Pila

Pila are slightly heavier, single-shot ranged weapons in RimWorld which deal a high amount of damage per shot; very long time between shots; slightly shorter range and slightly higher accuracy.

Combat performance

It takes 2 shots to the torso to kill an unarmored human with pila, or around 3-4 shots against a human with a normal armor vest. A pilum can also instantly destroy digits and eyeballs, and will always cause lethal brain damage. It also only takes a single pilum to cripple a limb if the victim is unarmored.

Since pila have a very long time between throws and have a fairly short range, it's best to pair a bundle of pila with a good shooter to make the most of them - a semi-competent shooter will also suffice at closer distances though. A healthy level 3 traitless shooter, level 0 careful shooter or level 7 trigger-happy can somewhat efficiently use pila up to 14 cells. However, a level 9 traitless shooter, level 6 careful shooter or level 11 trigger-happy shooter is advisable to efficiently use pila up to its maximum range of 20 cells.

On average, pila are best paired with a careful shooter until level 7, and with a trigger-happy shooter beyond that point.

They are infamous for skewering unlucky Urist McFullPowerArmors to a wall with headshots.

Melee Combat

A pilum has a weapon bulk of 100%, but weapon bulk doesn't seem to have any observable effect on actual gameplay. Out of all ranged weapons in the game, a pilum performs the best in melee combat.

All possible melee attacks with a pilum:

Tool	Attack	Damage Type	Power	Cooldown	Likelihood	Base DPS	Armored DPS
Overall	-	-	9.111	1.6s	-	5.694	5.239
Shaft	Smash	Blunt	8	1.6s	44.4%	5	4.6
Point	Smash	Blunt	10	1.6s	55.6%	6.25	5.75

Obtaining

Pila can be purchased from neolithic war merchants and orbital combat suppliers, or obtained from the following raider kinds:

Tribal:

Heavy Archer - 43% (normal quality on average, 50-220% health)

Pila can also be manufactured at a smithy once the smithing research has been completed; from 70 wood and 13,000 ticks (3.61 mins) of work.

Conclusion & Comparison

Being capable of instantly crippling limbs and destroying vital organs, pila can be very dangerous weapons if your colonists are either not armored or poorly-armored; a pilum is the second most damaging non-explosive ranged weapon in the game, only being surpassed by the sniper rifle. However, due to the arbitrary nature of combat, a pilum could also be 'wasted' by it only hitting an extremity such as a toe, or a nose - that combined with the fact that the pila's also the slowest 'firing' non-explosive ranged weapon in the game can be very detrimental.

A pilum's also one of the slowest projectiles in the game, seeing as it's thrown rather than fired: 15.6 c/s versus a mere 7.2 c/s for any grenade, or 24 c/s for an incendiary launcher bolt.

Compared to other neolithic weapons, the pila consistently gets beaten in a 1 vs. 1 against a recurve bow and against a greatbow, and trades blows with the short bow since they have similar sustained DPS. Therefore the pila's best used as a flanking weapon.

Graphs

The graphs assume normal quality pila against an adult human that's out in the open in clear weather. For DPS, projectile speed has also been factored into the equation, with the weighting based on the base amount of attacks that it'll take to put the aforementioned target into pain shock.