I just experienced sappers for the first time and they were terrifying, atleast i think those were sappers.

[Hottox]

"hmm, pretty normal raid. A bit big, but nothing i can't handle"

"alright, everyone is set up in the killbox, now we wait."

"wait, where the hell are they going? The killbox is over here"

(sounds of dynamite blowing up walls, empire drop pods landing to give us support and bloodshed as my soldiers rush to the scene to contain the damage)

How exactly does one make sure that doesn't happen in the future?

[Narrowmind]

Your first time in hundreds of hours? You've been lucky. Lol

[psychotron666]

Kill boxes are like the noob cannons of rimworld.

[Hottox]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

Your first time in hundreds of hours? You've been lucky. Lol

I know right? 276 hours and thats the first time i was in hot water like that. Usually they just drop pod into my barracks and i light them up from the door. I've never actually been forced to fight like that. Well, good thing my colonists are covered head to toe in flak armor and devilstrand though. God i love this game.

[Olcadan]

I recommend having lots of furry creatures running all around your base. First time I encountered sappers, they blew through my courtyard wall then made a beeline for my pet hare, walking right by the 6 or so pawns with chain shotguns hiding behind a statue, thus allowing me to thin the herd quite efficiently. RIP Sunny the Bunny, your sacrifice was not in vain.

[Cellar_Cat]

Depends. You can kill the leaders with ranged weapons. Snipers, mortars, psycasts, or disposable rocket launchers or psy-weapons. You can fight them in fortifications that aren't closed, since if there's an easy way to walk into your base (with no turrets) they don't seem to mind. I'm not sure if powering off the turrets until they arrive will trick them or not, but you could give it a shot.

If they do fight you in fortifications there are various crowd control weapons that work on humanoids. Tox gas, psycasts (berserk pulse lol, but vertigo will do), fire.

In a mountain base with a lot of turret coverage, I also found they tend to establish favourite routes. They'll dig in the same few places all the other sappers dug, I guess it's the cheapest pathing relative to where they entered the map. Even if it's a 20 tile deep corridor into rock, where I've left incendiary IEDs, they'd walk in there. Then I ambush them outside or they lose the sappers and run back to the main entrance.

[Ghevd]

Low shields are your friend and meet the enemy in the field. Focus fire on those with explosive weapons.

If ya have royalty, I've even seen people skip grenadiers into their own grenades. Add in a berserk or two or a berserk pulse and let them wipe out themselves.

If they have a low shield you can skip them towards you, set off their shield, dispose of them and use their shield to block their commerades gunfire.

Honestly don't know what I'd do without psycasts.

Finally it helps to read raid notifications to know if they will prepare or raid immediately. Also mentions if they are sappers and targeting your walls.

[JD]

Read notifications, it should tell you what kind of raid you're facing, if it's sappers/breachers then go outside and fight them. Or let them do what they want until they decide to leave.

[Swordmouse]

Turret coverage is a very, very heavy deterrent for their pathing.

This means you can bait them into areas with no turret fire. You may or may not consider this cheesy, or simple justice for being the obnoxious raiders they are.

Picture a boxlike base with plenty of turret coverage on the inside parimeter. Now picture a walled off, 7-ish tile wide corridor leading from the outer wall straight to your bedrooms. Since this corridor is walled off on all sides, you can fill it with tons of traps that will only be triggered by sappers trying to reach your bedroom, and sappers will priortize this lane even if it means walking around your base, because there is 0 turret coverage within the corridor. If you make it exactly wide enough to contain IED explosions without damaging your walls, bonus points.

You can also have a line of defenses, complete with turrets, facing that corridor. When the enemy busts that outer wall and starts going through the trap gauntlet, you can shoot out/deconstruct/burn/blow up/IED a designated chunk of wall so they path right through your line of sight, and your awaiting turrets.

If your map and base design allow for it, this defensive position can even be your existing killbox, just manned in reverse. No need to to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of being flippable though, as sapper raids are much weaker to compensate for bypassing most defenses or thinking they can).

[Makeithappen]

Originally posted by Olcadan:

I recommend having lots of furry creatures running all around your base. First time I encountered sappers, they blew through my courtyard wall then made a beeline for my pet hare, walking right by the 6 or so pawns with chain shotguns hiding behind a statue, thus allowing me to thin the herd quite efficiently. RIP Sunny the Bunny, your sacrifice was not in vain.

