Can someone post an effective killbox?

[Alenerel]

So I just read that turrets were nerfed... Yeah, I know, a bit late. Anyway, some dude in the steam forum made a great point, I think. He said that since turrets are so weak we can no longer hold different positions around the base with pawns+turrets and so we are forced to make a killbox. And since they are so weak we are forced to double down and make an ever bigger killbox which is what I was doing... So nerfing them all it does is removing the base defense and making killbox defense the only way.

Basically UlysseG confirmed all of this. He can defend without turrets, but he has 19 pawns... Im willing to aim for excellent quality weapons, but masterwork and legendary require serious minmaxing... But then we have tynan complaining about "players are really good at optimizing the fun out of the game" when thats the only way to not die.

[Krzarb]

miniguns owner must be where shown in picture cause ucan shoot above shoulder of mate up to 2 tiles. if you place them further behind (where assault rifles are) they ll destroy ur front walls.

Thanks for showing the killbox design you use. Can I ask, do you ever run into friendly fire issues with the centre group of your pawns (The ones positioned 5-6 tiles back)? It looks to me like they could potentially be a cause of friendly fire as they are shooting from more than two tiles away from other pawns.

[Alenerel]

Im using his basic setting (1 opening, then 2 columns, then another 2 columns) and for some reason they dont do friendly fire. The game states that its 2 tiles away, but it seems to be 3-4 tiles away. However the furthest away pawns do miss sometimes in the wall next to the melee guy, for some reason, but never hit him.

In fact, i think I improve his design a bit, instead of having 1 melee guy there, which can be meleed by several guys at once, the idea is to have 3 melee guys where the first 2 ranged guys are, so anybody that comes there receives an insta 3x attack. If you put a barricade in that overture and put the door 1 tile back, it can be done... Tho I dont like to have doors like that cause it isnt "realistic".

About the ranged aspect, idk what to say... I get outranged most of the times and dont know what to do. Also dont know if use assault rifles or charge rifles. My idea is that anybody that gets into the entrance should be in range of everyone, otherwise lancers and centipedes just sit there at max range and half my guys cant get them.

Also dont know about the minigun, if its better than rifles or not, when fighting many dudes...

This is what I have:
https://i.snipboard.io/9vLluK.jpg

Currently I have 2 melee guys per door, just to not have 1 melee guy idle and have 2 more guys being able to shoot.
I added the turrets for a bit extra power.

The problems I have with this one is that minigun and charge rifle are short 3 tiles from the entrance, so raiders that camp there cant be shot at, only the dudes with assault rifles can.

I have another idea that is basically the same setting but without walls, so I can but rows of turrets behind the pawns for extra fire power, but idk how that will work, specially with launchers and inferno cannons.

[UlysseG]

miniguns owner must be where shown in picture cause ucan shoot above shoulder of mate up to 2 tiles. if you place them further behind (where assault rifles are) they ll destroy ur front walls.

Thanks for showing the killbox design you use. Can I ask, do you ever run into friendly fire issues with the centre group of your pawns (The ones positioned 5-6 tiles back)? It looks to me like they could potentially be a cause of friendly fire as they are shooting from more than two tiles away from other pawns.

No, it never happens. Technically I suspect it could happen, but not with my current army. First off you see the barricades between the "wall-column" (1 tile wall), i suspect them + wall are giving cover to front pawns (friendly fire cover i mean).. and for the melee guy in the very front, he never gets hit but friendly fire is probably affected by accuracy (not going to mention the 2 tiles over shoulder). I have high shoot pawn with my worst quality weapon being masterwork. So at 3 tiles my accuracy ends up being very high and since the accuracy formula ressembles : accuracy stat to the power of tile distance, I suspect friendly fire is just not gonna happen.

Im using his basic setting (1 opening, then 2 columns, then another 2 columns) and for some reason they dont do friendly fire. The game states that its 2 tiles away, but it seems to be 3-4 tiles away. However the furthest away pawns do miss sometimes in the wall next to the melee guy, for some reason, but never hit him.

In fact, i think I improve his design a bit, instead of having 1 melee guy there, which can be meleed by several guys at once, the idea is to have 3 melee guys where the first 2 ranged guys are, so anybody that comes there receives an insta 3x attack. If you put a barricade in that overture and put the door 1 tile back, it can be done... Tho I dont like to have doors like that cause it isnt "realistic".

About the ranged aspect, idk what to say... I get outranged most of the times and dont know what to do. Also dont know if use assault rifles or charge rifles. My idea is that anybody that gets into the entrance should be in range of everyone, otherwise lancers and centipedes just sit there at max range and half my guys cant get them.

Also dont know about the minigun, if its better than rifles or not, when fighting many dudes...

This is what I have:
https://i.snipboard.io/9vLluK.jpg

Currently I have 2 melee guys per door, just to not have 1 melee guy idle and have 2 more guys being able to shoot.
I added the turrets for a bit extra power.

