Help my defenses without making the gametoo easy?

[jpinard]

I have a few problems instituting some of the suggestions.  First I don't have enough money and resources to make/purchase much of what is suggested.  I am obviously just not very good at the game yet.

Second, is friendly fire.  In some battles against no gunned tribesmen I end up with tons of bullet holes sometimes.  Like when someone gets to me ranted people and I need to move my melee guy against them he gets riddled with my own bullets.  This won't be a problem if I can get to a point where defenses are static but so far is been a really big issue.

[Stormfox]

I have a few problems instituting some of the suggestions.  First I don't have enough money and resources to make/purchase much of what is suggested.  I am obviously just not very good at the game yet.

Second, is friendly fire.  In some battles against no gunned tribesmen I end up with tons of bullet holes sometimes.  Like when someone gets to me ranted people and I need to move my melee guy against them he gets riddled with my own bullets.  This won't be a problem if I can get to a point where defenses are static but so far is been a really big issue.

The things I suggested above do take nothing but a bit of stone (even wood walls will do in a pinch, it is all about forcing the pathing of enemies to your designated battlefield) and perhaps a bit of steel for a turret or two and some sandbags. Oh, and of course some ranged weapons, but the starting two and a few long bows should suffice, and each raid by bandits will give you a good change of "upgrades".


Friendly fire can be a pain, but you can alleviate most of the issues by good positioning prior to the outbreak of the actual firefight. Some pointers:

When a raid event starts, hit space immediately and check them out. I like to not click the warning but scroll manually since then you can always hover over the warning to see where they currently are, directonwise. Anyways, if they attack at once, consider how long it will take for them to arrive and if need be, draft your guys immediately. If you want to play it safe, draft everyone, even the noncombatants, just so those id... err your valuable colonists do not run into the fight because they decided that now is the perfect time to haul that stone brick.

When drafted, place your shooters in a rough line vertical to the direction the enemies will come from, and behind cover. If needed, grown trees will do, but walls are of course better. Try to have most of your shooters more or less in one line with a few spaces between each - you can put long ranged pawns to the sides and a bit further back, but that can sometimes create friendly fire zones and needs to be micromanaged. On the other hand, they are pretty safe there and can basically stand in the open because enemies always shoot the closest things first. As a last nuance, place your melee guys near but slightly behind your main gunline. If you have looted some personal shields, instead place them on a flank slightly forward so they are not directly in the firing lines but closer to the enemy and draw some fire.

After positioning, wait for them to come to you (the obvious exception would be sieges, of course). If you really want to, pause and micromanage firing orders to maximize concentrated fire on a few at a time, but I rarely bother (mostly important against incendiary launcher or superweapon wielding bandits).

If during the fight melees somehow get close enough to attack a ranged fighter of yours, select a melee pawn and order him to attack that guy and draw your ranged guy back. Depending on injuries (from shooting or melee), retreat colonists to safety when neccessary.

When combat is over, hit space to pause again and check out your wounded and the possible captures. If some of them start to eat, you should usually let them, but make sure seriously wounded people go to a hospital bed at once. Make sure your docs treat them when they arrive, and try to capture all enemies that do not have completely negative traits if you have room in your prison. The last step can be ignored if your condition is critical, of course.

When the dust settles, unforbid everything there, strip the corpses and haul them somewhere out of sight. I like to set hauling priority to 1 for a day or so on most colonists after a fight so all that loot and corpses get where they should asap.


The moment you set up some basic defences, all of this gets even better since you can place your shooters behind preconstructed 1-space-walls for optimum cover and likely have a turret to draw fire out on a flank.

[Euzio]

A killbox with defensive positions for your pawns and turrets to soak the brunt of the front would be useful.

You can make a simple one by making a wall to your base area like so:
    ------
----     -----
  x         x
     x   x
   W W W

Lines are walls, X for turrets, and W for defensive cover in which you position your pawns behind.

The raiders will have to funnel through the walls into that gap and straight into your waiting turrets. Your pawns with ranged weapons would then pick them off as the raiders attack the turrets. Keep your melee pawns on the edges of the defensive cover to attack raiders who attempt to flank you. So far its worked quite well for me and is very effective against tribal raiders.

Also, you'd want to equip a survival rifle at least on all your ranged shooters for the extra range. Having an assault rifle would work wonders but if you simply do not have resources to make them. A great bow is actually good enough. Bows actually do pretty significant damage and have decent range with a low CD.
   

[hwfanatic]

If you have opted out of killbox design (congrats) then may I suggest a layered defense with multiple entry points?

This approach has its advantages and disadvantages, of course. First advantage is that, with multiple entrances, the enemy force will usually split equally between them. They will try to enter from a couple of places at once, instead overwhelming you at one place. This is actually a good thing! You can use this to set the pace of the fight i.e. choose the time and place of the fight, or lure them from one entry point to another.