I have wargs, megasloths, and grizzly bears patrolling along my walls. It helps when sappers attack immediately and I don't have time to move some of my pawns into position. If no one is outside the walls, I make good use of the Psychic animal pulser.

[boytype]

There are definitely ways to manipulate sapper raids to go where you want them to go, but often the best way to deal with them is to be ready to have your combat team move to wherever they choose as a breach point and to use the gap they make as the chokepoint.

Sapper raids are abusive, unbalanced, and all around trash compared to most of the other events that can happen in rimworld. They are an immersion breaking and meta-gamey response from the game dev to the tendency of a certain group of player to use killboxes, and they exist to the detriment and lowered game quality of all other players.

If raiders could so easily and effortlessly bypass a settlements defenses and cause such mass destruction, there is no reason they would not use this tactic 100% of the time. It makes absolutely no sense at all that these raids exist, and they are one of the worst things in the game.

They should be reworked or removed, and the fact that they even exist in the first place is a low point in developer ingenuity and design ability for rimworld.

[Yxklyx]

I've got over 1000 hours and have only seen them once or twice. On a related note, I had a quest that was to drop 2 raids on me from different factions. The first one had a mortar and I said Oh ♥♥♥♥ what do I do, then the second raid came in right on top of them and they obliterated each other :)

[Valen]

What is fun about making the same stupid kill box every game to cheese the AI?

[boytype]

Originally posted by Valen:

What is fun about making the same stupid kill box every game to cheese the AI?

Literally none of your business what someone else finds to be fun.

I can just as easily say "what fun is playing on X difficulty" or "what fun is playing with X storyteller". or "What fun is playing darkness tunnelers in a cave base". If people want to play a certain way, then they should be allowed to play that way.

Supposedly that is the reason that there are no achievements for the game; because Tynan does not want to force people to play a certain way.

If the mantra of the game is play the way that you have the most fun, then there should not be things that specifically exist only to sabotage a particular way that people are choosing to play the game.

And as someone who plays open or walled separated building town builds, I should not have to deal with the extreme reactionary addition of poorly designed and OP raid types that the devs are adding specifically to target a player group that I am not part of.

Its a lose/lose situation for everyone when the devs do things like this.

[Stormtrooper]

I also don't do killboxes (I want tactical and immersive combat, if I wanted tower defense I'd, well, go play a tower defense game, also the AI is only stupid if you use killboxes, without them it performs surprisingly good on the battlefield), but I see why devs specifically fighting with them might be bad - if some trenches, second line of embrasures and maybe a turret here or there once you advance far enough is all you can get, then you just can't play on the highest difficulty because it's clear these are only viable if you cheese AI.

But having said that... Sapper raids are good IMO. It provides variety and tradeoffs for certain design and location choices (do you want to fear regular firefights and sieges or infestations and sappers) and if anything, for no killbox playthroughs they are basically raids on easy mode since they bring less enemies than regular ones and their abilities are meaningless in a town built on plains.

[Swordmouse]

Originally posted by Valen:

What is fun about making the same stupid kill box every game to cheese the AI?

Funneling enemies into a killzone is an intended mechanic, you realize that, right my dude? Otherwise every raid would be a sapper/drop pod raid, and I THINK Tynan has had enough time to make that change if that was his vision.

I don't know how anyone could look at the vastness of Rimworld's mod scene which makes it one of THE greatest play-it-your-way titles in existence, remember it's a single player game, and then feel the need to question why people make use of a vanilla mechanic. That's really quite special.

Really though? Why do I personally find it appealing? Because I like base building, and I like tower defense titles as well. I also think it's satisfying to see just how much I can twist and shape a map over the course of years, and see just how miserable I can make it for enemies. Sort of a min-max mindset, sort of a push to reach ever greater heights of tactical mastery of Rimworld's combat mechanics. And regardless of what you might think of killboxes, when you have 30 centipedes pushing through in a single raid, you still notice room for improvement.

Running out and pewpewing is fun. Notice how I don't knock that. It adds variety, as do drop pod raids, sapper raids, insect infestations, sieges etc - that's the friggin' point.