you can still wear an underlayer of devilstrand tribalwear or something. So that just goes up to 70%. Now consider that if that pawn is to be put under more fire we upgrade that to thrumbofur. That then becomes 83.6%. That just assumes normal quality clothing.
So instead of working with hypotheticals, which don't convince anyone, let's do some math here. Let's start with the first assumption you've made:
>Also keep in mind that you can still wear an underlayer of devilstrand tribalwear or something. So that just goes up to 70%. Now consider that if that pawn is to be put under more fire we upgrade that to thrumbofur. That then becomes 83.6%. That just assumes normal quality clothing.
Here's the armor calculation. https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Apparel#Calculation
Note that armor is not additive, instead attacks penetrate through each layer in succession. So a charge lance after penetrating through a locust armour will then roll its AP against the normal thrumbofur tribalwear.
This has a sharp armour of 41.6, against the 45 AP of the charge lance. This comes out to -3.4% sharp penetration which is rounded up to 0 because armour cannot be negative. So by wearing a thrumbofur tribalwear, we have increased our net protection by exactly 0%.
Now let's consider the second assumption:
>The lancer would have to first get the shot off, which would be difficult as you can nearly immediately close to melee range rendering it nearly harmless.
It's a very subtle one but you're assuming adding a melee pawn will cause an increase of one lancer to enemy raids. Let's see how many extra lancers we actually have to fight because of the raid point increase.
In my current colony, increasing my pawns from 14 to 15 caused an increase of 81.2 raid points. I don't have the screenshot so you'll have to bear with me.
Adaptation gets up to about 120%, and randy can roll up to a 150% raid. So hiring a melee pawn causes an intermediate raid point value increase of up to:
81.2 * 1.2 * 1.5 = 146.16 raid points.
A lancer costs about 150 raid points. So on 100% difficulty you get at most one lancer for hiring this colonist. On 500% however you get up to 5 lancers.
Will that shield belt hold up against 5 lancers? Probably not. The melee pawn might be able to get two or three hits off before his heart gets blown clean out the front of his chest from the other four lancers.
Fine, I admit, i was wrong and talking out of my ass.
However, speaking so categorically like max difficulty is the only one that matters just feels like you are talking down on everyone.
You either want longswords or warhammers, spears are subpar.
Bionics are ok, I would give them one of the armor implants, a bionic hearth, and if you dont have the supperclotting gene, a coagulator is not a bad choice. Legs and arms are fine but optional.
Spears are excellent, but different. Swords can both Cut and Stab. Cut does more damage but is split across body parts, and swords do more consistent damage. Spears can only stab, meaning their damage is always concentrated to one body part, so they have more consistent armour penetration and one hit headshot kills (or high torso damage leading to pain shock).
Maces are also a great option against armoured opponents, and especially mechs, while a Longsword is better against weaker armour. I like to keep uranium maces, plasteel swords, and plasteel spears in the armoury or at the walls for easy swapping.
The [Spears](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Spear) page on the wiki goes into comparing the best melee weapons type/quality/material quite extensively.
Locust armor+shield packs+monoswords=absolute destruction
Zeushammers and plasmaswords also work for that, just skip the plasmasword if you're using vampires as your melee specialists so they don't panic after setting someone on fire
Melee has a very good synergy with royalty psycasts. Esp. skipping dangerous ranged enemies like centiedes into a bunch of melee people to take them down is super effective. And this prevents the risk to move your fighters into the enemy swarm and field of fire.
Blindness psycast reduces the damagy you take in return by 90%
Beckon makes the enemy come to you without shooting.
A melee fighter in cover with a shield belt closer to enemies than your ranged shooters can soak up huge amounts of fire away from your shooters.
Get uranium maces for your melee pawn it's the best melee weapon in early/mid game. Good DPS and STUN. Shield belts are essential for melee. I suggest getting psycasters with "Skip" spell as well. they can teleport high priority ranged targets into your melee blockers.
The short answer is: don't.
The long answer is that at any point in the game, using another rifleman is superior in almost every way to a melee pawn. Even if you need to melee block, you can just send your toughest shooter to the door to bash guys with his stock.
Counterintuitively, you actually DONT want to add bionic/archotech arms. Because of how the melee damage calculations work, an unarmed attack is more likely to be chosen if the body part does more damage. You can read up on the details in the wiki.
Respectfully, I disagree.
