How to make a good defence with resource scarcity

Started by Quasarrgames, June 26, 2017, 02:29:05 PM

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Quasarrgames

Playing randy extreme. 33 days in, already lost 5 colonists to raids. Have a scarcity of weapons (and pacifist colonists) and metal, only able to make 2-4 turrets at once.

This was my defence:

Turrets were helpful but barbarians would just melee them to death even if i surrounded them with sandbags. I put deadfall traps in the entrance to remove a few people upfront, but they only really damaged the first person and then the rest of the raiders just seemed to walk over them and disarm them.

So, i need a better defence. I have a few questions:
1- why were the deadfall traps so ineffective?
2- how can i make the most of having only a few turrets, not having researched mortars, bombs, or firefoam poppers yet?
3- is there a way to kill large amounts of raiders without a killbox?
4- i can't really expect to survive much longer can i?
On the right path, but the wrong medication.

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b0rsuk

#1
Frankly, I think tribal enemies are imbalanced, and Extreme difficulty is imbalanced as well. You get imbalanced * imbalanced. Pirates are manageable (although I don't play on extreme). I doubt you can tame enough war animals to fight off an extreme tribal horde.

I think you will NEED IED traps either way, or some way to detonate mortar shells. Or handgrenades.

You might have a better chance looting an ancient danger room very early and trying to loot a minigun. If you have decent shooters, it should be possible to defeat them without catching too many bullets (you can add some deadfalls in case it's mostly scythers).

In my experience ancient danger rooms tend to have much better loot (cryosleep colonists) if you open them early because storyteller. It's possible to get more than one person with pre-installed bionics, wearing power armor, and with high tier weapons! And they might not be hostile ! Put the wounded back into caskets and retrieve them later. If there are mechanoid guardians that don't rush to base immediately AND lots of caskets, you can throw an explosive (for example an EMP grenade) at a casket to make all caskets eject. You may be able to salvage some people in the resulting chaos, especially if some of the spacers have smokepop belts. I call it "Smash and grab".

If you run out of danger rooms, you can... migrate to adjacent tile!

MisterVertigo

One thing that may help is to put something that will slow the raiders down in between your chokepoint with the traps and your turrets. You can place a bunch of rock chunks out there and they will have to walk around them or over them slowing them down. It may get you a few extra seconds to shoot them before they reach your turrets.

Also, you can try to have some melee guys waiting behind the turrets to beat up on raiders when they get close. Just be sure to run away if they blow up your turrets.

If you don't have any weapons for your colonists to use or they are pacifists, it's gonna be tough. I don't think your setup is too bad, but having a few colonists who can shoot at range from behind your sandbags would be a HUGE help.
"In vertigo you will be..."

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hoffmale

Try building your deadfall traps out of stone (does a lot more damage) and to spread them around (so it's more likely each enemy gets 1 or 2 instead of the first 1 or 2 enemies triggering them all (e.g. place them in front of the sandbags protecting the turrets). This way, it's more likely that they take enough damage to be downed/killed with few extra work (so they start fleeing) instead of killing just 1 or 2 and letting the others assault in full health.

If you have shooters, try to have them attack from a direction different than the turrets (e.g. from the east or the west, possibly both), so when they go after the turrets, your shooters are safe, and if they go after the shooters, you kite them back and let the turrets do their job.

For your original questions:

1) They are out of wood (low damage) and are placed ineffectively (first and maybe second enemy will trigger all of them).
2) Employ tactics around them. Don't let the enemies run up to them and kill them without having them pay for doing so (slow them down, shoot them from other directions, ambush them with melees, ...). Ideally, you'd kite the enemies around while the turrets shoot them without being targeted themselves.
3) Yes, however, most of them require some thoughts beforehand (e.g. split them up, overwhelm them in smaller skirmishes - requires walls/structures to let you do so effectively). There are many ways to (ab)use enemy AI behavior.
4) Depends. I don't know enough about your game to make a definitive prediction, but it doesn't look good.

