Anyone else refuse to make immersion-breaking kill boxes and prefer to play more RP style with less than gamey defenses? What are your tips? I'm trying to get it all down for the Vanilla 1.5 DLC playthrough.

[JCourtney]

Anyone else refuse to make immersion-breaking kill boxes and prefer to play more RP style with less than gamey defenses?

What are your tips?

I'm trying to get it all down for the Vanilla 1.5 DLC playthrough by playing unstable branch right now.

[Mistress]

I just have a gate area with some sandbags and bits of wall. Looks more like a gate than a gamey kill box.
Nothing wrong with a killbox, for sure. But Im not a fan of using them either. Does also mean combat ends up being very same-y.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by JCourtney:

Kill-box-like is okay, but I don't want to be making those goofy-looking maze trap boxes, etc.

I think the vast majority of players use natural looking defenses. I typically have one entrance into my base with some barriers/sandbags I use for cover to shoot incoming enemies. That is a basic killbox and ya I think the vast majority of players do something along those lines. They might have more than one entrance each with sandbags and defend at whatever side of the map the enemy is coming from, but it doesn't really change the concept.

The gimicky maze stuff is typically excessive or exploitative and I think very few people deal with that.

[marcusaddamsson]

Yea, I typically just put up a wall around 3/4 of my base.. usually a fence to keep animals in. Then I'll build a bunker so my ranged pawns can have cover... and some sort of small building with my melee guys ready to pounce if it's melee time. :)

[Veylox]

The maze serves no purpose to stop the raids in itself except if it's in a burnbox.

Mazes only serve to delay the time between the raid appearing and the raid reaching the point where they fight you, so that you can't be killed by a raid walking faster to your colony than your colonists to their defensive positions

And embrasures are obviously just stronger killboxes. They work almost the same way (allowing you to shoot while preventing most of the return fire), except it is required to let the enemy through with killboxes, but you don't have to with embrasures, negating the dangers of melee. The difference between a killbox and an embrasure is really just the difference between a wall and an embrasure ; you have less options with the former.

[MadameHardy]

Originally posted by marcusaddamsson:

Yea, I typically just put up a wall around 3/4 of my base.. usually a fence to keep animals in. Then I'll build a bunker so my ranged pawns can have cover... and some sort of small building with my melee guys ready to pounce if it's melee time. :)

What do you do about invaders taking time out to kill your animals before they proceed to murdering you?

[marcusaddamsson]

Well, typically I don't have too many animals. They tend to flee when attacked. Shrug. The area inside the wall/fence isn't small. Plus I put the animal beds at the back, so they tend to stay back there. Once upon a time I would build a barn, and then 'forbid' the door if the attack happened when they're sleepin' in there.

My only goal is to ensure that they attack in a single corridor and attackers will route without any fuss.

[VoiD]

Same here.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by MadameHardy:

Originally posted by marcusaddamsson:

Yea, I typically just put up a wall around 3/4 of my base.. usually a fence to keep animals in. Then I'll build a bunker so my ranged pawns can have cover... and some sort of small building with my melee guys ready to pounce if it's melee time. :)

What do you do about invaders taking time out to kill your animals before they proceed to murdering you?

Go out and kill them first

[Tent]

Offset by cheesing passively instead of actively lol. Pick a good starting map, a natural choke feels a lot more organic than a maze of walls - even if it's only mostly organic because you slightly edited it. A strong starting pawn feels a lot more immersive than a line of traps - even though he's only strong because you decided he would be.

It's ironic, but it's way more engaging for me personally than using killboxes. I'd rather take the advantage I get from killboxes and spread it out a bit (even though it usually doesn't come close to matching the usefulness of a killbox), but honestly that's not even needed. You don't NEED killboxes unless you're doing a high threat/modded challenge run. You can get by with good base placement and micro. Tynan is actively trying to make raids that can get around them anyways.

And ofc you said Vanilla, but if you add mods then it's easy. Something like Vanilla Psycasters Expanded alone can be enough to offset most of what you lose by avoiding killboxes, unless you're using challenging mods too.

[Porky]

It's a personal preference thing. This is a game where you play how you want. You don't need kill boxes, it's just cuts down on kiting and mood breaks from days long battles and raid drops.

