Is RimWorld always going to focus around killboxes?

[Sieluton]

According to my understanding, the intent of Ludeon developer team is to avoid the situation where killboxes are sort of a meta strategy.

With that being said, it seems like there still isn't really any reliable way around them. No matter what strategy you use, you're always going to be better off forcing raiders to walk around narrow pathways or just literal killzones. You can be attacked by launched raiders that might make this strategy ineffective, but this just makes it more ridiculous task for defending.

This particular issue is the biggest reason for me why I get eventually bored with RimWorld. From early to mid, it's extremely fun. Once you start amassing wealth, the raider groups get bigger and bigger (due to assumption that all wealth correlates with defensive / combat capabilities) which pressures me to design killboxes or else I'm going to suffer major casualties. You can use strategies such as sniping the raiders while they are preparing, but even then it usually comes down to the killbox effectiveness once the raid begins.

All in all, I don't think the raider defense combat is really a mechanic that scales very well. I honestly think that end-game combat should focus less on defending raiders and more on assaulting other areas instead.

Of course, I'm open to listening to other players in these terms, but I've read a lot of these threads and typically the suggestions come down to picking off some of the raiders before they attack and still make a killbox of some sort, even if you don't want to call it a proper killbox.

[Grubfist]

I generally just set up sandbags and set up my people on each side until I can build a supporting bunker around one side of my base with walls, sandbags, and some supporting gun turrets.

Killboxes make sense sometimes, but they're certainly not necessary or even always the best solution, they're just the easiest to set up and a traditional way to use the defender's advantage.

I like to use a lot of assault rifles and sniper rifles for their superior range, and have people shoot from around wall corners over sandbags whenever possible, and then retreat to a killbox if things aren't going well.

[Sieluton]

I generally just set up sandbags and set up my people on each side until I can build a supporting bunker around one side of my base with walls, sandbags, and some supporting gun turrets.

Killboxes make sense sometimes, but they're certainly not necessary or even always the best solution, they're just the easiest to set up and a traditional way to use the defender's advantage.

I like to use a lot of assault rifles and sniper rifles for their superior range, and have people shoot from around wall corners over sandbags whenever possible, and then retreat to a killbox if things aren't going well.

It's still more or less a killbox strat like I said if you pick up people with snipers until they begin the raid*. Bunkers can be great early to mid but in lategame, piling up colonists into one spot is asking for a rocket launcher to hit them. You're still going to go for a killbox lategame.

*Although it's a fun strat. I like having self-sufficient outposts that have couple capable shooters living in them in case of raids. But should anything go wrong (as usually things go given enough time), you'll still need a killbox that can handle it all.

[Kiter5]

(new to the game still - just piping in - about things of which I know little)

my 1st game- I built a wall about the living area of the colony, with turrets at each opening. worked well to kill raiders and defend my city.
but it was boring. (of course I am still playing on either Base Builder or Some Challenge)

so now I just put a couple small sandbag areas  on each 'side?' of my colony. but the Raiders always seem to attack in such a way I can not get to my sandbags, or they are just in the wrong spots.

I did have a game where I had an animal tamer who had a fleet of killer elephants and rhinos (iguanas, alpacas, a muffalo, etc). I would send out my fighters/animal tamers- turn OFF their \fire a will\ and let the pachyderms do their thing.  It was my best defensive play yet.
(most of my would animals die from friendly fire- until I started turning their free fire off)

Speaking of Bored after mid game- that's usually when I just start a new colony. I revisit the late game colonies from time to time.

[Sieluton]

(new to the game still - just piping in - about things of which I know little)

my 1st game- I built a wall about the living area of the colony, with turrets at each opening. worked well to kill raiders and defend my city.
but it was boring. (of course I am still playing on either Base Builder or Some Challenge)

so now I just put a couple small sandbag areas  on each 'side?' of my colony. but the Raiders always seem to attack in such a way I can not get to my sandbags, or they are just in the wrong spots.

I did have a game where I had an animal tamer who had a fleet of killer elephants and rhinos (iguanas, alpacas, a muffalo, etc). I would send out my fighters/animal tamers- turn OFF their \fire a will\ and let the pachyderms do their thing.  It was my best defensive play yet.
(most of my would animals die from friendly fire- until I started turning their free fire off)

Speaking of Bored after mid game- that's usually when I just start a new colony. I revisit the late game colonies from time to time.