TheMeInTeam

#4
Quote from: b0rsuk on June 26, 2017, 02:35:19 PM
Frankly, I think tribal enemies are imbalanced, and Extreme difficulty is imbalanced as well. You get imbalanced * imbalanced. Pirates are manageable (although I don't play on extreme). I doubt you can tame enough war animals to fight off an extreme tribal horde.

You can, but you don't need to do it.

I have defended pirates, tribal hordes, and year 1 mech ships on Randy/extreme without losses or even damage, but the mech ships involve some pretty annoying micro management and/or pause buffering if you don't have guns from raiders yet.

Steel deadfall traps are much better than wood.  Melee is viable if you catch isolated enemies who can only use fists or bad club choices.  Aside from that you want building/door configs that let you shoot the enemies while not allowing them to react + return fire (needs practice vs AI to get use to it).  Deadfall trap maze is the tribal alternative to turrets.  The picture he's showing is actually significantly more resource-intensive than I'm used to having to survive.

Sappers with normal quality snipers, good quality chain shotgun, grenades, 100% normal AR, etc:



One character got hit because I micro'd poorly:



Notably only 1 deadfall was set off so I forced the retreat almost entirely using pawns + guns taken from previous raids.

Defending vs tribes is easier since their weapons consistently have > 80 warmup ticks and they will funnel into killbox/trap maze.  They will overwhelm you if you just try a straight up face to face gunfight using cover, but that's not a viable tactic on extreme against anything.

b0rsuk

I don't know why you call that "resource scarcity". 23 steel deadfall traps are worth 75*23 = 1725 steel. The OP suggests he's concerned about early game, too (no high research). Constructing this takes a lot of resources.

tyriaelsoban


Serenity

Deadfall trap damage depends on the material:
http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Deadfall_trap
Wooden ones are just useless

A zig zag pattern is better, so they can't just completely avoid them, but even then there is only a chance for them to trigger one.

TheMeInTeam

#8
Quote from: b0rsuk on June 27, 2017, 07:13:21 AM
I don't know why you call that "resource scarcity". 23 steel deadfall traps are worth 75*23 = 1725 steel. The OP suggests he's concerned about early game, too (no high research). Constructing this takes a lot of resources.

You can make 10 deadfall traps inside 10 days if you want, and it costs less steel than he's used already, with hundreds to spare.

The deadfall steel I used costs about the same as 10 turrets, but it's a bit disingenuous to focus on that when I showed an example of a strong raid of one of the most dangerous types (sapper) being repelled with exactly 1 trap (70 steel) actually being triggered.

Early game, you can do something like this on flat maps:



Melee them to defeat in detail.



Which is how we actually get weapons like in the example above.



OP has perimeter wall also.  He has also spent > 1000 steel just on the picture in OP.  If you want to survive on extreme, details of controlling colonists and base setup matter.  Losing 5 colonists in less than a year to raids is not sustainable.

This melee example is a good showcase of the intermediate steps to get to the point I showed above with exterior pillboxes.  Stonecutting takes time to research and do, so the wood perimeter wall is a good start on flat maps...but you still need to figure out how to handle larger enemy raid counts while they have superior weapons.

Thraxon

Don't waste so much ressources and time to traps.
Perimeter walls are also not that good.

You could simply builds differents squares with multiples doors on each side.

Have some pillars and sandbags to make some defensives positions. But have multiples smalls of this everywhere in and around you base.
Don't pack all your forces in 10m². Defend in multiples positions and force ennemy to split.
Back and retreat when you can't handle it. Send some melee comandos when ennemies are in range. Use your base and your doors wisely.
You can also add few distants turrets, this will force raiders to attack it, and it does a lot of damage to melee when it explode.

In early game like your, if you want to have efficient traps, place few wodden pillar in front of your defenses so raider hide and shoot behind it, and put the pillard behind this columns.

TheMeInTeam

Quote from: Thraxon on June 27, 2017, 05:23:08 PM
Don't waste so much ressources and time to traps.
Perimeter walls are also not that good.

You could simply builds differents squares with multiples doors on each side.