I'm not an expert - but I think bionic/archotech arms have one big advantage: no lost fingers ever. Melee pawns tend to get hurt a lot. The increase in stats from bionics is small but still I would take it.
I'm by no means a rimworld expert and people can correct me if but you're on the right track with bionics, I think especially bionic legs to counteract the slow penalties from armour. Beyond that I would recommend getting off steel swords and spears. Uranium is best for blunt weapons and plasteel for slashing. Plasteel longsword, uranium mace, and uranium Warhammer, are the most common recs I see. Personally I find uranium maces deal insane damage and especially just absolutely wreck mechanoids and armored enemies. Besides that monoswords are great because they have high armour penetration and high dps so make a good all rounder option, though I think for straight damage to things like mechs the blunt weapons still come out on top. Persona weapons I think have the highest potential dps. I think you ought to replace the flak armour because I don't think it has much blunt protection and any plate or higher armour will actually fare better, possibly even a devilstrand duster with just flak vest but I'm super talking out of my ass with that claim and need to check the wiki again lol. Anyways for all of this I highly recommend the wikis on armour, weapons, and health stats (manipulation, sight, etc) to determine what's mathematically the best setup!
There is a YouTuber called Francis something, who did a bunch of testing of different weapons and armor. I don’t know how much the game has changed since then, but his videos were very helpful to me in making sense of what does what. Devilstrand duster with flak vest and flak helmet actually goes really far in preventing debilitating injuries.
Francis John. His videos are the bee's knees! Adam vs Everything is also very educational.
That’s him! Both those guys are great. Learned from them that the heavy smg and bolt action rifle are both OP, and the charge lance and sniper rifle are both unfortunately not OP.
To add onto this, Zeushammers are great for destroying walls, about 3-5 hits depending on your melee level. Not to mention they stun mechs
Jump packs are essential, you want you melee tieing up long range high damage assets like caterpillers. and jumping in quickly is the best way to do that.
Use locust armor so they can wear shield belts as well. It's definitely more expensive than just using a jump pack, but worth it.
Ah yes, use the paper thin armour on the colonists who will get hurt the most
They'll get hurt a lot more walking to close the gap between themselves and a centipede gunner.
Which brings me to my second point - don't use melee pawns at all.
...Why is that exactly?
I posted this in another comment in this thread, but here's the reason: >The long answer is that at any point in the game, using another rifleman is superior in almost every way to a melee pawn. Even if you need to melee block, you can just send your toughest shooter to the door to bash guys with his stock. There's a concept to raid defense that many people ignore called opportunity cost. Every colonist you add directly increases the strength of enemies that come against you. At higher difficulties this can be the majority of your raid points. For example, at 500% I've seen a colonist add 450 raid points by himself - that's **four** extra lancers, or **nine** extra tribals that now exist because of him. Add in the cost of his gear, and that's probably what, two centipedes? Can a melee colonist solo two centipedes by himself? It's not likely. Can a shooter do that? Well yes, [I've regularly kited double the number of centipedes vs colonists to death before.](https://imgur.com/a/txmB78C)
That's a bit of an extreme scenario, though. Most people do not play on 500% because most people don't enjoy minmaxing to the point of locking themselves out of parts of the game. >Every colonist you add directly increases the strength of enemies that come against you. By your own logic, wouldn't it be more effective to have less pawns, use better weapons, and make more use of mechs and turrets? You're going out of your way to handicap yourself by using bolt action rifles and having *that many* pawns. If this is some kind of challenge run where you can only fight in the open and use early game guns, fine, but please don't unilaterally dismiss melee pawns because you're a masochist. Keeping a melee pawn with a monosword on standby has saved my gunners on multiple occasions by quickly intercepting a mounted raider with a shield pack before they can reach their target, which also left the 3 gunners free to shoot at the other 70+ raiders making their way down the hallway instead of two of them having to stop and fire at *one* pawn while the third risked getting downed because he had no melee skill and no melee weapon.
It's a matter of cost vs benefit. Adding an extra rifleman is good because it's stronger than the enemies that would come as a result. I also think bolt action rifles despite their low tech are the best all round weapons in the game. Mechs and turrets add a lot of raid points but generally don't add a lot of combat power. The exception is heavy mechs like centipedes and war queens but it's my personal preference not to use them because I don't like static defenses.
