Question concerning killboxes

[SeattlePoliceman]

So if I want to put killboxes around my base, should they be the ONLY way in and out of my colony? Or should there be a safe entrance somewhere along my walls for my colonists to get in and out.

[Dreagon]

Depends on what you want. I don't think they specifically target doors so you could build more, but I might be wrong about that. But it also depends on your killbox design I suppose. If it is just an empty box and nothing else you don't need anything else if you don't mind your pawns walking a bit more. But if you also include a corridor with traps you may want to have a back door somewhere because pawns are dumb and do spring their own traps every now and then.

[MadArtillery]

If it involves spiketraps you need an alternative way out otherwise someone may get killed if they take a bad hit.

[Spack Jarrow]

As long as there is an open path enemies will take it , so you can have another way out TROUGH a door and they won't attack the door.

Having said that after a while game sends in Drop pods instead of raids , sieges AND sappers.

[XelNigma]

First off, kill boxes are for cowards.
But, raiders will mostly ignore doors if they have an open path leading inside.
If your really cheesing it and having a zigzag maze of spike traps then have lots of doors but with the desired path doorless. your people will use the doors and the raiders will walk the maze stubbing there toes on the traps.

[Swordmouse]

Fixed.

Originally posted by XelNigma:

First off, kill boxes are for anyone who wants to use them. Rimworld is a single player game, and also a colony sim/story generator, not a skill check. Virtually every mod that adds anything halfway interesting to Rimworld introduces something OP, to the point that vanilla difficulty settings are meaningless in a heavily modded run. This makes gatekeeping, already a stupid concept, entirely pointless for a game like this.

[Spack Jarrow]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

First off, kill boxes are for cowards.

Lol go and play loosing is fun without kill-boxes

[coyo7e]

With the new updates, raiders seems to be a lot smarter about killboxes and traps overall as well. I've noticed that maybe 1 in 5 spike traps successfully hits a raider unless I put them along literally every approach - basically at this point spike traps seem to be useful for downing the occasional like megasloth or rhino for food, and useless as defense against most stuff except an insect or scyther swarm.

I've tried using multiple doors and opening/closing them strategically like I used to, and lately the raiders often just ignore it and go off and knock random holes in the walls for a while.

Originally posted by XelNigma:

First off, kill boxes are for cowards.
But, raiders will mostly ignore doors if they have an open path leading inside.
If your really cheesing it and having a zigzag maze of spike traps then have lots of doors but with the desired path doorless. your people will use the doors and the raiders will walk the maze stubbing there toes on the traps.

Having a killbox isn't cheating or cheesy though, it's simple tactics, as folks have brought up before a killbox is not a specific strategy and shape that was invented in RimWorld, it's just a slang term for a "no man's land" that's got an overwhelming field of fire and which probably reduces the enemy's ability to take cover or get close enough to use their own weaponry, etc.

I mean, maybe we should just go back and nerf all anti-siege tactics which someone came up with throughout history, to make the "hardcore" players happy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_fort#/media/File:Fortbourtange.jpg

Honestly - a well-designed killbox is a thing of beauty. Mathematically speaking, aesthetically pleasing, and it often provides outrageously superior cover and field of fire for the defenders. What's not to love about good engineering? KJ Parker and PD James have wrote at least 4 novels between them, about engineers using "overpowered" and "cowardly" tactics to save cities under siege.

The redcoats were really upset during the American Revolution, you know, because the colonists used clothing which didn't stand out against the scenery, and hid behind things like walls, or up in trees, and would lay down outrageously deadly fire on the massed lines of redcoat musketeers who'd march toward the revolutionaries, in lockstep. They called it cowardly tactics, I call it "not getting your butt shot off against a possibly superior force."

War is not about staying within the rules, it's about winning, and hopefully surviving well enough to enjoy the spoils. There are some things which pretty much everybody agrees are just too awful to do (like using civilians as human shields, torture, etc) but it mostly comes down to "we'd rather not have the enemy use those tactics on us, so we agreed to not use them on them."

[Dreagon]

Originally posted by Spack Jarrow:

As long as there is an open path enemies will take it , so you can have another way out TROUGH a door and they won't attack the door.

Having said that after a while game sends in Drop pods instead of raids , sieges AND sappers.

I believe after the last patch at least roughly half of the raids should still be regular raids.

[coyo7e]

Originally posted by Dreagon:

I believe after the last patch at least roughly half of the raids should still be regular raids.

Drop pods at least have a lot of chance to go wild or fall outside your base. That said, even vanilla raiders seem at least slightly smarter against traps lately, even the ones where it says "they are unusually smart and will try to avoid fields of fire and traps".

One thing I haven't tested in eons, is the 20-thick thing: supposedly, sappers won't try to attack anything that's got 20 solid tiles of stone or wall before they can reach it. This means (or meant, if it changed) you can just dig extra deep and ignore sappers being unusual almost entirely.