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Shotguns would be useful if shots hit the first thing in their way, and not merely what they were calculated to hit, and so spread out. I know shotguns don't spread that much in close combat, but if you were using a wide, flat choke, they'd have some spread - enough to fill a 1-tile hallway and make life absolutely suck for the jackasses sprinting down said hallway.

Of course, for that to work, weapons wouldn't need to take forever and a day to acquire targets and fire. By the time they do that, the bloody raiders are in melee.

Nope, you can't get rid of floors. The best you can do is lay down a different floor type atop it. So you can never go back to stone or natural soil.

[shamelessly steal it.]

Stormkiko: I love that "Use green carpet as astroturf" aesthetic. I hope you don't mind if I shamelessly steal it.

Altosk: I really hope some poor cat was standing next to the wall that blew.

That is fucking awesome. Did you take pics of the muffalo rampage and the carnage ensuing?

.254b happened next, is what happened.

is .254b save compatible with .250?

I dunno. I wanted to try Chill Callie though. Maybe we need a Chill Kassie - tough as Kassie, but with Callie's slower pace.

.254b happened next, is what happened.

I can't believe my .250 Cassandra fort got pic-dropped on Kickstarter...

That said, I'm going to try to top it in OMGWTF factor in Callie .254b.



This is my current fort. I named it Pandorica, though I'm starting to wish I'd named it New Hobbiton. It started into the hillock rather than the mountain because the thermal generator there was in the open in a lee in the hillock and I couldn't locate any on the mountainside itself. There are two Death Highways that I light off when I just can't be arsed to sound the red alert and pull everybody from their tasks, which takes care of about 19/20 raids all by themselves, because those raiders are idiots and think that running down my industrial highways lined with mass graves amidst a landscape showered in blood and viscera and probably bone shards and shit is a good idea!



This is the results of me lighting one of the highways off. I plant mines at three-square intervals, starting from where it lines up juuust right that it won't break into my mountain, and ending where the highway curves. It's a total of about 15 or so, and the explosives overlap so that when one goes off, they all go off; ensuring a full kill on everyone caught between the first and last mines. That seems expensive, but when a shooting war breaks out in my killbox, I'd lose far more metal than that in the turrets alone. Plus, with the graves right next to the death, clean-up's a fair snap, my poor people don't get unhappy thoughts for seeing death (really, after the first dozen or so times, you'd think they'd get used to seeing death through a gunsight,) and the rippling explosions somehow cleanly remove remains from the graves instead of, say, showering the landscape with the parts of corpses both fresh and less fresh.



An after image. Note the mine placement for those who want to take notes. I can't begin to guesstimate how much time and trouble this has saved me, both in fighting off those omnicidal fanatics (and taking casualties; the last time I let a raid get all the way through, motherlovers got a grenade into a pillbox and killed one of my colonists dead!) and in not having to dig my own Arlington for the enemy.



This is my hobbit-hole, such as it is. My killbox design isn't the best, as this was always intended to be temporary until I got my expansions into the mountain into full swing, but it works well enough. I had some raiders slip through on my last batch, but they got caught completely in enfilade and cut to ribbons before they even hit the sandbags - and that was during a flare, too, so my turrets weren't any help at all.

You can see my many pillbox armories, the numerous small rooms most of my citizens enjoy up in the hill, the generator, a commpanel for the colony con artist to swindle fools out of their credits and supplies, in his own comfy negotiations booth no less (He's an agoraphobe. I said so. ) the canteen, battery room, the oaf's living quarters (right next to their farm,) and some residential expansions which are "in progress" and planned.

My long-term goal is to exploit the fact that prisoners don't count against your pop limit to imprison my own people, bring in more prisoners, etcetera, until I have a population worthy of a Dwarven Fortress - and hence, worthy of filling that bloody great mountain!

It'd be nice if some mining vessels would show up with like, 2,000 metal apiece. I only get industrial traders with 500 or combat suppliers with less than a hundred.

The explosion radius on a turret is exactly the same as that of a blasting charge sited at the southwest tile. Solid walls would reduce it, sandbags won't. Solid walls are also a PITA to rebuild.

Basically, if you locate your turrets with three squares between them, you're golden.

That depends largely on the engagement range. The M-24 is the best if you're shooting over open terrain at a lone target which is much shorter ranged, such as a lone pistoleer or a psychotic muffalo.

