How useful are traps?

[mrofa]

Deadfall is to small and its effect is well crappy, only good thing is that it can be reuse but then again traps are often in fire zones so they dont live long. Bear trap maybe with 2x2 size and even only a chance to cut off or heavily dmg enemy legs would be better.

IED trap this one is preety neat reminds me of our good old mining mine, ability to maybe add a longer fuse time would be good and/or remote detonation(that may be to op thrugu).

IED Incendinary ... well non of incedinary stuff is usefull due flame/rain mechanic and the fact that its more often will damage the colony itself.

Biggest problem of traps is that they are not minified, becouse we all know that every colonist is experianced sapper

[w00d]

Completely useless to me, my colonists trip over them and set up off hurting themselves.

Wild Animals trip them sometimes killing them, sometimes going nuts and then attacking colonists. Either way since i have no issues hunting them normally, the are pointless for animal trapping

putting them in obvious bottlenecks has the same issue as before, your colonists trip them and hurt themselves

lastly given the nature of the assaults the traps are pointless .Case to point, you need to literally have 100s of traps to make a significant impact on the assaults. I have had over couple of hundred enemies bunched up after that the engine slowed up when i moused over them as it could not list all the pawns in 1 page , burning them all took months..

so in the end, traps are useless unless you use modded OP ones .

[erdrik]

Personally, I don't use traps purely out of fear of my colonists accidentally triggering them.

Ive never actually had one trip on a colonist but have heard that they can, and the few times I have used them I find the colonists pathing is not trustworthy enough to feel safe in using them.

Ive also noticed that walling up a trap within a Sapper dug tunnel seems to prevent future Sappers from reusing that spot. Which seems like an exploitable method for shutting down Sappers.

[Mussels]

I find them hard to use, as any path that works on enemies works on friendlies too. It becomes quite a complicated challenge to set up traps i can use to hurt enemies without friendly fire being so common.


My colonists should know where the minefields they built are, and avoid them at all costs naturally - short of dementia, or having a mental break and running into one.

I would prefer traps that can move blocks, such as doors i can remotely open and close, or traps i can trigger from radio switches. (have a minion hit a switch, doors/walls close, trigger IED's etc)

[cultist]

The main problem I have with traps is that in order to use them effectively, you have to exploit the AI's cover mechanics. In other words, you have to know/predict where the AI will take cover and put a trap there in order to be sure it will trigger at all. This raises further issues, as preferably you don't want the AI to go into cover at all - you want them to be mowed down by some combination of turrets and colonists shooting from cover. So I tend to place traps only in places where the AI is forced to go, such as 1-block choke points.

Additionally, traps lose most of their value when placed outside, because animals will constantly wander into them.

Deadfall traps are okay if you don't have anything else, but I think explosive IEDs are the best. Even without slowing raiders with sandbags, you can sometimes get lucky and get several kills with one IED. Worth the cost I think. I haven't had much luck with incendiary IEDs, the fire doesn't seem to spread much. Maybe if you could seal raiders in a room and trigger one, but I'm not sure how that would work.

[Mechanoid Hivemind]

Same as everyone just stated, that they are too hard to set up in points that are useful or so your pawns dont kill themselves. I would love to see a much bigger trap like a 2x2 or maybe even a 3x3 involving a rock wall, they trip it, it falls crushing anything under it, including the items. So its not a free item farm kinda deal. And maybe some remote explosives, like c4 that a pawn can throw and detonate it, and thats the weapon. Craft them at the smiths bench and they can only have like idk 2-3. Or another turret thats stationary, ex. gas turret thats stuck to the wall, or a flame thrower. something thats mid to late game. cause IEDS work wonders for me

[Mihsan]

Traps are almost useless for me and I don't use them most of the time. Or start to build them when there is huge excess of materials and lack of other stuff to build (which is year 10+). In other words: traps are the last thing I will build.

Why they are bad? They are useless against:
- Siege (since most damage from siege is made by mortars)
- Any landings inside of the base (since you cant minefield you own base)
- Landed ship parts (well you can lay traps around it... but I never saw it work good enough)

And even if we forget about this and imagine that there are only direct wave attack situations, which must be perfect for good placed minefield... well even then traps will suck because IED's have this delay and deadfall trap has no area effect.

And all this stuff are the major threats. If traps cant be used against those, then why even bother with placing them?

Also I would like to see more complex system for traps with separate damaging device (IED, firebomb, EMP, electric discharge, falling stone, shooting gun, gas, water sprinkler...) and trigger for it (remote activation, trigger line, pressure plate, smoke detector...).

[Haplo]

I use them only occasionally, because I have a small choke point as an entrance without doors. If I then build the traps so that my colonists can pass them without activating them, it only works against the first few raids. Afterwards, as they remember where they are, I need to change their placement often. This is too much hassle for me.
The alternative that is often used, a long corridor with many doors to pass safely between the traps, looks too much like an exploit for me and not like something that I would normally use. I mean, if you were the raider and if there are doors, therefore why would you go down the narrow path, especially if you know that there are traps? So I don't do this kind of entrance.
For me they are only useful as an animal stopper, but not that useful as a raid defence.