The second advantage is that failure at any point in the defense lines will NOT negate your whole defense strategy. Ability to retreat and regroup, delay and pin the enemy (in one word, adapt to the situation) is priceless. It is means the difference between life and death.

The third advantage is that most of your defenses are still inside, just in case Randy decides to drop some mechanoids right on top of you.

There are some disadvantages, of course. I've found this strategy to be particularly vulnerable to a combination of manhunter pack and a raid at the same time (a rare occurrence). The adaptation was to add another door in between the layers, but still.

In case you are wondering how this looks in practice, let me show you how this looks on a base that I've done recently (around 10 pawns in total).

http://imgur.com/a/XGCBg

Admittedly, I've got lucky with the steam geysers and the map in general, but the principle is the same regardless. Three entries per side - all three defended from the one in the middle. Long and straight walls/ clear line of fire in all directions to be able to deal with sappers. No cover for the enemy. Multiple layers that enable tactical retreat. Most of the defenses are in reserve at all times. U-shaped bunkers that protect you much more the higher the attacking angle. Either:

1. This one has unobstructed view angles, and offers great protection.

Code Select Expand


face towards enemy

SSSSSSSSS
SPSPS S S

WWWWWWWWW
or,

2. This one has slightly lower firing arcs, but offers superior protection to the side and some protection against rockets.

Code Select Expand


face towards enemy

SSSSSSSSS
WPWPW W W

WWWWWWWWW

3. In case of lots of melee attackers, stack your swordsmen in front of your shooters. They won't do team damage this way. So:

Code Select Expand

face towards enemy

SSSSSSSSS
WPWPW W W
P P
WWWWWWWWW

S - sandbags
W - wall
P - pawn

[taha]

Main problem with those "benevolent" posts (read "condescending tips") is the fact that if your colony is doing bad, spending resources to make a defensive perimeter will hurt you even more. Also posting a colony layout image would've helped a lot.

Anyway, here are my "i'm about to lose but I won't go down without fight" tips.

• be sure to set an "I surrender" area. That's a walled section usually 25 x 37 (that's 2x13 on 3x13 for roof coverage), with 1-2 openings, and a storage area in the far end containing a couple of valuables in it (art, gold, 10 glit med, etc). It serves as bait for enemies. If your colonists are indoors, and there are no other items outside the attackers will steal what they can and leave.

• if you manage to get a break from attacks / bad events you can set the far end of that area for covered shooting positions with sandbags, butcher tables and walls. Also you can turn this into the infamous killbox (turrets on each side, all connected to a single switch) and place firefoams all over the place. Plenty of pics / videos on how to make one, but always consider your budget (power, firepower and materials)

Main idea is to force the attackers to that specific area, not have them attack your walls where they please.

I understand you have a lot of farms and open land, right? No need to enclose the farms in walls. Just set a main "castle", haul all your valuables inside, put the "I surrender" box at castle entrance and you are set for a long time. Just be sure to direct all your colonists inside and forbid doors when raid starts.

It seems very simple, and it is, as long your colony value is low. Make sure to keep it low, at least until you get decent weapons / armor.

Hope it helps.

[Limdood]

the simplest defensive tactic is cover, spread and decoy:

cover:
just have something to stand behind.  the more things you're behind, the more cover you have.  the BEST cover is gained by standing behind a wall (the pawn will lean out around the corner) with a sandbag on the side they'll lean out.  Yes, you'll still be hit occasionally, but way less than standing in the open or even behind a tree.

spread:
Spread means don't place your pawns adjacent to each other.  Missed bullets scatter to adjacent squares.  Leave at least 1 empty square between any 2 pawns when being shot at.  If you're attacked by minigun enemies (or heavy harge blaster centipedes), then leave at least 3 spaces between pawns, as those weapons have higher miss radius.

Decoy:
Enemies shoot the CLOSEST (but not on fire) pawn to them.  This means that you can use less valuable or harder to injure pawns in cover close to the enemies.  personal shields are amazing, but even a naked, unimportant pawn will buy you some time (and the reduced hit chance from cover is likely to just down them rather than kill).  Even nonviolent pawns can be drafted to stand in cover.  If you have multiple melee/nonviolent pawns that you use for this, you can rotate them as they start getting injured or their personal shield breaks.  A very nice trick is that you can ignore the previous 2 rules for pawns placed behind the decoys, since they won't be shot at (but beware: if the decoys get lit on fire or downed, the enemies will suddenly switch to the pawns behind!)

With those rules, you'll come out of most fights without any serious casualties...excluding a random brain shot or something thats pure luck.

