Explain to a noob

[TPTI]

Explain to a noob

How do these work?

Defense cages? what is everyone talking about with these focussed fire points?
Is it a building within a building?
Is it sandbags?

I am doing Blood and Dust Randy

Many thanks

[Алкаш]

Just search "rimworld killbox" on youtube

[MadArtillery]

Usually it's wacky mazes, possibly on fire, that end in a big room full of people with guns. With a mini turret surrounded by doors at the entrance so enemies enter combat mode and can't stand in the same tile as eachother as they go through the maze. It makes the game vastly easier and combat quite a lot more boring as enemies march single file to be roasted and/or shot to death one by one. Absolutely unnecessary to survive even on higher difficulties but a lot of players use them. Never seen the appeal, making combat boring is a pretty big negative to me, but it's a single player sandbox, play however you like.

[di eshor ribly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEoikQtQ144

Noobert makes decent tutorial vids.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEoikQtQ144

Noobert makes decent tutorial vids.

I don't even use killboxes and even I know most of the examples in that video seems god awful and inefficient. Unsafe trap rearming being such a big one going to frustrate newbies. And the "wiki image" killbox disaster with barely any place for pawns to fight, terrible line of sight. Dear god. Please don't copy that trash thumbnails design either. 3 year old video with the title updated to 1.5 while giving bad information for extra views without having to actually put out something informative. Truly aweful.

[TPTI]

amazing, many thanks

[endymionologist]

It's applying the mechanics of Tower Defense games to your building style; it assumes you will construct a walled compound instead of an open village. The important principle is that normal enemies will path toward the part of the map where all your pawns are, so no matter how many walls and doors you make you must always keep one way into the compound that is technically open to just walk all the way in through.

Because you know most enemies will go in that way, you don't need to build thousands of barricades all over the map, and instead you can construct a firing range where the enemies will always face fire from all of your pawns right before they can even take their own shots (ideally...big raids complicate this and complicated raids can invalidate it).

[di eshor ribly]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEoikQtQ144

Noobert makes decent tutorial vids.

I don't even use killboxes and even I know most of the examples in that video seems god awful and inefficient. Unsafe trap rearming being such a big one going to frustrate newbies. And the "wiki image" killbox disaster with barely any place for pawns to fight, terrible line of sight. Dear god. Please don't copy that trash thumbnails design either. 3 year old video with the title updated to 1.5 while giving bad information for extra views without having to actually put out something informative. Truly aweful.

I don't use killboxes either, you've seen the screenshot of what I usually use as my base in other threads. It's not so much the specific information, but the general idea of what a killbox is and how to use them if you choose to. He has other updated videos, that's just the first one I found.

You want to talk awful and inefficient you can look up his video where he makes a killbox hallway out of diagonal doors that his pawns can stab enemies through without retaliation.

[TPTI]

Many thanks

From the tutorial I was creating a bed house etc

When I should make one full compound

Also I was building a little hut for deteoirating items

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

I don't even use killboxes and even I know most of the examples in that video seems god awful and inefficient. Unsafe trap rearming being such a big one going to frustrate newbies. And the "wiki image" killbox disaster with barely any place for pawns to fight, terrible line of sight. Dear god. Please don't copy that trash thumbnails design either. 3 year old video with the title updated to 1.5 while giving bad information for extra views without having to actually put out something informative. Truly aweful.

I don't use killboxes either, you've seen the screenshot of what I usually use as my base in other threads. It's not so much the specific information, but the general idea of what a killbox is and how to use them if you choose to. He has other updated videos, that's just the first one I found.

You want to talk awful and inefficient you can look up his video where he makes a killbox hallway out of diagonal doors that his pawns can stab enemies through without retaliation.

That doesn't even work anymore and and I am unsure if you know what inefficient means. It was absurdly busted strong, and now it's thankfully dead and gone.

I also have no idea who you are or what killboxes you may or may not be running. I generally ignore killbox threads or posts unless it's a super newbie asking questions. Lack of interest on my part. Please don't link garbage videos with terrible examples though. Better to link nothing at all.

[di eshor ribly]

Effective does not mean efficient. He had several hundred doors that he had to micromanage his spearmen to keep up with the invading horde. It took up a huge amount of map space for a silly serpentine door hallway, and he needed a small army to keep up with stabbing. It was like using a wrecking ball to smash a vase when a hammer would have done the job.

