Sustainable Cassandra Classic?

[Thoughts]

I've been fooling around with the different storytellers:

Randy Random can be challenging at the beginning, but settles into a easily sustainable game within a few hours.  I use Randy when I want to have >20 colonist.

Phoebe Friendly is great for playing around with base designs when you don't want to be hassled.

Cassandra Classic is proving a challenge.  I seldom get over 14 colonist, with various losses sometimes not being made up by the very rare slave trader or wanderer later in the game.   I actually managed to keep 11 alive from start to near-finish, until one got mauled by a muffalo while outside collecting.  Those and boomrats are a real pain.  I think that when defending against 50+ Raiders, kill boxes are pretty much required, with blast charges doing most of the work, and turrets/colonist doing cleanup.

Has anyone come up with a sustainable killbox design that is 100% effective against any number of raiders using the CC storyteller?  I'd love to try and build a large colony (e.g. 50+ colonist) using CC, but am not sure that is even possible  - between the every  two or three day raids, and the low recruitment opportunities, I'm just not getting there.   I've come close, but raids during solar flares causes losses that I haven't been able to recover from, and sooner or later, those get you.

Any suggestions?  I need some inspiration!

Thanks in advance.

[DeltaV]

Different storytellers are built to stop you from getting new colonists after you reach an 'optimal' point. For Cassandra, I believe it's around 12, which is why you're not getting many new people. Believe me, if you ever were to be beaten down to 2-3 (Happened to me many a time on Kassandra), you end up with a whole lot of slavers and wanderers and incaps and the like.

[Dragula]

Playing on CC, if it wasn't for my colonists accidentally killing incapacitated raiders i'd be above 20 people. Right now it's pretty stable at 15.

My defense is not fool proof but it stops large raids with losses limited to 1-3 turrets if any at all.. 4 Snipers in the back and the rest to the sides and between the turrets.
The number of charges varies; sometimes i have a few more than two charges, sometimes the place is filled with chained mines or none at all.
In the latter raiders sometimes get to my second row of turrets, or they hug the sandbags, blow up a turret and death ensues Note; the hydroponics prevent raiders from hopping over while working as half-cover.
Currently redesigning it into a corner instead of a wall.

[Thoughts]

Thanks.  I would have thought all those sand bags would help the raiders.  I've used rocks in the past hoping they would provide less defense but still slow them down.

Anyhow, I did a bit of overkill tonight.  Played all but the last half-dozen days with 9 colonist - FINALLY got a slave ship and bought two more. 

This was more of an experiment for me than anything else, but:

I started out with (1) kill box that holds (2) Blasting Charges.  Box has a door going in, which pretty much lets all the stragglers catch up,  and another box going out.  Timing changes depending on how many are beating on the door, but generally I light the fuse when the first one reaches the outgoing door.

As CC sent bigger and bigger raids, I needed to add additional kill boxes - both because I missed timing it sometimes, and because they were sometimes just too strung out.  As you can see - I tried dealing with them via Turrets, but they were never enough.  Blasting charges are WAY more effective.   Don't forget to shape your room so there are no safe corners!

CC sent me 9 colonist via the usual ways before she shut me out for well over  100 days.  They built the vast majority of the area shown.  Obviously, I had hopes for having a lot more...

At least I had the colonist long enough to get them decently trained.

Cheers!

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[Bobthefarmer1]

I mustbe lucky then, as ive gotten to a stable 17 colonists on cc.

[Dragula]

Nice looking spherical defense, from looking at it i'd say fire from all directions would work great. Aren't the raiders taking cover behind the wall at the end of the funnel?

You could also place sandbags/ruble in and around the mouth of the funnel to slow movement.

[Thoughts]

Actually I played around with the balance at the mouth of the funnel a bit.  Originally had rubble to the end but found it simply took too much of my limited colonist time to transverse it cleaning up after the dead.  Thus the backward open path along either side - the raiders always want to go forward, so it didn't hurt.  It also allowed the raiders to come forward a bit for easier access by the turrets.

One key is the 2 segment wall piece opposite the opening.  That prevents the raiders from standing in the tunnel and shooting.

Alas,  all that firepower was mostly unused. It was only useful to kill  6-10 raiders - if 50+ came thru they would easily overrun everything.  My goal was to create a sustainable kill zone that did not require "reloading" with blasting charges and new doors.  I failed at that.

I do think it would work if colonist and raiders took up real space.  e.g. 50 of them could not stand in a single square.  Then they would have to single file out and would be eliminated (presuming 15 turrets firing 4 rounds each plus the colonist fire was sufficient to kill a couple at a time).  Of course, if dead bodies took up space, that would quickly become a problem and we would be back to blasting charges to clearing dead bodies.

Maybe I will rebuild with a tighter circle, reducing range, and see if that helps.

Oh, note that NO wild animals are allowed inside the compound.  Between things I took 1-2 of my best shots and used them to kill all the squirrels, boomrats, and Muffalo inside.  That helped - seldom did the colonist ever go out. It was kind of silly to see a squirrel bang on a door until it destroyed it...

[Thoughts]

Results from a tighter box arrangement, with extra turrets... results were as expected.

I didn't bother with a colonist line - they would likely have Friendly Fired my turrets to death.

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[Ric]

I've managed to get up to 25 colonists in my current CC game(270days). To get up to this, once the incoming raiders start to flee I switch off all my turrets immediately & engage in melee with a few raiders. I've been a bit lucky getting so many incapacitated prisoners to build up to this number as I've seen others post that even when they do this, the fleeing raiders just die in melee battle & don't get knocked out for capture.


My current defense shown below. Works pretty well but without the use of the blasting charge room at the front I would probably get overrun. I usually use 8 or so charges spread over both sides of my final door and use the first 2 doors to bunch up the raiders. It holds strong against the 30-40 raiders that are left alive after the charge explosion. I also probably spend approx.400 metal replacing my doors/charges after every wave so it's not cheap but is still pretty effective.

I may try a wave with no charges but with 120 or so raiders every wave, I'm guessing that wouldn't end well

[Pendryn]

If you removed the sections of walls dividing your colonists, you'd have greater cover as they'd lean around the actual wall part and shoot over the sandbags.

[Ric]

If you removed the sections of walls dividing your colonists, you'd have greater cover as they'd lean around the actual wall part and shoot over the sandbags.

They already do lean over. Only when the raiders are in sight though. The way it's laid out just now, I don't get so much friendly cross fire & more flank shot protection

[Thoughts]

I like it.  Suggest reducing the blasting charge room down to 2 charges - that is all it takes for 100% kill, more is just a waste.  2 outside the door, two in the room should do you just fine.

I really do like the friendly fire protection.