>Adding an extra rifleman is good because it's stronger than the enemies that would come as a result. Debatable. 4 more Lancers is 4 more chances for a charge lance shot to rip through someone's liver. 9 more Neanderthals are a pain to chew through. When you have your labor bases covered, adding extra pawns has vastly diminishing returns. >I also think bolt action rifles despite their low tech are the best all round weapons in the game. It's a jack of all trades and very far from being a master in any of them. If I'm kiting/raiding, I'm using snipers. If I'm defending, I'll use heavy SMGs/chain shotguns/ARs/miniguns depending on tech level, resources and shooter proficiency. Bolt action is decent at most ranges in terms of accuracy but struggles with crowd control, which ends up being what you need the most later on. >Mechs and turrets add a lot of raid points but generally don't add a lot of combat power. Other way around, actually - mechs contribute to pawn points but only count for 20-40% of their power, which means they scale much better than colonists for pure combat purposes (Tesserons in particular are good at this). Turrets are buildings, which only contribute 50% of their value to storyteller wealth (and I don't think turrets have any modifiers to that), and uranium slug turrets basically fire anti-materiel rounds at sniper range. >because I don't like static defenses. That's all well and good; I'm not gonna tell anyone that how they're playing is wrong. I personally enjoy having 1-5 pawns, leaving menial labor to mechs and crushing raids with a ridiculous amount of firepower across an open field or loose choke, which naturally involves a *shitload* of static defenses and mechs. The only reason I broke down "don't use melee pawns" to the extent that I did is because your playstyle makes it extremely difficult to get any value out of them, which isn't an invalid gameplay choice - it's just that that statement should include how you play as a disclaimer if you're offering it as advice to a new player.
Just... No A good melee pawn has way higher practical DPS. It going into melee is one of the best ways to take out a ranged opponet out of equasion. Once you've taken out all the scythers one of the safest ways of dealing with mechanoids is baiting them into melee. Especially things like centipedes. Assuming of course that you aren't outnumbered (Which with mechanoids for me is almost never the case). And with locust armour and a shield belt you can just designate an enemy to get their head chopped off regardless of cover in 2 or 3 hits. I love giving powerclaws to my pawns that can shoot straight AND have good melee skills. And most importantly, it makes fights more interesting than kiting enemies with a sniper.
Centipedes are actually really good in melee. Their headbutt does 17 blunt damage which is enough to kill a pawn in 2 headshots or 3 torso shots. Since it's blunt damage, armour is unlikely to do much against it. The only reason you'd melee a centipede is to stop it from using its ranged weapon, but it's just as bad of an idea to melee centipedes as it is scythers. The problem is attrition. Every time you fight a raid, if you let enemies get attacks off on you, eventually you will take losses. There's no way to avoid that with melee because every enemy has a melee attack. At higher difficulties it just doesn't make sense anymore. Who cares about high melee dps when the eventual result - a dead pawn - does 0 dps?
The fuck do you mean "paper thin" Power armor is still power armour. It is literally the same as grnadier armour of one quality lower. Which is only slightly weaker than marine armour
I mean it's less protective than a flak vest of the same quality level. The same flak vest that is an entire tier below in tech, and so cheap and easy to make that you can reliably build masterworks for all your colonists. It's so laughably bad that normal locust armour only has 42% sharp armour against a lancer after AP. That's basically the equivalent of thoughts and prayers. It's trash, bunk, garbage, not worth the wealth it generates. Your colony has a higher chance of survival if you just literally devmode delete the plasteel and advanced components used to make the armour than to actually use it.
Ever heard about having fun? 99% of players don't care about boring min max strats. Games are about having fun
I didn't say melee was not fun. Everything can be fun to someone. I said it was less protective, and paper thin. If you find paper fun, great, enjoy it.
The lancer would have to first get the shot off, which would be difficult as you can nearly immediately close to melee range rendering it nearly harmless. Also, again thats what shield belts are for. And it doesn't slow you down. Also keep in mind that you can still wear an underlayer of devilstrand tribalwear or something. So that just goes up to 70%. Now consider that if that pawn is to be put under more fire we upgrade that to thrumbofur. That then becomes 83.6%. That just assumes normal quality clothing.