I can give you some tips here. First of all, if you place sandbags around your colony, make sure to remove any trees from quite a distance to the direction they are pointing towards. Trees act as a cover.

As for animals dying from friendly fire, that can occur due to two factors. Both have to do with animals being between your allies and the enemy raiders. If you set your animals to attack enemy raiders, they will very likely be hit by your own colonists because they're next to the targets of your colonists. If you allow your animals to walk between the raiders and your colonists, the same risk exists but it's somewhat smaller.

So what I recommend is to not use animals for offensive purposes unless the particular animal is very strong for that. Extreme case would be Thrumbo. Less extreme would be something like a jaguar, although they will very easily die from friendly fire. Dogs and cats will die in no time. And in general keep animals in a restricted area at minimum during raids. Restrict area into a safe zone where no combat should occur.

In lategame, however, animals aside from Thrumbo will largely be useless. Sandbag defenses won't necessarily be that useless, but once the raider groups become large enough, you would need to scatter everyone _a lot_ to avoid rockets hitting many colonists at once. And when you scatter, you run the risk of getting flanked easier by enemy colonists in melee and once they're melee, your friendly colonists are very likely to get hit.

In lategame, your best bet usually is just to get ton of miniguns actually and equip everyone who can shoot range with them. Shooting skill doesn't matter for minigun, everyone is as good (or as terrible) with them and they have like 5% chance regardless of the distance to your target. And because your enemy usually arrives in a clump, you'll likely hit a lot of targets at once. But again, this tactic works fairly well mostly because the game responds to your lategame colony power by just increasing the number of raiders.

[Kiter5]

Thanks for the tips.

[Grubfist]

Bunkers can be great early to mid but in lategame, piling up colonists into one spot is asking for a rocket launcher to hit them.

Rocket launcher holders get the insanity/shock lances immediately as the raid spawns. If it's late-game enough for them to have rockets, it's  late-game enough for you to have counters.
Also my bunkers are much larger than the explosion radius of a launcher anyways.

And of course killboxes are always a plan B or C - you have the resources, the location, and time on your side, you can mold the fight to your advantage. That's why castles had big gates with tons of defenses. Defenders typically funnel people into smaller areas, it is a simple and effective way t counteract people bringing larger numbers when you are a small group. One tribe that lived on Mesa Verde actually had only one way into their village and it required crawling through a narrow tunnel on your hands and knees in single file. Two defenders could hold that village against any army of their time. That's why you have things like sapper raiders and mortar sieges as well.
And the poison and psychic ships that force you away from your well-defended base.

[sick puppy]

i once built a killbox. playing with it was so boring that i closed it off. i wanted to keep it around for if a raid gets out of control, but i could never get myself to cheese again. so it just sits around. instead, in that late game colony i focussed on selling as many useless things and upgrading what i could in a way that my colony welath wouldnt increase but the overall usefulness of structures, objects and even gear. for example i try to keep morale very high so that i can make my pawns wear deadman's armor for good defence and low wealth at the same time. some pawns work better with this than others, obviously. also means i cant just constantly generate wealth and upgrade medics by stealing and selling organs. i also have to release tons of prisoners that are useless without touching them.

i guess you can try what i did or something, or just start many savegames and eventually abandon them.
or you play the game the way it was intended to be played: flee the planet as soon as possible. either by making a long caravan, or by researching and building a spaceship. :/

[Shurp]

In order for combat to be both interesting and winnable, the player has to have some sort of advantage over the attackers.

Being able to set a fixed defensive perimeter (aka "killbox") is the easiest way to achieve this in Rimworld.

Options available in other games are not easily achievable in Rimworld.  You don't have vehicles to gain an advantage in maneuverability.  You can't accurately target the raiders as they approach your encampment with mortars.  Raiders stick together so there's no easy way to split up their forces and pick them off piecemeal with superior numbers.  You can't even really gain an advantage in firepower -- guns differ more in range than in firepower.  Defensive armor is not too effective -- body armor won't keep your pawns legs from being blown off, and devilstrand dusters and power armor take a long time to develop.

