Best Non-Gamey Defense

[BetaSpectre]

I never understood why exploiting your oponents ineptitude is such a bad thing. Hasn't that been military tradition since the dawn of man?

Yes, but since the dawn of man, enemies learn, and improve their strategies. Big killbox? "We'll just use this triple rocket launcher here on the other side of your base and go straight through the weak spot."

Multi-layered walls with a kill boxzone in each layer. And mortars. Force fire 10 of them and some will be bound to hit true. Sappers, sieges, and sheer numbers are supposed to make you adapt, but honestly once you do if the AI can always beat your adaptation then the game is pointless since you'll always lose, but if you have a strat that works it should always work or variations there of like rock paper scissors.

Atm Sieges can get sniped by mortars or snipers. Sappers are pretty weak in actual combat lacking alot of weapons from normal raids. While large rushes of tribals end up into kill boxes.

[cultist]

I suspect that in the end, you will fall back to either trapped corridors or some sort of killbox. It's usually either a choice between meta-gaming or exploitative tactics. Of the two, I find the latter to be less disruptive to the experience. Using the terrain to your advantage is military tactics 101, there's no reason your pawns wouldn't know that even if they are telephone sanitisers and diplomats.

[kubolek01]

Killboxes are weak. They are a good thing... til a shotgunner comes and pops your head. They show no skill in positioning, pawn rotation etc. Normal shootout is more hardcore and satisfying.

[TheMeInTeam]

Killboxes are weak. They are a good thing... til a shotgunner comes and pops your head. They show no skill in positioning, pawn rotation etc. Normal shootout is more hardcore and satisfying.

"Normal shootout" is also weak.  Positioning and rotation there requires limited ability in positioning and rotation.  More than a killbox, but not high-end RTS stuff or something.

Adjusting for raider weapons and popping in/out of doors or abusing line of sight angles to isolate targets that you outrange takes a lot more game knowledge and has more chance for error in execution, but done optimally it both requires more skill and gives better outcomes.

There's a fair bit of irony when some reddit posters claim skill boxes take no skill while their first/last line defense amounts to "put sandbags down and stand there", as if that somehow takes skill .

[Limdood]

i use a small corridor at a right angle to a wide open (like, 10 wide) hallway.  At around pump/chain shotgun range to where the corridor enters the wide hallway, i put a door on each side, then a wall, then a door, with sandbags in front (so shotgunners can lean out from the door and shoot and get sandbag cover).

After those doors, I shrink the hallway down to 8 wide and repeat...door, wall, door on each side with sandbags.

Then do it again at 6 wide, and again at 4 wide.

Instead of dropping to 2 wide, i open it back up and just put isolated wall sections for them to hide behind with sandbags.

The key points here are that the little corridor enters the 10-wide hallway at the middle of the 10-wide.  Each width of the hallway only has 2 pawns shooting from each side, and they're generally shooting inwards towards the center of the wide hallway, so they don't hit allied pawns.  The hallway shrinks in width so i can keep stacking pawns shooting in a line without the usual problem that a big ball o pawns has of the back ones landing stray shots on the front ones.

exploits: the right-angle corridor means that all enemy pawns enter while in range of all weapons...i don't have to worry about my shotgunners getting picked off by snipers.  It's a very large, space-intensive design so you really ought to just build one and reinforce the rest of your base so enemies enter at that point.