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You'd clearly need to go really high population with quality weapons and armors asap either way, psycasters would help too
As for how to fight, no idea, since everything slightly efficient could pass as a killbox, guess you have to randomly run around in open field
But in my experience not. I always get some type of hard raid in my first year, like mechs. When I don't even have proper armor/weapons yet. If its not mechs, its a Savage raid by 10-20 pawns, when I only have 5 myself, again ill equipped. Cause when doing roleplay stories... You can't cheese yourself to riches.
Everything I try just doesn't work without a killbox to cheese and funnel them into... Which is just lame gameplay imo :( Running around is just silly, and will defo not work on raids where you get heavily outnumbered (which in my case always happens in Year 1 or 2 already).
I like to play this way too. Another thing about killboxes (generally speaking) is that they require fencing off your base and it's something I can't stand visually. My solution is to play with mods that boost/ expand pawn's fighting potential, like Psycasts Expanded:P, EPOE + Cyberfauna + Elite Bionics Framework, SOS2 and the most powerful of them all - Draftable animals. I'm not joking, elephants become true machines of war when you can move them directly without insane amount of zone micro. If you want to play a colony with lots of civilians, maybe this is the option for you?
Of course the consequence is that you have to design your own difficulty. It's fun to have godlike pawns, but after some time it makes me lose interest in the game. I really, really recommend Advanced Riders and Xenotype Editor (if you own Biotech). Those Hussars en masse (and Uhlans, with Vanilla Expanded) are no joke! But I won't lie, there's lots of tweaking involved. In my current playthrough I have 2 melee fighters and 2 shooters (no prosthetics yet), herd of elephants plus 7 civilians in tow (mostly children); so far they smashed and stomped everything that came their way :)
I recommend you play on Custom difficulty and you'll want to move the 'threat' slider about 3 times during gameplay to around 40% to 60%.
Keep it on 100% initially because at the start of the game you'll get the odd straggler for a raider and setting the threat too low can sometimes mean they don't even show up.
At some point you'll get an even amount of raiders to colonists attacking you in a raid. Once you see this you will want to go into the options menu and adjust the storyteller threat difficulty manually. Adjust the threat with about -20%, going from 100% threat to 80% the first time and from 80% to 60% the 2nd, etc.
It will take about ~1 to ~2 more raids before the raids are bigger than your colony again and you'll want to do this until you're around 40% to 60% threat difficulty. The ideal threat difficulty will depend on how well armed your colonists are and how well you play. Even at 40% to 60% you will end up with large numbers of tribals who are able to overwhelm you if you are not properly armed and defended so remember to keep your pawns prepared and armed and don't skimp out on defenses.
I personally play on 'Strive to Survive' preset difficulty, and then manually lower the threat difficulty as the game goes on to prevent overwhelmingly large numbers of raiders or manhunter events. I also play with 0% chance of kill on downed for raiders so you have lots of options for recruitment and to nurture downed enemies back to health and send them back home for relations gain (I remove permanent hostile factions and replace them with ones who can be allied but start hostile). Friendly fire on 100%, instant death for colonist pawns at 100%, because I like to worry about positioning and turrets. Oh yeah and insect deep drilling at 25% because these just get annoying after a while lol.
That's just how I play though and this playstyle might not be for you but this is how I play without killboxes and am able to keep a colony alive that doesn't demand that every colonist is also a warrior of some sorts. You have much more breathable space in what type of colony you want to build this way.
On 100% 'threat' difficulty you can probably manage without a killbox up to the mid-game but in the late game you'll definitely need a killbox or use 'bottleneck' strategies, which are just killbox-lite versions such as forcing your enemies to attack you through a door and putting 3 melee blockers behind it and like 9 shooters behind those, effectively a compact kill corridor.
Alternatively you can slow down the growth of raiders by changing the 'threat growth' and 'threat impact' in the custom difficulty menu. Setting it to 50% growth for example will mean that raid sizes will grow 50% slower than usual. In the end it just means you'll get to your large raid sizes a little later than usual but it might be what you want.
In Vanilla, your best friends are sandbags; they're cheap and simple, but don't let that distract you from their effectiveness from a general standpoint. If you're the kind of person that over-prepares, you can even use walls which are approximately 1.5 times better, at a 75% cover bonus, compared to the 50% of sandbags. Keep in mind that cover bonuses for walls are based on position, so unless you have your enemies right where you want them to be; which doesn't happen often, it'll be more flexible to use sandbags. In late game, you can replace sandbags with barricades; they're the same cover bonus, but have more health, breaking less often than sandbags.
