Raid Tactics



Raid Tactics

Raiders remember what happened to them, and stop using the plan that got them killed.

Wipe out a pirate raid at your killbox and the next group from that faction will not walk into it. They breach a wall somewhere else, dig in as sappers, sit down for a siege, or drop straight into your base. Build inside a mountain and they stop trying to get in at all and start shelling you from outside instead.

What they learn depends on who made it home. Kill every last one and they know the attack failed but not why, so the next group turns up careful without countering anything in particular. Let one get away and they come back with an answer to your setup. Release a prisoner and you have handed them a map of your base.

Raids have a goal now, Every faction tracks its own history with you.

How it works

Turning raid types off with an event blocker only makes raids rarer, which is not the same as making them different. So this mod does not choose raids and does not replace them. It changes the weights the game already uses when it picks a tactic and an arrival mode, then lets the game pick.

Every hard rule stays where it is. A neolithic tribe still cannot call in drop pods no matter how often you wipe them out. If every weight ends up pushed down the game falls back to normal behaviour instead of skipping the raid, which is why re-weighting can never cost you a raid.

Four ways in, not one difficulty ladder

A single "how advanced is this" number does not work. It lifts everything advanced at once, so industrial factions end up drop podding almost every raid. Instead, every tactic and arrival mode sits on four axes: direct (walking straight at you), breach (through a wall somewhere you were not watching), standoff (staying out of reach and shelling you) and bypass (skipping your perimeter entirely).

Tactics are placed on those axes by which worker class the game uses, not by name, so a modded tactic built on a vanilla one is classified correctly without me having heard of it.

What it reads off your base

Your colony is measured on the same four axes, cached and recomputed at most once every 2500 ticks. Counting and ratios, not pathfinding sweeps. It reads wall against home area size, how many doors sit on the boundary between inside and outside, turrets per colonist, and how much of your home area is under thick roof. Those pull in different directions on purpose:

• Turrets packed behind one entrance raise standoff hardest. Something that outranges your guns and never enters their arc is the correct answer to a killbox, and now the game reaches for it.
• Thick walls with plenty of doors raise breach instead. Lots to cut through, no single point worth besieging.
• A tight chokepoint raises bypass, because going over the top is the obvious way past one corridor.
• Thick roof cancels most of that and then subtracts more. Pods cannot punch through rock, so a mountain base gets sieges and breaching instead.

Every reading is measured against a baseline first. A colony with no walls produces exactly zero on all four, so the multiplier is exactly 1.00 and the mod does nothing until there is something to react to.

What a faction actually knows

Two separate things, tracked separately.

That the attack failed. Thirty people went out and nobody came back. You do not need a witness for that, so it always registers and always escalates them.

Why it failed. That needs someone who saw it and got home. Without a survivor they know the direct approach kills their people, so the next group is cautious but picks its alternative more or less blind. With survivors they pick the tactic that actually beats your setup.

Two exceptions, both read out of the faction's own definition rather than a list I wrote. Machines and hives always know, they were reporting the whole time. Higher tech factions recover some of it because they had radios, and a faction whose people do not flee when losing recovers a bit more, being a disciplined force rather than a band that scattered with the loot.

There is also a strict mode where killing a raid to the last raider teaches them nothing at all.

Raids have an objective

A vanilla raid comes to wreck whatever it can reach. That is not how you raid someone. Every raid now picks a goal first and the game's own flags are set to match, so this is real behaviour and not a line of text:

• Probe. A faction that has not fought you sends people to find out how you fight. They carry nothing away and break off early. Easy to beat, expensive to let walk, because survivors of a probe bring back far more than survivors of a normal raid.
• Plunder. The ordinary raid, exactly as the game already makes it.
• Slaving. Humanlike factions sometimes want people, not goods.
• Revenge. Only after a faction has been beaten badly and knows why. Takes nothing, kidnaps nobody, does not break off. The only objective that makes a raid harder rather than different, so it has its own switch.

The raid letter tells you which one you are looking at.

Anyone who leaves alive reports back

Raiders who flee your map already carried what they saw. Now a prisoner you release does the same, and so does one who escapes over the map edge. You get a message when it happens. Recruiting a prisoner tells their faction nothing, and neither does letting one die in your cells.

That puts a price on releasing prisoners for goodwill, and gives you a reason to hunt down a broken raid instead of shrugging as it runs off.

Variety, and your settings

Whatever a faction used last time gets damped, harder if it has repeated it. Separate histories for tactics, arrival modes and objectives. This is what stops the mod collapsing into drop pods forever.

Set drop pods to 0% because they do not fit your run and they will never happen. The pressure that would have gone there is redistributed into breaching and sieges rather than disappearing. Your sliders are applied last, after everything the factions decide.

On the Odds tab you can pick a faction and see the real chance of every tactic and arrival mode at your current threat level, with the vanilla number beside it.

What it never does

It never blocks, cancels or delays a raid, and the chance of a plain walk-in never reaches zero. It does not change raid size, points or frequency, apart from one optional slider that ships at zero.

Set the three adaptation sliders to zero and every weight is exactly vanilla. The system also scales with colony size and wealth by default, so a three person camp is not treated like a fortress.

Compatibility

CAI 5000 and Smarter Raider AI change how raiders behave once they are on your map. This mod chooses the tactic and arrival mode before it lands. Different layers, no overlap, and they go well together.

Combat Extended works. The one optional feature that would touch weapons after generation switches itself off when CE is running.

Vehicle Framework and anything else adding arrival modes or tactics is read out of the game's own database and takes part automatically.

Objectives work by writing the game's own canSteal, canKidnap and canTimeoutOrFlee fields, the same ones vanilla reads when building the assault lord job. Sieges use a different lord job and are unaffected.

Safe to add or remove mid-save.

Early

If a faction escalates too fast, or you never see any change, tell me in the comments. The Odds tab makes it much easier to describe what you are seeing.

Source: https://github.com/Funstab/RaidTactics

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