[giannikampa]

If I could suggest how to balance traps i'd like them to be faster to re-aim and maybe bait with food to attract animals to hunt

[Listen1]

If I could suggest how to balance traps i'd like them to be faster to re-aim and maybe bait with food to attract animals to hunt

That is a good idea.

I never use traps, the amount of time to build them and the minimum damage that they do, seem  not worth it.

[Bruxy]

I'll use them when the terrain gives the opportunity; raiders constantly funnelling down the same natural chokepoint, etc. I don't generally go in for man-made killboxes so trap use is pretty much limited to random luck on a mountain map.

I don't use IEDs, particularly incendiary. I don't use fire weapons full stop as I find them more hindrance than help. Deadfalls have their benefits but I'm generally only using them to thin the crowds in a cheap way; I've never relied on them.

There is a significant amount of jiggery-pokery to be done with restricted zones to make sure people, and particularly tamed animals, keep clear. They also seem to be incredibly varied in their effect; the number of maps I've had three raiders pile through picking up nothing more than a scratch, but one distracted colonist loses his way and BANG, his head has been ripped clean off (literally; this is not an exaggeration. I've had two separate colonists have their heads completely removed by a deadfall). I'd definitely like to see a more consistent damage output; not lethal and constrained to the lower body with a view to reducing movement speed, perhaps.

I'd also like to see them hooked more into hunting. Having them baited has been suggested already and I agree wholeheartedly, but baited or not I'd like to see any animal killed by a trap automatically flagged as permitted so a hauler can go fetch it. Preferably I'd like to see this extended so anything caught in a trap sent a flag to a hunter to go collect the body. If you combined this with the aforementioned lessening of lethality, perhaps the animal gets automatically downed and flagged to hunt so someone can go finish it off without the usual risk of going on a hunting trip. This could further be related to previously-mentioned ideas on differing trap sizes; what traps work on which animals, etc. An elephant probably wouldn't notice a rabbit snare but equally a squirrel wouldn't crash through a pit built for a Thrumbo.

I think the auto-rearm option works well and keeps them viable, though I never realised raiders learned their position and avoided them on later attempts. I shall bear this in mind in future base design! Not knowing the ins and outs of this, I'll make some additional suggestions that might be pointless: if you completely wipe an attack out, there are no survivors to learn for next time. Locations should only be learned by raiders who triggered the trap (and those who saw it triggered?) providing they survive the raid - the old, blind guy with the bad back and bum leg who'd barely made it halfway to the attack before routing almost certainly didn't see and make notes of the traps that killed his friends a mile away! Finally, and probably already in the code, lessons should only be learned by the clan that attacked. Pirate Band 1 should not know your traps simply because Tribe 2 attacked a week ago.

[mumblemumble]

Actually with the whole learning position thing,  id argue it should ONLY  work if someone who witnessed the death AND ,  manages to get back.  So if you slaughter everyone,  or one guy splits up / doesn't see the trap go off,  it shouldn't be remembered.

This would effectively be a huge buff alone,  in terms of you don't have to micromanage / move a trap every single time. I also think enemies should still "trip up"  and step into traps they know of occasionally anyways.

But,  even JUST having it need to be witnessed / reported back would be huge.

[Thane]

Yeah, traps as they are really are not worth the material you put in. 50-60 stone blocks might get you one dead raider if you are lucky and 85 steel, maybe three or four. They just are not efficient when you can construct large fortifications, layers of defense and periphery turrets for the same cost of a decent minefield, or deadfall chokepoint.


And those don't get triggered by the stray muffalo.

[Veneke]

I use traps all over the place, but I don't think them particularly useful. I went for the middle option as a compromise.

The problem I have with them is for them to be effective you have to spam them everywhere. Sure you can put them down in chokepoints (IEDs are actually ideal for dealing with sappers in my experience) but unless you plaster the approach routes to your colony you're only going to hit a very small few raiders every time. The problem with plastering is that you can hit anything - from animals (not such a big deal) to guests (really bad) to your own colonists (facedesk worthy). It's also pretty expensive.

Another issue with traps is the priority the colonists are assigned auto-rearming vs. hauling. It is disturbingly common after a raid to see colonists run around and fix up all the traps without picking up what is on the tile first. The result is that the trap is activated and a colonist has to step onto the tile with the trap (potentially activating it) to haul what has dropped on the tile.

What I'd really like is a trap which had a larger area of activation. It is immensely frustrating to see raiders (or centipedes) walk immediately adjacent to an IED and have it not go off. A little more proximity for activation, or IEDs at least, would be really nice and cut down on the amount of plastering that needs to happen.

[RemingtonRyder]

Hey guys, what do you think about gun braces and tripwires? They're one of the things I love to hate about Fallout 4.

Pros:
Doesn't matter if the tripwire is discovered, you can easily set it somewhere else the next time you're attacked.
Customisable according to what weaponry you have handy (potentially, could use any mod weapon).

Cons:
Single burst.
Tripwires are single-shot and need to be linked to a particular gun brace.
'Spare' guns could be sold for silver.