When it comes to taking enemies out, psycasters can be the most useful and the most terrifying threat when it comes to you or your enemies. Enemy psycasters are usually kitted out when you do wind up running into them, so having a long range weapon, or, if the psycaster is threatening enough, a psychic shock lance, is very handy against them.
For your weaponry in particular to deal with raids, I suggest medium-range weapons, as well as one or two pawns with chain shotguns in case enemies get too close. Depending on how flexible you are with your mindset on what a killbox-esque structure is, you can even set your pawns up behind a corner, having a sort of firing range where all of them have to come from one side.
If you're in a real panic and you're trying to salvage a bad situation, smokepop packs are your saviour, having a 70% decrease in all ranged weapons fire aimed at targets through the cloud.
In Modded Playthroughs; I'll just go with the most general approach and assume that all of Vanilla Expanded is being used, ditch the sandbags, since now you have trenches and barriers. Barriers are your step-up from sandbags, and trenches are your step-up from walls, with the penalty of having your range reduced while inside of a trench,
Psycasters can now be immensely dangerous as an enemy and as a friendly pawn; but this time, you have the advantage. The Protector path is, as it sounds, good at protecting your pawns. You get the option of blocking bullets similar to a shield belt, effectively giving you temporary health, or negating bullets entirely for a short amount of time with skipshield. For offense, Warlord is immensely powerful on the battlefield, with the ability to essentially kick yourself into overdrive with numerous psycasts. Killskip is insane for low-armoured enemies, as it continues attacking enemies until it does NOT get a kill. As for dealing with other psycasters, Archotechnist is your friend, capable of debilitating both enemy psycasters and normal pawns, while also using your own pawns' consciousness as a resource, having the ability to cleanse themselves of mental heat by putting one of your pawns into a harmless coma. Apart from that, there are plenty of other paths with more focused offensive boons, which you can explore yourself.
There are two ways you can go about kitting your pawns up. Warcaskets, and spacer armour. The former is superior for combat, quite literally being a killing machine, essentially a permanent transformation of turning a pawn into a being that purely exists to kill; while the latter is less effective, it doesn't inhibit your ability to live normally. Melee becomes easier to accomplish with the addition of lassos, which can be used to pull enemies toward you, while ranged has the aforementioned spacer tech weapons; albeit, coming far later on than warcaskets. If you have a Comms Console, you can even call in pirates to aid you; given you have the silver to spare. There are a few for you to choose from, but if you're going against immense gunfire, you can call in a warcasket squad to go exterminate the threat; do note, that the pirates have RANDOM weapons, and occasionally they can spawn in with a non-lethal tear gas launcher, so do your best to not rely on them too much.
TL;DR, Vanilla is certainly possible without killboxes, but can be moderately difficult if you don't keep your colony wealth in check, while Modded gives you a lot more options, as well as preventative measures in the form of calling in pirate squads to aid you if you aren't prepared to deal with a threat on your own yet.
You need good starting pawns and slow growth. I like having a sanguophage start with both pawns around the same age and opposite sex so they can (hopefully) get married, making these two the key royalty people later on as well. Having the ideology of bloodfeeding to give the cannibalism and harvesting of organs ability, a big plus.
See the screen shot below as a mid-game example. This one was on sea-ice, just to up the difficulty but an ice sheet is a lot easier and quicker (if you are into cold biomes).
Starting, I concentrate on basic survival; a few small multi-purpose rooms - just enough to satisfy the basic needs. Then pump resources into defence before the bigger raids come. I usually go for a ringed wall to stop ranged attacks that are longer than the range my pawns can fire back, sandbag defences near the base to hide behind, and a turret or two at each quarter to give a soak for the attackers and a little extra firepower.
Once the basic defences are done, grow the base and the defences equally, but in favour of defences as long as pawn satisfaction is at an okay level.
Pawns need to be exceptional - my preferences is to grow by having children (training them up to your needs) and cherry picking the best pawns that come into your possession, this does mean slow growth though (which is what you want).
It is very hard to have a big, fancy base with lots of pawns though. Every room needs to be the model of efficiency, with multiple uses, and the pawns have to be super-efficient and low in number.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3014233517
You have some good defenses there but still a rudimentary killbox theme going (although that is inevitable if you build defensively) but its not nearly as bad some killbox constructions out there
In fact, I'd give your base defenses a legit pass as not being a 'killbox'. It's a heavily defended multi-layered fortification.