The problems I have with this one is that minigun and charge rifle are short 3 tiles from the entrance, so raiders that camp there cant be shot at, only the dudes with assault rifles can.

I have another idea that is basically the same setting but without walls, so I can but rows of turrets behind the pawns for extra fire power, but idk how that will work, specially with launchers and inferno cannons.

Would be better if we saw the ennemy entrance spot. From my experience the minigun should be at the door in front of ennemy entrance, not sure if it's the case. My melee guys are really only here for opening the door, they never actually do anything cause ennemies never reach us. They re only ever usefull when i get raided by pods inside my base. But if ennemies were to reach my doors i would set door on stay open and move the melee guy back so i get the 3v1 situation in my advantage.
Imo you have way too many melees, i'd rather go for 75% ranged 25% melee. problem is that your charged rifles are too far back, if u wanna do it this way u gotta move ennemy entrance closer obviously you want your pawn to reach the entrance tiles. Having one caster is really usefull as well, with focus and blind it does wonders, blind is really effective against centipedes

[Alenerel]

In my case the entry was in the corner directly below the minigun dude. I ended up using 3 melee guys cause in my case enemies sometimes ended up reaching and they would seriously injure the ranged pawns if they were melee enemies, this way, anyone that gets in encounters a wall of 3x insta hits.

About the minigun, after using it for a while I really dont see it... There were 4 centipedes shooting at me and the minigun barely hit one of them, even tho it was excellent quality and the pawn was over 10 shooting and with bionic arms. I dont know if its worth it for tribal raids, since most of the times they rush in almost not giving time for the minigun to be used.

[Canute]

Minigun's arn't to hit one target at distance, you should use a rifle for that.
But minigun is good to hit multiple targets at the line of fire or at the target area. Like someone said once, with the minigun you will hit anything else then the target.

[Alenerel]

I understand that, the problem is that I dont know how many targets there have to be for it to be more efficient than a rifle. Enemies usually dont stand still packed together, even in a tight killbox.

[UlysseG]

I understand that, the problem is that I dont know how many targets there have to be for it to be more efficient than a rifle. Enemies usually dont stand still packed together, even in a tight killbox.

In a few words, for minigun to work, you need a hallways which direction is the same as minigun bullet trajectory.
That is, if your pawns appear from side into your killbox, you have to make sure they stay in the hallway nontheless. You can easily achive this, but i think that having the entrance in a corner is a design flaw.

[Listy]

Here's my Screw everything killbox. It's from the previous version of the core game, so I hear we have a few new toys to play with. Its will stop most things, although you will need to use your colonists on a gun line. It can be a bit time consuming to set up as well. The explosion chambers are utterly tileable, but I only use two.



What you can't see, just off screen next to the metal stockpile, is a bomb dump, with explosives in. There are also 4x EMP IED's as well. The Idea being that I place two EMP's on the approach path of mechanoids from a crashed ship part. Then two more inside the explosion chambers to catch any fast ones (just site them on the path between the steel trap and the Explsoive IED). These will cause the Scythers to clump up with the rest and so get murdered by the explosion chamber.

So how does it work?

Well, from the entrance the enemies who have been snorting go-juice trigger the steel spike traps and get offed. This prevents the explosion chamber blowing up just one or two blokes. The same goes for the spike traps inside the chambers next to the sandbags. These are there to provide cover and induce enemy pawns to halt.
They will always trigger the explosive IED trap. However a Gun turret explosion is bigger than the IED trap, and so will cause a detonation, but not the other way around. The IED explosion then chain reactions down the line (I did experiment with using half the number of explosives, and it worked but didn't do enough damage).

Once they get through the first chamber, there a second. Not many make it through to face the gun lines.

Of note is the Incendiary IED by my front door on wooden floors. I noticed, even with double wide passages large groups of Tribals would get stuck at the door way and keep on bouncing off each other. This only happens with Tribals. The Flame IED is off to one side so no one else triggers it. But when the Tribals clump up they'll hit it. Then you have 30 odd, all standing on flammable flooring that normally guts the raid.

If you wanted a self cleansing version, just have the last explosive IED trigger a flame shell (you can see where there's carpet). This was again to allow the fire to spread along the line of the tunnel. You'll easily generate temperatures over 600 deg using this (and all the flammables inside the chamber). However, this will burn off the the bodies and weapons, but it'll also detonate doomsday and triple rocket launchers causing damage. Plus I used to deploy mace armed Power armour soldiers out of the colony entrance (top right Hand side) to beat up the fleeing enemies so I could keep grabbing recruits.

Of screen, I've got a battery of two mortars fed by EMP's. When facing big Mechanoid raids, I wait until they get into the firing range for the colony and turrets, then start punting rounds into them. They quickly get stunned. Oh and you'll notice I have a couple of switches, these are to turn off the turrets for mechanoid raids, as they don't due anything in those scenario's apart from tempt the centipedes to fire their inferno cannons. This will cause a fire on the IED trap, which the mechanoids then avoid. Thus the explosion chamber will not function as most mechanoids will be out of the danger zone when the ordnance goes off.

