In another universe, Tynan has his brother Tysan who is less of a minimalist helping him dev the game and they included all the vanilla expanded content in the base game. Thankfully, we have mods in this universe.
Even when they're wielded by physically weak people (children, starved, or diseased, etc) they can still be extremely dangerous too because it doesn't rely on brute strength either. Slings are great weapons but they have the same problem bows do, but worse. They require a lot of skill to use effectively.
Been loving your videos! Good overview of the mods. Do you think you can do videos on Detnox's Weaponry videos? The Ion, Phase Cycler, Pulse, and Impact weapons seem real interesting.
Heavy club is a bit OP for what it is. One of the earliest weapons available, doing very good damage, very good penetration - and with one of the least resisted damage types out there. However, this weapon's existance single-handedly makes melee tribals into something more than just a nuisance and turns them into legit threat - so I can't complain. The other weapons of the set are mostly gimmick variations giving tribals and early melee raids some reasonable variety of actual damage. A shiv among the melee attackers can be a nasty surprise early on. The ranged weapons are honestly mostly ineffectual - and I actually think they make tribal raids... easier. Because tribals have bigger arsenal to choose from and are less likely to spawn with pila and greatbows. Both are devastating in their own right: > Pilum hit can outright kill a pawn if they have no armour. > Greatbow is one of the longest ranged weapons - forcing you to exit cover to deal with it. Only bolt action rifles, sniper rifles, miniguns, assault rifles and charge lances, and missile launchers equal its range or outrange it.
I get you with the ranged weapons, but in a weird way I've found it plays into a false sense of security. You hit and run the melee line because of the big smashy clubs, which are obviously dangerous, whilst trying to stay out of range of the greatbow users at the back. You see an enemy creeping closer with a throwing shard or sling and think 'meh, that won't do anything, focus on the guy with the club'. The issue then is when someone gets dinked with a rock and staggered... juuuust long enough for the guy with the club to close the gap and obliterate their leg. The damage they do is of no consequence, they just disrupt everything else and draw focus from dangerous targets out of fear of that stagger chance.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact the shiv used to be base game before it was removed. Overall, I think stuff like the shiv and the light club are what my main issues are with Vanilla Expanded. It expands, a lot, to the point of being bloated. Like do we really need a light, heavy and normal club in the game? Do we need the return of shivs? Sure I do want a repeater or an AMR in basegame RimWorld but some of this stuff is excessive. Putting in stuff for the sake of it. I'm glad mods like Cherry Picker exists so I can remove things I want and others who enjoy these things can have them too.
The tricky thing is that all of those upgrades on their own sound like fine ideas, but then you load the whole mod order and realize the game is now 3x the size it used to be.
I fall 2 ways with bloat. I hate *hate* *HATE* material bloat. I don't need 100 different meats, 50 different leathers, 20 types of stone etc. It makes storage and crafting in the game an absolute chore to manage, especially as with things like meat, 99% of them are just a renamed version of the same thing, a 0.05 nutrition foodstuff with a 4 day shelf life. However, I'm all for apparel and weapon variety. Solely because it makes raids that are getting into the 50+ numbers actually rock up with a bit of diversity. I might not want to use all of the weapons or armours included with the mods myself, but it'll make for more unpredictable engagements that aren't as easy to immediately assign a level of threat to with a glance. It also occasionally adds to a more interesting early game, perhaps you get offered a masterwork weapon as a quest reward that you'd never normally use, like a Service Rifle. That weapon ends up semi-carrying you through the first few raids and you develop a weird level of attachment to it. I'm unlikely to ever build one of those in a colony, but the one we got for hosting a Noble for 2 weeks now practically has it's own lore. That's my jam.
@@MysteriousFawx I think having variety for stuff is great and something Ideology started but did NOT commit to. Having an in-game way to change styles, whether it be for clothes, armor or weapons, would be a lightweight way to do so without introducing small club, medium club and big club. There are some mods that let's you change style but being able to skin the assault rifle to an AK is enough for me, personally.
Not sure if you've played around with it, but for something that lowers 'bloat' whilst also adding a fantastic degree of flexibility, give ModularWeapons a look. I'm tempted to cover it soon but want to wrap the VWE series before opening another box of content as it were.
Heavy clubs being better than warhammers feels kinda BS balance-wise, since a warhammer is harder to make. I love this mod, tho. Is it this mod or regular VE Weapons that adds flamebows? I'm a very big fan of those.
Yeah the heavy club is definitely poorly balanced and the fact we have 3 clubs just feels like bloat imho. Slings, axes and firepots are pretty dope tho
@@BrutusAlbion Calibus, mightiest warrior of House Rimrim, and his excellent quality warhammer when face to face with the unstoppable force that is Ug and his uranium heavy club:
@@jimothyworldbuilding3664 Clad in master-made plate armor, Calibus... oh wait, it turns out the club just basically ignores armor. Uh... Well, Calibus' widow can take solice in the fact that her husband's killer proceeded to die to one impid with a bow and a large field.
You could see the warhammer 40k hawk mod, which contains a lot of armor from that francisia, although I don't know how to put on the armor and when I try to use it it just won't let me, even if I have a spacemarine as a colonist
I'm covering more stable large mods at the moment, as making those videos takes a good chunk of time, but DMS is on the list. I played around with it over a weekend to get a feel for what it adds and in it's current version, I feel like the video would lean towards bashing it rather than praising it, which I'm not about. I've seen a lot of the WIP tags and 'coming soon' parts of the mod, so I'm giving it breathing room to update rather than releasing a video when it's in (what I'm considering) an unfinished state, I'd rather release a positive Rundown for it than a negative one. I'll say that it does add *a lot*. The scope and passion going into that mod is fantastic. It's just horrifically balanced and crazy rough around the edges in terms of text/textures/mechanics. Fingers crossed with a lot of people using it and giving feedback it'll be tightened up and fixed.
@@MysteriousFawx totally understand, personally rewrited stats of mechs and weapons (AMR that cant hit shit and other strange weapons, like piercer) and added simple quest for obtaining dms mechlink
