Mid to Late Game Raids

[EngineerDoge]

How do you handle the raids? Around mid game, the game will start throwing 15 - 30 man raids against you when you only have like 5 or so fighters (maybe 8 pawns in all). I set up a bunker, wall off my town, and then clear out all trees in front of the bunker, effectively making a kill-box where I slaughter maybe half of them before they overrun my pawns.

Because of this, if I want to keep playing into late game, I have to constantly restart to get rid of the raid (playing on Randy). This gets VERY tiring, because I do like fighting the raids, and I'm fine with loosing one or two pawns now and again. But if you constantly get overrun, why bother playing?

[St3amfails]

traps, turrets, melee specialists, guard animals, special weapons - less random wealth accumulation until you can protect it.

These are only a few of the possibilities. Mix and match. Even more options if you have dlc but I left them off the list since you didn't specify.
By mid to late game 5 well equipped pawns should easily be able to handle 15 - 30 raiders without more than a few scratches though, even without cheesing a killbox.

[Madcain]

make a dump zone filled with stone slabs outside the entrance into the killbox is one example.

but mostly it is wealth management, if you have 5 colonists. dont make a 5000 stockpile of food just because you at some point might have 50 colonists.

burn, smelt, sell anything you dont need.

if you see a large mouintain of compacted steel, just take what you need now and then, dont stockpile it.

Everything on the map is worth something and it will increase your wealth and raid difficulty.

if you have mortars then have mortars ready with force fire incendiary in front of the kill box so that you might put some of them on fire before they start making their way tru the tunnel.

i could go on forever but i suggest you start by looking up rimworld wealth management on youtube or something. there is a couple of guides there. thats the first step

[The Blind One]

The real answer is to just lower the threat scale in the storyteller settings.

Don't bother playing at 100% threat if you are not willing to cheese the game. I recommend you set strive to survive (100% normal for everything) and then lower the threat scale down to 60% or even 30%. You are not a weak person for doing this, it just shows that you don't want insane raids.

Your setup of using a bunker sounds solid but it isn't going to work in this game because the amount of enemies charging you will overwhelm your defenses easily and the game is NOT balanced around being able to fight off enemies from a distance.

In fact the game is balanced in such a way that you can theoretically run up as a melee pawn up to a ranged pawn and bonk them on the head and win, even if they are a bunker and have cleared out the map infront of it to prevent cover.

Since there are triple or quadruple the amount of enemies running towards you, you cannot realistically ever shoot them down before they get to you. So you will always end up in a situation where your defenses will be overrun at some point This is why many people use killboxes as this way they are funneled 1 by 1 into a killing field. If you don't want to use killboxes or cheese strategies, the only real realistic way you have is to simply lower the threat scale.

I play at 60% or even 30% depending on what I feel like and even then you will end up with raids double your size.

[Teal V2]

It is a quite interesting situation.
You play on Randy which is stated to be random and warns you it will be unfair, then you are surprised by attacks you are not prepared for.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
They say.

No offense, but this seems a bit as a contradiction.

[Ducks on Fire]

Make sure to try and reinvest your wealth into things that will help with defense. Try and get at least 5 mortars set up. That way if you get a raid and they are preparing you can fire off 1 or 2 volleys of 5 shells and you can do quite a bit of damage to them before they even attack. Having a few animal insanity pulses can help too. If a large raid comes at a bad time you can just restrict your pawns to hide inside somewhere where there is food and let the animals kill the attackers for you and then just wait it out until they calm down.

Taking quests for faction goodwill can be helpful for mid game raids since you can ally with them and call for help if you need it. If you have the royalty DLC the ngetting someone up to the title of Knight/Dame is a good idea. You can get the aerodrone strike you can call down every so often (or even the salvo if you get to Praetor) which will help and if you have a Knight/Dame you can trade for cataphract armor.

Having a couple good melee fighters with good armor can be very effective. If you set up a choke point you can have you melee pawns up front with your shooters just behind them. You can also try using traps. Now I'm making assumptions about your kill box config, but if you have a standard wall-sandbag/barricade-wall-sandbag/barricade-wall-etc pattern then put traps in front of the sandbags and then at least the first ones to reach your pawns will hit the traps.

But yeah you seem to have a wealth issue if you are getting 30 person raids with 5 pawns. Much like RTS games any resources you have that are just sitting in your stockpile are not doing anything for you so spend them. 1000 steel in your stockpile does nothing to help during a raid, but 10 mini turrets do. And of course none of the stuff in storage is going to be of any use down the line if all of your pawns are dead. Well, okay technically it could if you wait around for someone to show up, but they'd likely get killed by an oversized raid as well.

[psychotron666420]

It'll only get worse, like 30-50 enemies eventually. so you better learn how to deal with the raids now.

[sono]

Originally posted by Teal V2:

It is a quite interesting situation.
You play on Randy which is stated to be random and warns you it will be unfair, then you are surprised by attacks you are not prepared for.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
They say.

No offense, but this seems a bit as a contradiction. :ori:

Randy doesn't drastically alter the size of raids, there's more range up and down but it's still based on your wealth. The main difficulty with Randy is triggering multiple bad events.

There are 3 options: lower the difficulty, manage your wealth, or build better defenses.

There's no shame in lowering the difficulty, and you can do so at any time.

Managing your wealth is about not having stuff you don't need. Besides the stuff people have said, a big one is statues and floors. Don't pump out expensive statues you don't need, as they spike your wealth. Floors can also raise it more than you'd expect.