One last tip, 1 on 1 fights are a terrible idea...you always want local superiority.  This means that if the enemy splits up (such as sending melee pawns ahead while ranged take cover, or splitting up to 2 different buildings) you back away or hide in cover anywhere you're outnumbered, and you rush to fight anywhere that you outnumber them.  If you have a few melee pawns, they can be fantastic for this, popping out of a building to triple team someone will get you a few cuts, but is otherwise a rather low risk way to take out a few enemies.

[TheMeInTeam]

Checkerboard maze of steel or plasteel deadfalls will do the same job as turrets in a killbox.

However you can also just make a compound like this

http://i.imgur.com/vbsnOSE.jpg

And dive out with 4-6 people to melee raiders that get separated to death.  A good shooter with a fast weapon (pistol, machine pistol, even AR) can also pop out of a door, shoot, and get back behind it before return fire.  Hold interior door open so you can move.

One variant I want to try out is to leave extra space on either side of the interior door, so that I can have a personal shielded pawn open the door, causing up to 4-5 pawns to auto-target a raider, then after shots go off move personal shield pawn back inside.  This completely negates the cooldown period for moving after firing, meaning weapons like AR/pistol/shotgun would be borderline untouchable, as only these weapons on enemy raiders could hit you, and only if they defeat hard cover + don't hit personal shield.

[Stormfox]

Main problem with those "benevolent" posts (read "condescending tips") is the fact that if your colony is doing bad, spending resources to make a defensive perimeter will hurt you even more. Also posting a colony layout image would've helped a lot.

That is not really fair.

What most people here (including myself) proposed was nothing you could not whip up with a bunch of stone blocks and a very small amount of steel with just a few constructors and 2-3 workdays. A few cover colums and a turret or two as decoys cost almost nothing and the positioning tweaks we suggested are 100% free. The most recent posts also added the use of traps and ways to make melee guys work, which is again very cheap and could possibly be incredibly helpful.

If someone had posted "well, just build 20 turrets and a perfect killbox around it and place your 10 guys with charge rifles at the points marked with an x", you might have a point. If someone had posted "raids are easy, git good", you might have a point about being condescending, but I see nothing of that sort in this thread.

[Stormfox]

@OP

Just had a nice "example fight" in a relatively new colony. Had a new-guy-chased-by-pirates event before my defenses were built.

I sadly forgot to take multiple screenshots, but the only ones of my guys that moved were the two meles on the top of my battle line - they were a bit forward from their position at the beginning of battle to draw some fire and if needed intercept those guys that almost made it to my shooters.

As you can see, I have one damaged pawn - shot by a sniper rifle in the arm, but luckily nothing serious. The shield on Shanda was almost down, iirc. With less pawns, I would likely have taken a tad more damage, but fights like this are quite doable.

My pawns are not overly strong, btw - most of the guys there have only self crafted mediocre short bows and bad shooting stats - about 50% of my damage output are the two guys with the starting weapons and one with a shotgun I found on some attacker during summer.

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[SpaceDorf]

As for cheap cover.

Rock chunks are your friends.
Instead of Building Sandbags place a dumping stockpile and fill it with chunks.

The first defense posts I build in my colony look like this

C C C CC
CWWWC

Three walls surrounded by chunks.
I can place two shooters behind the walls, with a secure spot to retreat a wounded.
The middle spot is also great to place a backup melee pawn if I can't retreat fast enough,
or a Non-Fighter for immidiate MedEvac.

Those dotted around the base are cheap reliable defenses, which deny the enemy the use in my direction.

[jpinard]

/picture

Thanks for that awesome write-up.  This is unrelated, but in your picture don't your colonists get angry because you have them in such tight confines?  I think you saw the "critique my base" thread and you can see what an apparently stupidly sized production room I have.  If I can make it that small... that would change my game dramatically.  Or do you have a mod that changes room size parameters?

[hwfanatic]

I don't use such mods.

As stated in this other thread, the space requirements have been reduced considerably for A16. I used to have much larger bases.

But also the inner yard is considered a room and an extremely spacious one at that. They spend a lot of time in it and their space requirement is thus filled. This is something I've been experimenting with lately. It has its advantages and disadvantages.

No longer true in A16. Single-tile corridors work fine if they are at least 10.5 tiles long. 3x5 bedrooms also work very well. They can even be made decent with superior furniture and some floor tiles.

Also, do note that furniture and pawns themselves no longer fill space in the same way they used to.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/5l4oe6/another_unsung_minor_improvement_in_alpha_16_that/dbt3byt/
I can confirm this to be true in practice.

[Shurp]

Those dotted around the base are cheap reliable defenses, which deny the enemy the use in my direction.

Hmmm, you might be too clever on this one.  The rubble will prevent the enemies from using the walls for cover, true.  But can't they just use the rubble for cover?