Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
This topic has been locked 
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
There are a lot of ways to 'cheese' the enemy ai that you don't even need to bother with a kill box. How many times have they dug into an ancient danger just because I claimed the walls? ;'D Good times, good times.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/oukof2/killbox_alignment_chart/
You have to do something on that chart to survive on anything other than peaceful, some are more effective than the others. It's up to you to determine how to define your defenses.
Max difficulty is 500% scaling. You have two options for dealing with it, the first is to essentially not play the game. Avoid wealth, avoid progress, stagnate in a tiny dirt base and deal with small raids for as long as you want until you get bored or die. The second is to build a perfectly optimized defense using all the tools provided by the game.
Having a defined location on your map with any defenses where you engage an incoming enemy is a killbox to somebody. Even if those defenses are just trees or some stone chunks.
The "min-max trap corridor into turret spam" is just one variation of an effective killbox, it's not required on most difficulties, though it's probably one of the very few methods out there to survive on 500%.
Had a good laugh at "Harvesting chocolate is a killbox".
Beside that, killboxes are a little worse now esp. with royalty because of mech clusters and new breaching enemies. I mean this run I've tried to do without good pawns, but it was a mistake and a ton of raids are really doofing me now just because my strategy of superheating my enemies doesn't work.
Granted dev added sappers a while back but supposedly he changed up how they calculate a path now so its harder for people to predict and just make more kill boxes not sure how it all works though. I just make pillboxes using a mod that adds in half walls cover it with traps, place ♥♥♥♥♥♥ cover in form of a dump zone for chunks so AI will go where I want them for cover to fire, and any luck the melee will get shot down or hit traps.
I do the rock cover because my system of one full then one half wall works well put my colonists on the one solid and they peek from it and fire over the half walls. I did this before with sandbags works just as well but they can walk over it but yet again I put traps in front hoping those cripple or kill any one who tries to come in trhough the sand bags.
But if you don't leave AI cover with in resonable distance like I would clear cut trees around them at first they will try to run up to the solid walls and point blank. Especially annoying thing early game when you weapons are meh, so are theres, so they get in close quite easily with ranged weapons. Tossing them low value cover items like chunks with in say pistol or shortbow range of the pillboxes makes them take cover there giving my colonists the better cover bonus. I make these outside my colony and so far they will go after those large pill boxes before the main colony had like a couple instances where my base was in a mountain and terrian was iffy where they just dug in but normally I try to set up now so the fastest route from any spot they spawn in is to go past the pillboxes even if they want to use sappers.
Added in lmgs or automatics mid to late game and they work pretty well only danger is mortar attacks on it and explosives. That or a large group of zerging melee fighters at least the non moded sandbag solid wall version its weakness was tribal raids who had more melee then I was use to trying to force their way into the pillboxes.
That is a great chart.
I have yet to see any streamer win the end game at 500% vanilla/close to vanilla without a “proper” killbox (maze with traps and/or turrets), even with a platter of cheeses.
I play at 500% with a few mods and wouldn’t bother trying without at least a small maze even though I fight most of the raids outside my base relying on psycasts. The maze is valuable for slowing enemies down and buying time.
That said, I don’t see why you couldn’t win the end game without one (using doors in a thick perimeter wall) if you had a really big colony and psycasters. The delay caused by the maze and ability to chew up the walls with missed shots is pretty important, though. One of the functions of of the “maze” type killbox is to keep the perimeter intact and having lots of enemies shooting at your walls means they will eventually get destroyed if you don’t have a whole squad of repairers. You’d still have to manipulate the AI to get raiders to move between doors, though, and some would say that’s just replicating the function of the killbox.
AI hasn't changed at all, and likely will not, the game is designed around the way the AI works. I'm sure the dev will continue to add new events with all future content releases that makes people do something new in response, but the core threats are going to remain the same.
The new event with 1.3 is the Breach raid, it's a new type of raid functionally similar to sappers. It's just as uncommon, and they are even smaller and easier to deal with than sappers. It's not a mechanic that has been merged into other raids, it's a unique incident.
Anyway and to the point of the thread, killboxes are just born because of the nature of the game and how combat works. What I mean is that not all pawns are equal, some are more important than others and are better at fulfilling certain jobs than others, losing pawns may severly delay or disrupt the functioning of the colony, so you want to avoid losing pawns or risking permanent injuries (while the AI pawns don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about their own lives, they just fight to the death and will run when their group drops to a certain number). Second, is that random rolls in combat may completely ♥♥♥♥ you over get your best pawn shot at the heart, or maybe the supersoldier you're so proud of get's hit in the head, develops a brain scar and turns into the drooling janitor of the colony, and now, this isn't X-Com where you can get new recruits whenever you like and then train some more if missions go wrong.
Only a handful of enemy pawns are actually desirable to have, those have to not die to your fire, weapons, traps or whatever other hazard on your map, AND at the very end there's just the pretty high random chance of enemy raiders dying upon being downed (let's not even add the odd chance of prisioners breaking out and dying to fist punches).
Thus, because of said reasons, you want your pawns to literally avoid as much combat as possible, because you can't roll a 1 if you never have to roll the dice on the first place. As such, killboxes are the way (meta) players developed to increase success (or save some headaches, because not everyone likes supersoldier#2 getting oneshot by a bullet to the brain, even if said player forgot supersoldier#2 has already dodged 3000 shots to the head and will just focus on that one bad event).
TL;DR: Killboxes exist for a reason, but players are free to gimp themselves as much as they want.
Not by a long shot, sappers and breaches are still just a couple of the multiple raid types you can get, and aren't enough of a deterrent to keep a killbox to deal with normal raids. You do have to come up with your own way to deal with them, but killboxes won't stop being a thing. And mech clusters are pretty much a puzzle, once you find a way to solve whatever fell in your backyard it ain't much different from normal raids, you can bait the mechs into your killbox, turrets are a non-issue after you get smoke launchers and can even blow them up with 1-2 grenades, mortar other stuff, if camp has a shield, you deal with shield first then mortar away... how do you kill shield? well that's part of the puzzle, is camp asleep? send a slave with 'nades and be done with it. Maybe send a psycaster with invisibility and some line-of-view blocker... maybe you can just leave it there and let raiders and trading caravans deal with it.