As for defenses: besides cover, a killing field with traps and possibly some turrets, the main way is to start taking advantage of pathing. Funnel them into a tunnel/opening, so they don't all swarm in at once. There are various levels of cheese, but creating a predictable entry point is important. This helps in weapon selection: not all weapons are created equal, and with a fixed entrance you make sure they're in your optimal range. Heavy SMG's are some of the best weapons, but if the enemy has a sniper shooting from a distance you can't reach then you're going to be in trouble.

[Admod, the Equivocal]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVu_LcalIeM&list=PLQWnHloPSfq4ajFkTBA8vZk2R43NaQeKO&index=7&ab_channel=AdamVsEverything

[brian_va]

Originally posted by sono:

Originally posted by Teal V2:

It is a quite interesting situation.
You play on Randy which is stated to be random and warns you it will be unfair, then you are surprised by attacks you are not prepared for.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
They say.

No offense, but this seems a bit as a contradiction. :ori:

Randy doesn't drastically alter the size of raids, there's more range up and down but it's still based on your wealth. The main difficulty with Randy is triggering multiple bad events.

There are 3 options: lower the difficulty, manage your wealth, or build better defenses.

There's no shame in lowering the difficulty, and you can do so at any time.

Managing your wealth is about not having stuff you don't need. Besides the stuff people have said, a big one is statues and floors. Don't pump out expensive statues you don't need, as they spike your wealth. Floors can also raise it more than you'd expect.

As for defenses: besides cover, a killing field with traps and possibly some turrets, the main way is to start taking advantage of pathing. Funnel them into a tunnel/opening, so they don't all swarm in at once. There are various levels of cheese, but creating a predictable entry point is important. This helps in weapon selection: not all weapons are created equal, and with a fixed entrance you make sure they're in your optimal range. Heavy SMG's are some of the best weapons, but if the enemy has a sniper shooting from a distance you can't reach then you're going to be in trouble.

Randy can roll + or - 50% raid size, I'd call that pretty drastic

[Ballistic Drop]

Originally posted by Madcain:

make a dump zone filled with stone slabs outside the entrance into the killbox is one example.

but mostly it is wealth management, if you have 5 colonists. dont make a 5000 stockpile of food just because you at some point might have 50 colonists.

burn, smelt, sell anything you dont need.

if you see a large mouintain of compacted steel, just take what you need now and then, dont stockpile it.

Everything on the map is worth something and it will increase your wealth and raid difficulty.

if you have mortars then have mortars ready with force fire incendiary in front of the kill box so that you might put some of them on fire before they start making their way tru the tunnel.

i could go on forever but i suggest you start by looking up rimworld wealth management on youtube or something. there is a couple of guides there. thats the first step

Wealth management is key. Just because you see component and silver deposits on the map does not mean you have to grab them now. I always try to beef up my defenses before making a major upgrade.

As far as your defensive tactics are concerned it sounds like you are in the right track. One thing I do recommend is to try to ally with someone, as they will sometimes drop in and assist if you are raided. Its a huge help if for nothing else than a distraction.

[JD]

You must be doing something wrong. A simple killbox + equipped pawns can deal with any raids the storyteller throws at you, considering that raiders never fight to the death and tend to flee.

[Di]

it's probably the quality of your kill box, or you have way too much wealth triggering OP raids in comparison to how crappy your weapons are

for a better killbox, try this one ... the streamer basically doesn't use it any more because its too strong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH9oyC9KZlE

for wealth management...for 5 colonists you shouldnt be above say, 30k wealth or on higher difficulty your defenses are probably being outstripped by your wealth.

[HunterSilver]

A lot of it is wealth and population management. Unfortunately, it's kind of important to keep wealth low until you have a decent combat force. Time also isn't on your side. Pushing to ~12 gunners with good guns in your colony lets you nullify critical threats reliably and immediately. It's important for it to be both reliable and immediate. The focus fire of ~12 gunners with assault rifles will basically drop anyone not decked out head to toe in cataphract armor.

If you have the Royalty dlc, rushing as many colonists as you can to lv5 psyker powers also helps a lot. You can use the skip power to teleport high priority targets directly into your melee units. This means targets who would otherwise sponge bullets (units in power armor), units that could kill your entire frontline (anyone with a rocket launcher), or any tank units (centipedes) can be forced into melee and effectively nullified. The focus psycast also improves all of your combatants.

Another critical component is micromanagement. Colonists haphazardly shooting at whatever they feel like are worse than all of your colonists focusing their firepower on single targets. On higher difficulties, identifying enemies with better guns and higher shooting skill is key just so you can gun them down first.

And finally there's the prep work, like you mentioned. Building a decent killbox can solve a lot of problems, but keeping your colonists at optimal range for their weapons and allowing raiders to spread themselves out as the raid goes on will help a lot. Forcing an all melee raid through a doorway is going to be substantially better for you than fighting them in a traditional killbox. Forcing humanoid raiders through walls of fire burning on wood floors can buy you time and deal serious damage. Stashing a single tile of chemfuel in the middle of your killbox to light up for when raiders are pushing in too hard can be a more effective use of your bullets than just shooting at the horde.

[Narrowmind]

If you're kilłing about half, you were close to breaking the enemy. You only have to kill half before they retreat. I'd suggest you just hire more people. It's possible to be too discriminating for your own good. Midgame, I'd suggest at least 10. You need to become better with managing your mood to handle less optimal pawns. Just give extra recreation if you must.

[Playzr 🐵]

Kill box kill box kill box. Moat moat moat. Turrets turrets turrets.