The only cheese are the forced entry points filled up with sandbags so enemy pawns are forced to enter into the killing field. That's definitely still 'cheese' and an important element that potentially makes it a 'killbox' setup as you're purposefully abusing game mechanics to break the enemy AI into taking unfavorable positions. So -1 point there
If you removed those sandbags at the entry points, I'd 100% say this wasn't a killbox but a fortification with multi-layered defenses. Exactly as you'd expect defenses to actually function.
Overall 9/10 legit defenses (non-killbox style)
If you want to spice it up, I'd place IED's around the entry points at strategic places hehehe
In the first year a mechanoid raid shouldn't be difficult, it's gonna be a couple of them, I'm surprised you even see them on year 1 on strive to survive. Either they don't have scythers and you can melee them to death after luring them in a corner, or they do have some and you probably need an early EMP grenade. You can go buy them to other factions. But yeah, eventually fighting in open field isn't gonna cut it, unless you somehow manage to keep ahead in numbers, gear, while not moving an inch wealth-wise. As someone said above, most people who do it that way use some sort of cheat to allow more recruitment, because the game naturally tries to limit your numbers past a certain point (refusing to down enemies for example)
It's litterally a killbox redesigned to be slightly less efficient
No wonder people can play without boxes when their idea of it is to build one anyway and replace a wall or two with sandbags
Maybe. One person’s kill box is another person’s fortified gatehouse. Perhaps we should agree on a definition of a kill box.
I'm not sure how essential the sandbags are though, the whole triangle bit is usually done later game - I might try to skip them on my next play to test it out. Early on it's just the corner wall protections, mini-turrets, and sandbag protections that hold the line. Also a lot of the later attacks are breach ones that break the walls at random points or the walls just get destroyed during the fight.
Quite often it ends up as a running battle with lots of destruction, particularly with scyther and madden animal attacks. It's just not possible to hold the line sometimes and you have to retreat to the next line of mini-turrets, running around the edge of the base trying to wear them down. Lots of rebuild is needed and, if another attack should happen in between, then it can be game over. Rebuilds can be tough on the ice bimods too due to the lack of available resources.
Drop attacks into the base are also a problem. This usually ends up, again, with a running battle (but inside the base) and lots of destruction.
The design is far from perfect but I have won with it on “blood and dust” (the royalty ending) on several occasions. More often than not though, I’ve have had to abandon the base when a recovery isn’t possible. I’m more of a journey than destination player anyway.
I will say that I have never gotten far on "losing is fun" without cheats or scum-saving though.
but do need lots of spike traps
the concept of kill boxes should always be considered though. you want to funnel the enemy towards your defenses. The game gets smart though and eventually spawns enemies where you don't have good defenses or drop pods on top of you. I use lots of spike traps every where on outer perimeter. middle perimeter. inner perimeter. i make sand bags behind by fences and have lots of defendable postions and retreatable positions.
a good deal of my construction is spent on spike traps and maintaining them.
remember you have nothing if you can't defend it.
Killboxes are technically hard to define. No matter what defensive construction you make, it will start to conform to some type of killbox inevitably. This happens in our own world too with castle fortifications which have a zwinger or a portcullis with literal murder holes. The difference in real life is that nobody unless extremely desperate would actively enter into these death contraptions.
The thing about rimworld killboxes is that they typically funnel the entire enemy force through a single long trap corridor that leads them to a well curated area where the enemy can fire the entire colony's worth of firepower concentrated on a single enemy coming through a single corridor.
This guy's construction does not conform to that. He has 4 different entry directions (North, South, East, West) with each 2 more entry points for a total of 8 entryways for pawns to enter the base area. There are no elaborate trap corridors which force pawns single file over traps and no cheese burnbox or toxbox configurations. He has no strange contraptions that allow him to EMP safely behind a single wall tile or through side doors.
His defensive construction is actually surprisingly similar to roman camp design combined with overlaying firing vectors that modern multi-layered defense networks use.
Honestly I don't think this is a killbox.
It's a (star shaped) box yes ...
It's good at killing yes ...
But it's not the quintessential killbox that we see in a lot of playthroughs.
This guide shows you some of the typical killbox setups and mechanics:
https://www.dualshockers.com/rimworld-best-killbox-designs/
Or the guide by Francis John;
https://youtu.be/K8fsjNjbz8Y