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Raider Swarm Compression

Large raids are fun, but quickly reach a point where the game crawls to a halt. This mod aims to make VERY large raids possible through some visual trickery and smart balancing. In theory, with this mod, raids can have many hundreds of enemies. All without melting your computer.

Instead of fully simulating every pawn, each pawn represents a "squad" of many raiders instead, meaning the game only has to simulate a fraction of the pawns involved in a raid. For each member of its squad, this pawn attacks faster (up to 5x). Every time this pawn would be killed or downed, a member of its squad is killed instead, and the pawn's combat bonuses reduce accordingly.

Long story short:
Hordes of enemies LOOK and FEEL like hordes of enemies without the game crawling to a halt!


The mod patches vanilla incident generation, meaning any mod that either changes vanilla incidents or adds custom ones may not be compatible. In the latter case, the mod won't break, but it will also just not take effect.
Mods that simply introduce new factions that then use "normal" raid generation should work just fine.

Known Incompatibility: Cinders of the Embergarden (unconfirmed, may work, but it has some wacky enemies)


CE?

Heard reports that it works with Combat Extended, but also heard there may be bugs. I have not looked into explicit compatibility yet, so use at your own risk.

I installed the mod and it does nothing?

The mod's default settings are such that only the largest vanilla raids would be affected. The main target audience is people with other mods that cause (potentially) enormous raids OR people who struggle with already decent-sized vanilla raids. For the latter, reduce the maximum number of allowed raiders in the mod's settings for it to take affect there.

Is this just like the mod Compressed Raiders?

Yes, but no. Compressed Raiders aims to address the same issue, but:
Since it reduces the number of enemies, hordes feel less like hordes.
The bonuses it gives quickly turn even tribal pawns into plasteel-skinned, lightning-speed supersoldiers. This mod does not affect armor or raider movement speed at all!

Why only 5x strength per "real" pawn when one pawn can be a swarm of dozens?

I figure that space does matter. In melee, you can't be attacked by dozens of pawns at once, 4-8 is a more reasonable expectation, depending on the terrain. And even in ranged combat, positioning matters and huge numbers of raiders are likely going to struggle to find spots to shoot from. The max of 5x seems like a reasonable compromise to simulate a lack of space.

It should be rare to have swarms of 5 or more though. With default settings, that'd mean a raid size of 600+ individuals!