Have some pillars and sandbags to make some defensives positions. But have multiples smalls of this everywhere in and around you base.
Don't pack all your forces in 10m². Defend in multiples positions and force ennemy to split.
Back and retreat when you can't handle it. Send some melee comandos when ennemies are in range. Use your base and your doors wisely.
You can also add few distants turrets, this will force raiders to attack it, and it does a lot of damage to melee when it explode.

In early game like your, if you want to have efficient traps, place few wodden pillar in front of your defenses so raider hide and shoot behind it, and put the pillard behind this columns.

He's asking for advice on extreme specifically.  Face tanking bullets from stronger weapons with 2x your numbers is not sustainable, and you *will* face tank them in cover with "defensive positions".  You can only roll dice at 90% odds so many times before you get hit on 10% chance. 

Perimeter wall is a big deal vs manhunters (lots of lost productivity time w/o it since you must micro to kill them or starve, and that can take a long time on extreme) and helps vs most other raid types.

If you can tell me that you're going 5+ raids in a row with 1.5 times or more colonists numbers and can avoid being at risk for damage, I'd be interested in how that is accomplished with fewer resources.  I'm all for learning new things, but from what you've described so far such tactics will eat bullets and maim or lose colonists on extreme.

Thraxon

#11
I only play on extreme.
As i said, the key is to retreat and back in time. Don't let yourself be overhelm.  For example don't wait shotguns and melee to be in position to start running, have a wise man hold the stone door open before you moove. Of course you need pause and micro to do this.
Then ennemies will start separating, one attacking door, 3 attacking your solar pannel and 3 other going otherway. You can regroup and kill them in small group, assault with your melee from a direct door while they are busy.
You may loose fews structures, but it is nothing compare to your 15 traps plans. 
Also long bow are really strong early, don't underestimate them.

And for manhunters, in A17 early game , they are easy, its not a real deal, but more a free food party. You can use same tactic to kill them unless it is super fast deers.

SpaceDorf

Quote from: Thraxon on June 28, 2017, 07:31:55 AM
I only play on extreme.
As i said, the key is to retreat and back in time. Don't let yourself be overhelm.  For example don't wait shotguns and melee to be in position to start running, have a wise man hold the stone door open before you moove. Of course you need pause and micro to do this.
Then ennemies will start separating, one attacking door, 3 attacking your solar pannel and 3 other going otherway. You can regroup and kill them in small group, assault with your melee from a direct door while they are busy.
You may loose fews structures, but it is nothing compare to your 15 traps plans. 
Also long bow are really strong early, don't underestimate them.

And for manhunters, in A17 early game , they are easy, its not a real deal, but more a free food party. You can use same tactic to kill them unless it is super fast deers.

This.

Also why are you using your Traps in long corridors ?
Try placing them in U or L patterns around entrances and chokepoints.
Around or in front of your turrets .. check the paths your pawns take, then place a trap
where they use shortcuts. This is where you will catch your invaders.

Cheap Bunker :

SSSSSS - Sandbag
TTTTTTT - Trap
TWWWT - Trap next to wall.
 
TTTTT
SSSS  - the same for a turret ..
STuS
Maxim 1   : Pillage, then burn
Maxim 37 : There is no overkill. There is only open fire and reload.
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TheMeInTeam

Trap corridor is more efficient.  Raiders that remember where they are still trip them, and are forced there regardless of entry point on map, in contrast to putting traps in U patterns at chokes.  It is realistic to get most or all traps in corridor to go off against manhunters, and still most of them vs raiders (they retreat before triggering all in that case).

I'm not seeing how < 1000 steel investment that you can create inside a month is a serious barrier to early game defensiveness.

So long as they require 1400 research to access, longbows are not a viable early option unless tribe raiders drop them.  Non-tribe starts have access to better stuff immediately.

Shoot and move mostly works, but you have to micro to run very quickly against mid range weapons, and only snipers can pot-shot other snipers or bolt rifles w/o eating return fire.  When you start getting 15+ pirate raids it's an onerous task and pawns will usually take bullets.  Vs manhunters after first month or so it *does* matter.  You can try to shoot --> micro back, but these things can take a long time to actually hit and kill.

marc0910