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It's worth asking what you'd do as a player if you were raiding a faction base and the defenders started doing this.

Shoot the wall from outside the defender's gun range (most fast weapons are short ranged; if they use assault rifles you can still use your charge lances, bolt-action or sniper rifles).

It's worth noting that no matter how evenly matched the defenders and attackers are in terms of gear, the defensive perimeter will always be targetable by the attacker from outside the defender's shooting range, since it has to be placed between the two sides. This means that "shoot the wall" tactic makes any defensive structures useless unless they are backed up by sniper turrets. Which in turn would make the mid-game raids impossible to defend against if they retained their current numbers.

Or do players like this strategy? Should it be left alone?

There's hardly anything else that during the early game would allow us to beat the better equipped, outnumbering 3 to 1, raids of the higher difficulty levels, or am I missing something?

3. Should players be able to consistently avoid losing people/resources even at high difficulty? At any difficulty?

They already are. I've been consistently playing 10+ year colonies with little to no losses (2-4 colonists lost total per game, and in most cases those were preventable as well) on Cass extreme iron man in previous versions. In the current build, I'm dropping 10-15 man raids with my two colonists who have nothing but looted gear - without taking any damage in the process.
You just need to treat any chance of return fire as completely unacceptible; it's tenchnically possible and not even all that hard untill you have to micro it in more than 2-3 places at once.

My point is, if someone says that they played it perfectly but still lost, chances are they did not have the patience to actually play it perfectly.

> 1. Are animals useful in combat? Do you use them? If so, why?  If not, why not?

Can be useful, but are unreliable and hard to use. I use them when I have to, otherwise not.

> 2. Are there annoying/weird points about animals in combat?

They are hard and inconvenient to position and quickly engage/disengage, while precision and speed are key factors to successful melee combat. Being able to give them specific orders would help with this, but would still not make them really viable because the micromanagement wouldn't be worth the benefits most of the time.

Also, being unarmored means that they more or less inevitably and fairly quickly get permanent injuries. It's not a problem if you mass breed them to be cannon fodder, but otherwise it is.

> 3. How are you using animals in combat?

Early game, they can provide extra dps or tanking because it's easier to keep them out of excessive retaliation. Also, muffalos can help protect caravans untill ambushes start getting really nasty. Other than that, I only use them in desperate situations.

I personally would use my big cats in caravans as lower power score melees if:

1) permanent injury was reasonably fixable
2) they could hunt while traveling in biomes where they normally can hunt

In larger scale combat, I don't see non-throwaway animals becoming usable unless there are shields and armor for them.

Picture of your base please.

You don't need killboxes to play this game. I've never used them, my current colony is year 17 on extreme difficulty. Killboxes are boring.

Vanilla Cassandra extreme, late game raids are still too easy though I wish they were smarter.

Registered just to say THANK YOU for these mods! The memory leak fix and Pawn GC literally brought my late game back to life!

I really hope that, eventually, the core build of the game will internalize this great work.