Teach me something new: Walls

[animagus_kitty]

Pretend I'm new to this game and don't know how stuff works ((edit:: i don't mean menus. everything else, tho)). How should I build walls in/around my base?
The only thing I'm going to have you assume that I know is that wood is much more flammable than stone. Teach me something else.

*waits with notepad and pen*

[Call me Arty]

 Go for multiple layers of wall. Assuming your base is at the center of the map, you'll want to have a wall somewhere between 2/3 and 1/3 between the edge of the building area and the center of the map. If you keep your walls thin, you're going to have a bad time when it breaks and everybody funnels through one point. Make it multiple blocks thick, and have multiple doors around it. That way, you have a chokepoint, and people won't get stuck trying to run to your one door.

[NiftyAxolotl]

Stone walls and double-thick walls are better for insulation than single-thickness wooden walls.
Pawns can lean out from behind a wall to shoot. If there's a sandbag on the side they lean towards, they get both cover bonuses.
Pawns have a need for space that causes bad moods if neglected. Design your rooms with walkways through the middle, rather than along a wall, so that pawns feel spacious when walking around.
Your pawns spend something crazy like 75% of their time walking around (check the Records tab under the information pop-up on one, to see if I'm exaggerating). Knowing this, you should optimize all of your building placements to shorten their commuting routes.

[mebe]

Hmmm walls, not a lot to say really.

Building speed depends on material - wood goes up quickly, solid stone like granite quite slowly.

Wood, Steel and Plasteel are all flammable, the rest not.

Double skinned walls insulate better than single, double skinned with a single tile air gap insulate even better.

You dont actually need the corner brick where two walls meet - it just looks funny without it.

For a base organised around a killbox double skinned outer walls are a great help against mechs - when they decide to attack a wall instead they will give up and move on after the first layer is destroyed.

[animagus_kitty]

Related question to the pawn space issue. Should I put things my pawns spend a lot of time at, like research benches, cooktops, and the butcher table, facing the center with a lot of space? or did they fix the issue where if there was a wall in front of a pawn, no matter how big the actual room, the pawn felt cramped?

Does a larger butcher room make a pawn happier, or will a lot of blood negate the benefit of a large room anyway?

[Jibbles]

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=38969.0
You can place fridges inside a room as shown in the first pic. Note that there's no roof where fridges exhaust heat. I mention this because a fridge or door is the weak point in the structure most of the time and often targeted, not your walls.

You dont actually need the corner brick where two walls meet - it just looks funny without it.

True. Should be aware that pawns can still attack you through walls if they're in that corner.  I won't cut corners in common attack points.

How should I build walls in/around my base?

There's no specific way.  You experiment, or this game gets stale too fast IMO.  The gist of what I do when building bases is set up multiple attack position, and provide mutliple ways to retreat.  Where they retreat to will also have multiple or effective attack positions. A stocked up bunker is always a good idea for long battles.

Adding small rooms such as 2x2 with a stone door left open in multiple areas around the map away from your base will help minimize risk in unexpected attacks, and can come in handy during sieges and other types of threats.

A common mistake I've noticed is that players get too caught up in walls while overlooking doors.  I've seen bases with three layers of stone walls and one wooden/steel door attached to it.  Most of the bases I come across online do not have true exit points for their pawns which makes them trapped when things get hairy. This is especially common in mountain bases.

If your base is completely closed off with walls, then expect to be attacked from different angles. Expect to lose resources. Expect the same thing if you add doors and keep closed. If you have an opening or just a chokepoint, then you don't really need more than one layer surrounding your base since raiders will make the trip there if they can.   Two is somewhat helpful when it comes to sappers, that's only cause it gives you extra time to react to them before they break into your base. 
Layers to your outer perimeter just do not matter all that much. sappers do not detect weak points as far as I can tell.  4 layers, 1 layer, doesn't matter... if sappers decide to attack a 4 layer wall over one without layers (which is not uncommon) then that's what they'll do, and they'll get through it if you just let it happen.