Even old information is useful, it serves as a foundation to start understanding the basic principals at play. It'd be like ignoring the history of human warfare because we don't use sharpened sticks any more.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

Effective does not mean efficient. He had several hundred doors that he had to micromanage his spearmen to keep up with the invading horde. It took up a huge amount of map space for a silly serpentine door hallway, and he needed a small army to keep up with stabbing. It was like using a wrecking ball to smash a vase when a hammer would have done the job.

Even old information is useful, it serves as a foundation to start understanding the basic principals at play. It'd be like ignoring the history of human warfare because we don't use sharpened sticks any more.

Bad information teaches poor habits that can both sabotage the play experience and future learning by having false foundations. Nothing good comes from building a house with a faulty foundation. If you are going to help someone, put in the bare minimum legwork to actually be helpful in the very least. Just the thumbnail is enough reason not to share it let alone quickly browsing through it for a second before posting it. Would it really have been so much extra effort to post at least a middlingly informative video? If you're going through the trouble of posting a video already at least do it right.

[Crimson]

I've found most killbox videos on Rimworld to be outdated.

[apud.harald]

You need the general idea, and the vids explain that well enough.
It is NOT a good idea to burden noobs with the finer points, which should be obvious to anyone who has even taken a primary school math class. You do not need to explain multiplication to someone learning to add.

The public display of ''critical thinking'' should be abstained from. ( And if you need that explained I refer you to Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. )

[Veylox]

I'll show you the three I use currently (not outdated). All three assume that the enemy will come through them to get you, meaning you have to seal your base and make the killbox the only open entry point.


https://imgur.com/a/ZcMFYPG

More of a "classic" killbox and the weakest of the three, but it can be set up as early as first in-game week. Really well-suited for chain shotguns because the range is short. Enemies enter left, go through the tunnel, and get blocked when arriving outside by your melee blockers. Shooters are behind (ideally behind the lone walls) and fire at will. It can technically overcome the entire game, but you really need to keep your gear way ahead of the curve, raids WILL chew through this if you don't have high-quality shotguns nor extremely tanky melee pawns (at least one tough sanguophage will help a lot, or maybe a juiced-up ghoul). Plus longer raids on higher difficulty run significant risk that your shooters will end up destroying the walls, creating a path for the opponents to walk through.

The "classic" killbox is a variant of this one, slightly longer to build, where instead of waiting right outside the tunnel your colonists stand 30-ish tiles away (depending on their weapon's max range). They shoot at enemies walking in trying to close the gap. Not sure which one is stronger, but I feel much less at risk of being overtaken with the close-range one, because you can always melee block with something.

https://imgur.com/aeseAjP

This one is absolutely overpowered. Let enemies enter at the top, and light the wood on fire at the bottom. Anything that can die to heat, will. Zero chance of survival, even if we're talking 200 enemies on losing is fun. And all it takes is one colonist to ignite the wood, everyone else can keep working.

There is one massive weakness ; mechs and most anomalies (not fleshbeasts tho) are immune to heat. This will do nothing against them, you might as well be naked.

https://imgur.com/DDmQ1qU

This one isn't well-optimized because I came up with it myself and as long as something works, I don't try to make it look clean, but it's easily the second strongest thing in existence after the previous one, and it does well against mechs and anomalies. Make the room shape roughly match the radius of a deadlife dust IED (you'll need Anomaly DLC), and store any rotting corpse (or any corpse you're not gonna butcher) in there. From the start of your game. The more corpses you have, the better. Whenever a raid rolls in, send a colonist to shoot your IED, and it'll raise the corpse army. The stronger the initial creatures, the stronger the corpse. A lot of them retain their powers, I'm pretty sure zombie Noctols still get a massive buff in the dark for example. Corpses are kinda weak though so you need a lot to beat the strongest raids. But it's a nice self-sustaining box (it will add corpses to the pile on its own when it kills enemies), and again, hands-free and secure since you don't need colonists beyond the initial trigger.

Be warned that these are some of the strongest defense methods in the game, and I wouldn't recommend using them anywhere below blood and dust difficulty, it WILL make your game really easy if you don't have massive difficulty settings.

Neither of these three will allow you to survive forever or exempt you from learning how to fight, because several types of raids can ignore killboxes and there's no real "easy" counterplay to them, you just have to have good tactical improvisation when they appear.

[Veylox]

"You want to talk awful and inefficient you can look up his video where he makes a killbox hallway out of diagonal doors that his pawns can stab enemies through without retaliation."

That was by far the strongest, most efficient box the game has ever seen, but we're probably not thinking of the same one