Turrets... That's insane.

[GARGEAN]

So, this is how right bottom corner of my settlement is looking.


There are next defensives there: 6 heavy turrets, 15 uranium slug turrets and 25 uranium-made miniturrets. Cornermost segment is 2 heavy, 5 slug and 9 small respectively. Whole corner costed me 8350 steel, 690 plastee, 201 component and 1650 uranium. Cornermost - 2830 steel, 230 plasteel, 69 components and 570 uranium. Powersupply: 5150 W for whole corner, 1770 W for cornermost.

In short: this was quite a lot of resourses and time invested. And what I got in return... Recently I had mechanoid attack. STRONG one, so I never expected turrets alone to hold it back. But this corner got attacked by pack of Scythers. Quite heavy, around 35-40 heads. They were attacking at perfectly bad angle for me, so most of the time only cornermost section was engaging them. Still, when they got close, most slug turrets from two another sections discharged at them at least once. What was effect of that geniunely heavy fire on approaching forces? When most of the scythers got point plank to turrets, four of them were dead. FOUR.
I never expected those defences to hold such attacks easily without any settlers help or without any losses of material. But I invest that much into something that should be at least partially viable and got result when at moment of complete destruction of cornermost section there was 11 dead mechs, part of which died from exploding turrets... That's insane. There was no rain, no fog. Scythers were moving trough slower terrain lacking even single tree to cover them. And yet they suffered minimal damage from all those defences.
I kinda understand initial decision about nerf of turrets. Disagree with it, but understand. Turrets, especially slug ones, were extremely useful and with proper placing could give you incredibly potent protection against like 80% of threats. But you still were paying for that in resources and time! Now?.. I am not sure if their defence weight isn't negative now, increasing raid weight more than they can help killing. What else there is left for long time games? Should I lay minefield 6 rows thick at whole outer perimeter before defoliating line? Should I finally go for cheezy "killboxes" I heard so many times about? Or should I go for murderhobo tribe where weapons and armor combined are giving at least 50% of settlement wealth? Cuz now viability of protection is either those options or goddam savescumming. Well, or forced loosing, which is always fun and diversifying, amirite?

[Canute]

If you don't have fun at the tactic part you should play the base builder storyteller or at the lowest diffucult.
You should try out different defence strategies, until you found something you will like. Maybe use dev tools to create defence and attacker to experiement around. Mosttimes you will be disappointed about your build stuff when the attacker comes, special when it took alot of time/resources to create them. The learning curve would be too low if you need to build that everytime while playing.

But you where unlucky too, you got the badest possible attacker for your defence.
You should think self, how many hit's does a scyther need to take before he is down ? And how many possible hit your defence could deliver ? Not to speak how inaccurate turrets are.
Not nearly enough, it is clear that once the syther made it to your turrets they are scrap.
Against 35-40 lancer it would have maybe looked different, even vs. 5-6 centipedes.

Against syther a narrow passage would have worked better when only 1 could do damage vs. 3 of your brawler marines, with 6 range support behind them.

[Vincent]

Open defenses never work in Rimworld, its how it always has been... You can defend a very high number of scythers with only a handful of colonist, some animals and a coridor, not even a killbox, just a room with a door is more than enough.

[Ukas]

Open defenses never work in Rimworld, its how it always has been... You can defend a very high number of scythers with only a handful of colonist, some animals and a coridor, not even a killbox, just a room with a door is more than enough.

Nah, open defenses worked fine before 1.0. I have thousands of hours in Rimworld, never built killboxes or walled colonies, more farm & small town like colonies, really rich. Only one out of dozens of colonies I built got really overrun, it was by tribals. Most of them Randy on rough/extreme. After 1.0 it's been harder, at some point there will be just too many enemies.

[Alenerel]

Killbox is the only viable way to play this game at higher difficulties. Even more, the new meta is having crafter with tortured artist trait to get legendary miniguns and rifles.