[Dargaron]

I've been experimenting with the idea of a Perimeter hallway: Basically, a wall around the rooms of my compound, then one/two spaces of floored open space, then the actual outer wall, with doors placed every so often.

With this setup, you are (effectively) 30% faster than the enemies outside (due to the floor), have a number of fire-points from which to shoot at enemies, and can retreat into the corridor once the angry tribal/muffalo/scyther gets too close for comfort. Make sure that your power supplies and/or crops are inside the wall (I usually have a windfarm w/ potatoes and cotton growing under the windmills), and you're laughing. Usually, the only structure I have outside the main compound is a small 9x9 hut with a stonecutter's bench inside it for making stone blocks.

[saulysw]

Small tip : You can hover your mouse over any wall to see how many hit points it has left. Damaged walls can be repaired. Natural rock seems to have more hit points than man made walls, although it is -1 beauty and you can't run power through it, and you can't repair it.

[dkmoo]

Each wall can support up to 13x13 roof tiles in a circle. Damage the wall to a low HP and then u turn this into a massive trap. Shoot the wall and the whole area will have roof dropped on enemies.

[cultist]

Pawns have a need for space that causes bad moods if neglected. Design your rooms with walkways through the middle, rather than along a wall, so that pawns feel spacious when walking around.

Room size is calculated the same way regardless of where in a room a pawn is located. If the room is spacious, the pawn feels spacious inside the room regardless of how much space he appears to actually have. The only thing you actively need to avoid is long, narrow corridors where pawns may stay for long enough to actually take a hit to their "space" bar.

Of course, there are other reasons to avoid narrow walkways, such as fire safety concerns and defensive positions.

[TheMeInTeam]

I've been experimenting with the idea of a Perimeter hallway: Basically, a wall around the rooms of my compound, then one/two spaces of floored open space, then the actual outer wall, with doors placed every so often.

With this setup, you are (effectively) 30% faster than the enemies outside (due to the floor), have a number of fire-points from which to shoot at enemies, and can retreat into the corridor once the angry tribal/muffalo/scyther gets too close for comfort. Make sure that your power supplies and/or crops are inside the wall (I usually have a windfarm w/ potatoes and cotton growing under the windmills), and you're laughing. Usually, the only structure I have outside the main compound is a small 9x9 hut with a stonecutter's bench inside it for making stone blocks.

Roof your floors in biomes that get snow to prevent that slowdown.  Put burnt floors outside for the enemies; these slow movement.

[Luckless]

"A little different from last time you played."

Playing around with how you do things, finding things that work and things that fail is a big part of what makes the game fun for a lot of people. Be careful about robbing yourself of exploration in this regard.

I recently started playing again, and have been attempting some new layouts compared to how I played before. In the past I frequently used trap corridors and turret heavy kill zones. This time I've been trying to build 'strong houses', with lots of doors in and out of the base, and bedrooms/workshops ringing the core of the base as a sort of double layer defence wall, with two or three ways outside of the base to repel attackers from while not using turrets.

For my next game I'm going to take it a step further and essentially build "Star Forts" from the 15th century from the get go to address issues I had early on with my current run. The outer walls get loaded with doors and the doors are fronted with sandbags, and every now and then, spaced about the range of my main weapon at the time, I'll put narrow bastions projecting out from the wall.

When an attack comes along I will recruit all my soldiers and rush them to the doors on the side the attackers are coming from, but they'll remain safely hidden INSIDE the walls. After the attackers have spread out and are looking over the walls I'll start popping them out of the doors in strategic locations. Anyone who starts to draw fire ducks back inside, and I can safely run them to the next point-of-fire.

If a section of wall comes under attack, then I main the bastions and catch the enemies in a cross fire. If they attack a bastion then my soldiers start popping out the doors along the walls.

[Snafu_RW]

HINT: bedrooms on outside of base is not generally a good plan, as they tend to be raiders' ultimate targets. Stick the bedrooms in the centre & surround them with curtain walls, workshops etc when you can, esp. if you're planning an 'open' base structure (ie lots of unconnected buildings)