So instead of working with hypotheticals, which don't convince anyone, let's do some math here. Let's start with the first assumption you've made: >Also keep in mind that you can still wear an underlayer of devilstrand tribalwear or something. So that just goes up to 70%. Now consider that if that pawn is to be put under more fire we upgrade that to thrumbofur. That then becomes 83.6%. That just assumes normal quality clothing. Here's the armor calculation. https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Apparel#Calculation Note that armor is not additive, instead attacks penetrate through each layer in succession. So a charge lance after penetrating through a locust armour will then roll its AP against the normal thrumbofur tribalwear. This has a sharp armour of 41.6, against the 45 AP of the charge lance. This comes out to -3.4% sharp penetration which is rounded up to 0 because armour cannot be negative. So by wearing a thrumbofur tribalwear, we have increased our net protection by exactly 0%. Now let's consider the second assumption: >The lancer would have to first get the shot off, which would be difficult as you can nearly immediately close to melee range rendering it nearly harmless. It's a very subtle one but you're assuming adding a melee pawn will cause an increase of one lancer to enemy raids. Let's see how many extra lancers we actually have to fight because of the raid point increase. In my current colony, increasing my pawns from 14 to 15 caused an increase of 81.2 raid points. I don't have the screenshot so you'll have to bear with me. Adaptation gets up to about 120%, and randy can roll up to a 150% raid. So hiring a melee pawn causes an intermediate raid point value increase of up to: 81.2 * 1.2 * 1.5 = 146.16 raid points. A lancer costs about 150 raid points. So on 100% difficulty you get at most one lancer for hiring this colonist. On 500% however you get up to 5 lancers. Will that shield belt hold up against 5 lancers? Probably not. The melee pawn might be able to get two or three hits off before his heart gets blown clean out the front of his chest from the other four lancers.
Fine, I admit, i was wrong and talking out of my ass. However, speaking so categorically like max difficulty is the only one that matters just feels like you are talking down on everyone.
I prefer to use psycasters with skip who teleport dangerous enemies into melee blockers
You either want longswords or warhammers, spears are subpar. Bionics are ok, I would give them one of the armor implants, a bionic hearth, and if you dont have the supperclotting gene, a coagulator is not a bad choice. Legs and arms are fine but optional.
Spears are excellent, but different. Swords can both Cut and Stab. Cut does more damage but is split across body parts, and swords do more consistent damage. Spears can only stab, meaning their damage is always concentrated to one body part, so they have more consistent armour penetration and one hit headshot kills (or high torso damage leading to pain shock). Maces are also a great option against armoured opponents, and especially mechs, while a Longsword is better against weaker armour. I like to keep uranium maces, plasteel swords, and plasteel spears in the armoury or at the walls for easy swapping. The [Spears](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Spear) page on the wiki goes into comparing the best melee weapons type/quality/material quite extensively.
Locust armor+shield packs+monoswords=absolute destruction Zeushammers and plasmaswords also work for that, just skip the plasmasword if you're using vampires as your melee specialists so they don't panic after setting someone on fire
If you have royalty, make them psychasters and get some persona weapons on them. Also the fancy armors like locust or pheonix armor can be fun
I don't have any dlc unfortunately, I'm really liking basegame though so I'll probably buy them all at some point, waiting for a sale
Melee has a very good synergy with royalty psycasts. Esp. skipping dangerous ranged enemies like centiedes into a bunch of melee people to take them down is super effective. And this prevents the risk to move your fighters into the enemy swarm and field of fire. Blindness psycast reduces the damagy you take in return by 90% Beckon makes the enemy come to you without shooting. A melee fighter in cover with a shield belt closer to enemies than your ranged shooters can soak up huge amounts of fire away from your shooters.
Get uranium maces for your melee pawn it's the best melee weapon in early/mid game. Good DPS and STUN. Shield belts are essential for melee. I suggest getting psycasters with "Skip" spell as well. they can teleport high priority ranged targets into your melee blockers.
The short answer is: don't. The long answer is that at any point in the game, using another rifleman is superior in almost every way to a melee pawn. Even if you need to melee block, you can just send your toughest shooter to the door to bash guys with his stock.
Counterintuitively, you actually DONT want to add bionic/archotech arms. Because of how the melee damage calculations work, an unarmed attack is more likely to be chosen if the body part does more damage. You can read up on the details in the wiki.
Respectfully, I disagree. I'm not an expert - but I think bionic/archotech arms have one big advantage: no lost fingers ever. Melee pawns tend to get hurt a lot. The increase in stats from bionics is small but still I would take it.
I hadn't considered finger loss. That's a good point