So while combat is entertaining... it's not very developed.  Killboxes will remain the go-to option until other options are more developed.

(It also doesn't help that new colonists are often miserable shots and an early colony will get easily overrun by tribals without turrets helping defend it)

[Bozobub]

Simply put, defensive warfare and fortifications have ALWAYS focused on some variant of the "killbox". Castles are nothing but a set of concentric killboxes, with killboxes as gates o.O'!

Note:  The modern military use of "killbox" has little to do with the historical meaning we generally use in RimWorld.

[Dashthechinchilla]

Simply put, defensive warfare and fortifications have ALWAYS focused on some variant of the "killbox". Castles are nothing but a set of concentric killboxes, with killboxes as gates o.O'!

Note:  The modern military use of "killbox" has little to do with the historical meaning we generally use in RimWorld.

This, and Shurp. Killboxes are popular because they work. Still, people like Aavak have shown me that there are other ways.
I usually have a small turret pillbox outside of my killboxes by late game. I find it is more effective than a killbox when dealing with doomsday launchers and swarms of centipedes. Position some decent snipers until they are overwhelmed and fall back inside the killbox.

[sick puppy]

the problem lies in the ai. it for the most part focuses the whole attack force on one point with only very few going astray and attacking random stuff, like your outside energy generators and the most random cables.

especially larger attacks in numbers would in my opinion profit from the real life tactics of not attacking a single spot but multiple ones at once. like for example if you built a fortress, it will always seem as if the enemy wanted to attack the same damn door. with this change the enemy would attack the whole side of the fortress and therefore split up accordingly. the more pawns participate in the attack, the larger this front would be until at some point the enemy could completely surround your base and attack countless points at once. sure, it would be EVEN harder for you, but since the enemy enters from one point of the map, they'd have to split up and you had the opportunity to pick off some of them this way better.

(and maybe even set the whole area/building ablaze with a coordinated fire starting command. they could send a wall of flames towards you. while first cutting grass on the other side so that it doesnt spread the wrong way too far. but this is probably too advanced)

but that would make the best weapon to deal with late game attacks (the minigun) useless, so maybe not. a successful surrounding of your base would also make it nigh impossible for you to survive (without appropriate gun nests positionned and multiple outside walls without doors and stuff) maybe it would invite for more doorway fights than there already are, so maybe definitely no...dunno.

[Jibbles]

B18 sure pushed the need for killboxes or more security measures.  The common injuries pawns would get such as scars has increased, as well as some Ai quirks.  I could usually get by with little to no turrets in other alphas but it's not worth to deal without them in this one.

[Bozobub]

What I actually do eventually on any map, is to sprinkle the ENTIRE OPEN MAP with carefully-placed, little 2-turret emplacements, separated by one granite wall segment to prevent fratricide when they blow, and surrounded by sandbags.  Each emplacement is well within the field of fire of at least one other, if not 3 or more, depending on the location, and the power to them is always a separate loop from the main base, with a switchable bank of charged batteries and its own generation facilities.  I also like to alternate the direction of the turret-wall-turret line, — & |, but that's more aesthetics

This works rather well, partially because I also turn off the automatic expansion of the "Home Area" to include them, thus they don't increase the value of my base, ho ho ho .  Each emplacement is worth almost as much as an explosive device as it is, as turrets, honestly, and they provide WONDERFUL distraction to any enemy (that doesn't drop right into my compound, that is ) as well.  Each one tends to "grab aggro" for any nearby hostiles, giving you plenty of time to set up an ambush/crossfire.

Of course, this takes a rather long time to build and a lot of resources, but it also gives pretty good bang for the buck, if you care to bother with it.

[Jibbles]

Bozobub. I always enjoy looking at other bases if you feel like sharing. 
This sounds similar to what I did when I first started playing rimworld. I would also try to bunch up many turrets at different locations around the map and hook them up to a room that has switches to toggle them. I couldn't tolerate all the fires my conduits would spread though..  Expanding was hard too as I couldn't merge the conduits. I also didn't like the way it looked when covering the conduits with stone walls.  Looking back, I should've placed some firepoppers on the exposed conduits and lay down more concrete hehe.