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That all looks wonderful, excellent work.   

1- Make armor behave more realistically - i.e. Much higher protection ratings (that is what armor is for, and if it doesn't do it reliably, well, historically speaking a lot of expensive but questionably useful military equipment has wound up tossed into roadside ditches by those who didn't want to be weighed down by it), and making power armor give a movement speed bonus.

PA is already super blatantly the best armor choice in just about all cases, I really doubt Tynan will buff it (if anything it needs some fairly hard nerfing)

Awesome, thanks for the update.

e: I enjoy failure, so I am trying an all-nudist colony (even later recruits are relieved of their apparel and all apparel on the ground is left forbidden) so I'll be forced to do both heating and cooling systems pretty much everywhere, I won't post stories this time though 

I still think you should try to price traits, because so many of them are blatantly all positive or all negative.  This mod and your interface mod (along with some others) are really awesome feature sets that I feel ought to be incorporated into the vanilla game at some point.

It will probably break the mod if you comment that out. It will still attempt to run the event but it won't find it, and it will throw an error.

Rather than make a whole separate version that writes it out, could you maybe make it something easy to customize on or off (I see the 'chance' tag but I don't think it actually does anything)

[such high risk]

The cost of building, maintaining, and powering a wall and a killbox is trivial, especially if you manage to build into a valley or tunnel into a mountain. If you get a very unlucky set-up you might have to forgo lights for a while but the mood modifier for darkness is pretty minor.

People don't construct things like this because it's cheap on resources, and frankly I think the guy who built this one would be insulted to hear you say that.   

Colonists aren't weak against a solar flare, and you can craft bows. That's nice I suppose. The killbox is still a safer and more effective means of dealing with the enemy than running around with your colonists hoping no pirate with a M-24 (sniper rifle I think it got renamed to in the last update?) gets a lucky RNG roll and shoots off someone's head, or their melee folk don't close the gap in time and start hacking off limbs.

You were talking about turrets saying they can be constructed immediately, well so can bows (if you have wood, which is not a given).  Safer, sure, but safety is not the only benchmark and it isn't an objective measure of "best" - there isn't one, it's a sandbox game.  It's totally fine to be risk averse and turtle up, and it's also totally fine to not turtle up and grab 20 or so guys with some form of weapon and hit R and mash things.  You can also see exactly what equip all of your invaders are using before you even engage them, so there's no reason the guy with the sniper rifle is particularly more dangerous than the guy with the knife unless you play passively and allow him to pick is own engagement.  Any form of hard cover between you and the sniper dude means you have total control over when you engage and how far away he is, and the only advantage of that rifle is range.

The single most valuable resource in the game is colonist ability and skill. You can buy spare limbs and neurotrainers but the good spare limbs are expensive, and neutotrainers are rare. You can also recruit more people, but there's no guarantee that they'll have the skills you want, won't have been wounded terribly in the process of capturing them etc.

Building an unbeatable kill box with dozens of turrets is pretty counter to your point here, as you will get many fewer surviving invaders to capture.  I don't disagree that new colonists are valuable, of course they are, but if everything that walks into your entrance is immediately turned into hamburger (possibly literally) ...

I skimmed the thread again just in case I missed a slew of comments about how the game was too hard without a killbox and all I spotted was your posts replying to nobody in particular, and SSS mentioning that not using a killbox restricted him to lower difficulties. As you know yourself it isn't true that not using a killbox restricts you to lower difficulties. It is quite possible to run a successful defence on a higher difficulty without a killbox and it's really only the sudden 'Mechanoids everywhere!' event (which you mentioned back on the first page of this discussion) that can really finish you without the killbox.

"Every colonist is valuable, and rarely well trained/equipped for combat, so tell me. Exactly what reason do we have not to use killboxes Tynan? What other ways do we have to protect our colonists without such high risk?"

"There aren't really too many alternatives to killboxes and other chokepoint entrance structures, because building a 360-degree defense is prohibitively expense in both resources and energy, and using colonists to defend is basically impossible because attacks occur instantly with zero warning, so defenses must be fully manned and fully operational at all times, which we presently do not have the numbers to do and do not have the UI features to work without it being a massively tedious micromanagement chore."

etc, I mean interpret these however you like but they boil down to "I can't win unless I do this thing"

The point being made here is that there's no reason to use any other defence than an automated killbox. It is the single best approach to your colony's defence in the entire game. It is basically impenetrable if designed correctly, only has a weakness against the odd solar flare, can be constructed immediately, and offers no danger whatsoever to your colonists. If you're using something other than a turret-lined killbox it's because you want to, not because it's an optimal strategy.

- It costs vast amounts of steel and power, so in terms of efficiency, no not really
- Colonists aren't even weak vs the odd solar flare
- You can trade immediately, you can make bows at the smith immediately (just in vanilla)

I mean you can absolutely play the game however you enjoy it best but your criteria for efficiency and what is optimal are very subjective.  I mean ok, resources are generally common enough that it's not hard to build and power a huge array of turrets, but that being "best" is strictly your preference.  And actually the OP and others have said repeatedly that yes, the game is too hard unless one builds an impregnable kill box.

Easier than you'd think.  I have a colony of over 100 that has never fired a single shot.  Turrets.

Haha ok, now would you say the game's difficulty has FORCED you into this situation of 100 colonists that you don't bother to put a gun on because there is no alternative, because uh

e: It's just weird that people equate "The game is easy if you build 5,000 turrets" with "The game is really hard if you do not"

I dunno, but it seems likely /shrug

I'm sure the mod owner will be along soon to say for sure.

Fairly sure you can just comment out the block for that incident in Mods\Zombie Apocalypse\Defs\IncidentDefs\BaseIncidents_Zombies.xml

How are you crafting large numbers of legendary art pieces but you don't have more than 5 combat-capable dudes, how does that even happen.  By the time I manage to produce multiple legendary sculptures I have around 12-15 dudes who can hold guns, and a large assortment of guns looted from attackers/traded.

Okey doke, working well so far.

Seems this has gone FAR past my first comment. This wasn't really to talk about killboxing, but ways to get around having to use killboxing. The overall consensus here though is, you can't get around using killboxes to stay alive.

What, no, just get some dudes with guns and activate them and shoot things.  The vanilla game is really not that hard at all.  What scenario is so difficult that you have to build a hands free kill box?

Man, I had really forgotten how much meat and leather the game throws at you in vanilla biomes.  Ice Sheet is so gratifyingly challenging compared to any of the more comfortable terrains.   

What do you do when you want to play tundra/ice sheet again, disable Wastelanders mod?

Yeah that's what it is, I guess I unpacked it wrong /shrug

Thanks!

ps: FYI "cactus" is a really good seed for producing a lot of desert biome tiles.