I usually set up one or 2 gated main entrances to my colonies with the ability to close them in case of manhunters, but sprinkle defensive positions all around. Breach raids, drop pods don't care about the kill boxes - so you need back up plans and alternative positions. Falling back, retreating in doors, kiting enemies towards other turrets placed around are all viable.

[UselessOkuu]

Originally posted by Arbee:

Nothing wrong with a killbox, for sure.

My problem with killboxes is that they cause circular logic game design, they are too efective due to the AI, so the raids get buffed to compensate, which at some point you will need a killboxe to survive which means raids get buffed to com- you get the point

[Greb]

I'd be less likely to use killboxes if 250 tribals from a nearby village didn't come to raid me. The food requirements to feed 250 of them for a 15+ tile trek during winter over a mountain and across the planet must be pretty extreme.

Killboxes (or at least defensive positions where you can shoot the enemy from cover and they can't easily shoot back due and from without cover) are just natural when you're at threat of being raided. It becomes even more important to funnel them when you've got 10 or so colonists that apparently all need to kill 10-20 pawns each (disregarding retreats, of course) - even I wouldn't want to send a top tier pawn kitted out with mods and legendary gear against 10-20 dudes at once.

I started using a mixture of mods namely Compressed Raids, Raid Limiter for a bit more control, and Fortified Walls for some embrasures for a more realistic set of defences, and it feels a lot better. Better than funneling 100+ things into corridors and then shooting them as they pour out one at a time, anyway. When it's a smallish group of elite pawns coming to attack you it also feels a lot less chaotic and lethal (which in turn reduces the need for a killbox quite a bit).

Not to mention manhunter packs. I can't find sudden attacks from 30+ polar bears fun if I don't have a way to funnel them somewhere so my colony can mow them down. Just closing the front door and waiting seems kinda lame, you'd think they'd be able to sense fresh meat and attempt to rip doors off the hinges instead of just patrolling outside, lol.

I also don't like playing colonies where everyone has to be armed at all times. It's nice having some pawns who don't have to fight. I know you can adjust difficulties and such, but I'm content with just normal. It's just eventually normal itself bloats into these huge raids which make little sense to me (without mods at least) unless you're literally building the Normandy defensive line outside of your base. It's like every RimWorld colony turns into Cadia or Krieg eventually where even the kids are handed Chain Shotguns "just in case."

I hope Anomaly adds more types of raids. Wouldn't mind seeing people tunneling up through the ground, to go along with Mechanoids emerging from water. Imagine having Mechanoids tunnel up through ice, or suddenly explode out of the sand like they were dormant and buried there for centuries. I'm assuming we might see some monsters who melt walls, jump walls or simply phase through walls, too. As much as I'm not really a fan of the monsters / night terrors type of thing, certainly curious and hopeful that it'll mix up raids again. Other than sieges and drop pod assaults, raids feel very samey.

[Mokona]

Kill boxes stopped working for me when they added sappers. I cant survive without them so my colony doesnt ever last long. Would rather play with kill boxes. Dont see how its "immersion breaking" as it makes perfect sense to make a kill zone, its been done many times in real life its strategy.

[nosedigger]

I use maze with traps, but do not make one big kill-box, because I tend to have few melee specialists that I want to see hacking and slashing during raids. They are usually first to receive bionic/archtype body parts, and it would be really wasteful not to watch them holding the line against swarms of enemies.

(except for Mechanoids, those heat-resistant f-tards deserve to be chocked)

[Astasia]

Originally posted by UselessOkuu:

Originally posted by Arbee:

Nothing wrong with a killbox, for sure.

My problem with killboxes is that they cause circular logic game design, they are too efective due to the AI, so the raids get buffed to compensate, which at some point you will need a killboxe to survive which means raids get buffed to com- you get the point

Raids don't get buffed though, raids were actually significantly nerfed around 1.1, and turrets and defenses have been buffed multiple times since. The game is balanced around using the included defensive tools in a way that makes sense, they are intended to be as effective as they are. The gameplay loop is just that not all threats use a killbox, and that has always been the case since sieges and sappers were introduced many years ago in the early alphas, these are much smaller threats designed to be able to be dealt with using normal combat.

When players come up with a "killbox" design/strategy that is overly effective for minimal cost, it generally involves exploiting bugs and those bugs get fixed. 1.5 has some fixes there from my understanding, but I'm generally not one to take advantage of exploits and don't know the details on what exactly was fixed or how.