I do occasionally loose people to lucky head-shots and the like, but that's par for the course.

[Grapplehoeker]

This is more or less the same 'Spider' layout I have successfully used in many colonies. The only variation I've added since Royalty are the extra turrets in the corners of the killbox to provide more of a crossfire. Cassandra savage.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2067591308
and current wealth is 381,380, but by the time I'm done, I should expect to see it at around 600k
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2067592840

[Teleblaster18]

Just to set context: there is categorically no such thing as an effective "fire and forget" killbox, which can be turned on, left unmanned, and destroy enemy raids - and there never was.

I have a design which was developed in 1.0 that required tons of micro, and always resulted in both material and colonist injury (and sometimes death), but which was never actually breached once in several thousand hours of gameplay...it would be heavily damaged, often with colonists killed, but it held. 

I'm not going to post that design, because it's no longer valid - nor are several dozen iterations that I've tested in 1.1/DLC.  Several hundred hours of experimenting and testing how the 1.1/DLC nerfs to all defensive structures affect killbox viability have led me to believe that killbox strategies (which experience has shown me are essential in extreme biomes and on Cass/Merciless as an adjunct to other base defense strategies) have effectively been rendered not only irrelevant, but impossible to sustain.

Again, I'd like to set context for this determination: I have over 8,000 hours playing RimWorld, and had no intention on slowing.  I've done literally hundreds of hours testing different killbox designs in both 1.0/1.1, and I'm saddened to reach the conclusion that a true, sustainable and effective killbox is no longer a viable option in 1.1.  I feel that the defensive structures have been not only nerfed to the point of irrelevance, but to the point where even attempting to build one as a long-term adjunct to base defense is an outright liability.

I consider myself an expert player after playing 8,000+ hours (the last 3000 or so exclusively on Cass/Merciless in both 1.0 and 1.1/DLC).  I also consider myself an expert at killbox design at this point, and have spent countless hours experimenting, modifying, and min/maxing without resorting to exploits or mods. I feel I am capable at this point of distinguishing when the nerfs have gone too far in the larger scheme of things...and, without attempting to flame Tynan for his decisions, I would ask him to reconsider some of the changes that were made, from the top down.  In my opinion, it's not only past the point of "moving players away from a killbox strategy", but we're now well into the realm of limiting options for experienced players - a direct contradiction of Tynan's stated philosophy that "there shouldn't be only one way to win".  The nerfs have gone too far, and one of the ways to win has de facto been taken off the table as a result.

The last nerf made to traps (an increase in materials from 35 to 45 materials) simply feels like a position has been taken which no longer bears any connection to how late game needs to be played on the highest difficulties, on the most difficult biomes.


I'll be substantiating every claim that I made with specific and direct comparisons to how gameplay played out in 1.0 in late game/extreme biomes/max difficulties in 1.0 and 1.1 at a later time, and with specific, verifiable and repeatable parameters.


In the meantime, this is a respectful and direct appeal to Tynan and dev team, who I truly have the utmost respect for:  I believe that the apparent premises that are being worked under (1. that the game was being "beaten" too easily at high difficulties, and 2. that killbox strategies, even when used as an adjunct, were far too powerful)  are fundamentally flawed premises, and working under these premises are actively now detracting from gameplay. 

As probably one of the most experienced players on this forum, I'd urge Tynan to reconsider the changes that have been made.  1.1/DLC has presented some wonderful new things, and new opportunties, and I've successfully adapted to all of the changes during every other iteration of the game.  As it stands now, the game which felt quite well-balanced as a finished product of 1.0 now feels extremely unbalanced, with a strong bias against traditional tactics.

Most importantly: it should feel like more fun, and, personally speaking, it's not playing that way at all, at the moment.  I know I don't need to state the obvious, but games that cease to be enjoyable to their players are quickly abandoned.

Thanks for reading.

[Listy]

I'm not going to post that design, because it's no longer valid - nor are several dozen iterations that I've tested in 1.1/DLC.  Several hundred hours of experimenting and testing how the 1.1/DLC nerfs to all defensive structures affect killbox viability have led me to believe that killbox strategies (which experience has shown me are essential in extreme biomes and on Cass/Merciless as an adjunct to other base defense strategies) have effectively been rendered not only irrelevant, but impossible to sustain.

The main problem is that there is always a killbox. Due to being outnumbered by enemies you need to have an advantage. As a defender that's modifying the terrain to enable effective defence, and boom, there's the killbox.

Tynan has long been nerfing all the defences we've had, I've long said that was a mistake. Is there any point in playing if you reach an arbitrary point and get over-run because you can not defend yourself? I play long, usually to the point where aging colonists become a problem (I've done 20-30 year colony's before, with 40 odd colonists), and you have to recruit younger ones to replace the old folks.