M-24 sniper squads with free lines of sight are devastating. That goes both ways, though, so it's not recommended that the player attempt to exploit this, as the raiders will have a lot more gunners than the colonists will, and much better shots to boot.

At closer ranges, the R-4 charged rifle is pretty much king. The M-16 out-ranges it by a few tiles, but not many. The other weapons, I find, are simply not worth even bothering with - shotguns are very short-ranged and don't have the devastating effect that you'd expect a short-ranged shotgun blast to have, nor do they have the spread or accuracy bonus you'd want from a shotgun blast in a video game. Uzis have the single advantage that they recycle and fire quite quickly, but that's all they have - they're doing pistol damage and have bad accuracy compared to a rifle, and sadly suppressing fire doesn't exist. The Lee-Enfield is just a less-accurate, less-ranged sniper rifle, which is a real shame because IRL the Lee-Enfield is a wonderful gun. A person in a survival situation could hardly ask for a better bolt-action rifle. The T-24 incendiary launcher is utter dogshite. It takes a long time to fire, isn't terribly accurate, only fires one round, and if it hits it only sets the guy on fire. He'll run around for a few seconds and either put it out himself, or he'll run around, burning to death, and setting your base on fire.

So basically, you want to set things up so that the bad guys come into an enfilade of R-4 charge rifle shots with turrets to draw their fire. Or, alternatively, you just want to set explosives, lure them into a perfect explosive killbox, and blow them all to kingdom come, which results in many fewer casualties and much greater simplicity for you. Also, even blowing up fifteen miens at once is cheaper than losing three turrets in a pitched battle.

I recently found out that the number of raiders depends on the number of turrets you build.

This is not true at all. I have only three turrets in my base and about 11 colonists and I'm getting raids of about 20 bandits.

Fortunately, they're all as stupid as the last group who immediately cheer their good fortune in that I paved out a nice concrete walkway for them to travel down, completely and blithely ignoring the fact that it's literally lined with mostly-open graves and has landmines every three paces.

Then the inevitable happens, and if any of them happened to be outside that kill-zone, they usually go "Nope!" and turn around to leave, having learned smarts the only way raiders can.

[do]

You do realize that you can put more than one image in a single post, right?!

Combat in RimWorld, if you don't want to lose (or at least take unacceptable losses,) is about manipulating the battlefield to your advantage. The enemy will always have a numbers advantage, and their shooters will always be more experienced than yours.

So do whatever you have to do to win. Build sheds to put your people on "Dark" tiles even at high noon, and build lights to illuminate incoming hostiles even in the dead of night during an eclipse. Use sandbag-wall-sandbag-wall bunkers, preferably with at least one more layer of sandbags out front of them

Build sandbag bunkers that are ideal for taking cover and shooting at your base, and combine them with perfectly-positioned demo charges to blast the raiders to kingdom come. Build one or two tile wide highways of concrete, line them with graves and plant explosives on every third square. You can wipe out entire raids without firing a single shot, and the replacement cost of the mines will always be less than the cost of repairing all the damage the raiders did, even if you use fifteen mines and detonate an entire kilometer of ground!

The AI won't throw fair fights at you, not even Chill Callie. She just takes longer to throw ridiculously unfair fights at you. Remember Maxim 31: Only cheaters prosper.

I have a better idea.

Why bother with raiders dropping in at all? They should just drop a goddamn space rock on top of 1d6 of your colonists from orbit and have done with it![/sarcasm]

Generally speaking, gigantic fields of graves occupied by hundreds of people who have tried and failed in the last five months are a good reason to say "You know what? Maybe we should go find someone less psychotic to raid."

You really do need to use a wall to force the raider snipers into close range, with Callie or without.

And even with Callie, I've just resorted to building huge concrete highways along my 250x250 map. They're just too good for the raiders to resist (though I originally built them to speed up my miners' movements to outside mineral deposits.)

Really, you'd think that looking down a straight concrete path lined mostly with open graves and a few filled ones, someone would say "nope!"

But no. They cheerfully hop on the concrete and skip their way at 100% movement speed straight into the ka-boom. Mines spaced every three squares. Costs less than the three turrets that will inevitably be blown up anyway, and much less factoring in the costs of rebuilding the sandbags, etcetera, not to mention the liklihood of your colonists getting hurt or killed, even when you catch the bad guys in the open in enfilade.