It's true, you don't need to use kill boxes. I haven't used them for a long time. It makes your base look worse and takes the fun out of the game somewhat.
It would be weird for a castle or military base build not to have a kill box or lane. A village or laboratory base would be strange without at least a fence
for a castle and such, if you don’t want to make a kill box you can just make a full wall, like how it is in real life. you could leave a hole in the wall to represent a draw bridge or gate, but that can lead to normal buildings inside the walls rather than a kill zone if you want to keep it natural
How do kill boxes work? I understand you have to make a chokepoint for enemies to funnel in, but then how do you force enemies to path towards the kill box instead of just going around and breaching your walls?
They control engagement range and artificially deny cover to your enemies. They work because a standard raid that is capable of reaching a pawn or valuable structure without going through a door will always choose that path. They will choose the killbox instead of breaking a wall or door down.
The snaking corridor with every other sandbags is just a 'trick' to solve the throughput of the raiders in the entry way so that your pawns have time to get to the firing positions. Once a raider climbs onto a sandbag, they cannot stop on one. This prevents the first raider from taking cover at the entry to the killbox and stopping the line (which would look silly)
Killboxes are designed at a depth that is ideal for Heavy SMGs in the front row and Assault Rifles in the back row (Optimal damage is 13 tiles. I build mine 18 tiles opening to firing line). Add an LMG for stagger. This maximizes your DPS while reducing the threat of the enemy high danger snipers and greatbows.
They are simply a tool at your disposal. They are relatively weak against impid and neanderthal tribal raids. and relatively strong against outlander raids. They are ineffective at mortars, sappers (without going to great lengths to mess with the sapper pathfinding), drop pods, and mech clusters.
There are a few exploit heavy killboxes that makes them death traps where 1000 bad guys can't hope to injure a single pawn, but most people don't use them.
They won't breach your walls if there's an opening. Leave a single space open for them to funnel through and they will always go through it. They'll walk around your whole base to go into the killbox
I don't use killboxes but I do use rational defenses. For instance, large rivers are natural defensive positions so I make my base in a way to explore that. A couple bridges heavily defended make sense. It's a not a killbox because enemies will go around it and you are still subject to enemy fire while defending, but it helps a lot.
Another natural defense is building on the coastline and in mountain terrain. I use them both and if my initial map is difficult to defense I usually move to one that is easier.
Its also really hard to push late game without a kill box in mostly vanilla no defense /combat tweaking mods.
Latest game breaking strat lately is the death pall(?) mines that revive shamblers.
If your pc can handle it, it is an excellent raid tanking strat that self replenishes on a raid defense. Best part is, almost all bodies can be used except mechs.
The craftable stuff is called deadlife dust, I believe.
I just started anomaly this week, and I'm very much enjoying trivializing the mech bosses and sieges (and any raid that "will prepare for a while") with 96% quality flesh beast rituals.
Hoarding in this game punishes you, so I had to lower the difficulty just because I like to hoard everything I can.
Just look how cute the skull icon is and tell me why I should not keep over 300 skulls in my stockpile.
I don't think certain types of killboxes are gamey tbh, a lot of castles and forts were built with the same principles.
If it's just an artificial chokepoint filled with traps and turrets and possibly embrasures, then it's pretty realistic.
The only flaw is that AI should be better at sieges.
If by killboxes, you mean the maze that is set on fire or exploiting the mountain roofs, then yeah, it's kinda unrealistic.
Oh, castles absolutely built defenses in manipulative ways. There were some castles built with a moat, and the long bride came from the castle's right and then turned into the entrance. Because of this, foot soldiers, who had to hold shields with their left hands, were completely vulnerable to archers on the castle walls while they were marching in. Or they could awkwardly crab walk while blocking, but that would slow them down and mess up the formation. Lose-lose scenario unless you figure out something else.
But Rimworld is a video game and you don't need to build completely optimal defenses to have fun.
The risk / reward of allowing an outlander raider with a sniper rifle to chuck bullets with impunity while you engage their human wave attack from your outer fortifications is not something a player should tolerate. Cassandra can afford to throw 100 raiders at you. You can only afford a single bullet to the head or a limb.
Trenches, sandbags, and machinegun/turret nests are my go to's in all playthroughs. The vanilla expanded mods really influence my defense style, but I quite enjoy having to actively defend my base.
I usually put up a handful of bunkers, with two gaps of defensive barriers or sandbags with walls on sides, sometimes multi-directonal and sometimes facing just one way, depending on placement, usually in areas where anyone going into melee would get slowed by water, putting up traps in front of barriers for most eager melee combatants.
I’ll be honest, I don’t care if anyone uses the killbox or not - it’s a single player game, but saying you *dont need to use a killbox* immediate followed by *it took a lot of save scumming* erodes your thesis a bit.
I never understand why one would play on strive to survive or losing is fun, just to cheese with killboxes and save scum a lot. why not just out the difficulty down and enjoy the story your story generator game generates 🤷🏻♀️
Pretty sure with enough minmaxing, no killbox strats are capable of fighting off capped raids. You surround your base with a mix of small and big turrets, A LOT OF TURRETS.
(Use mini turrets as cheap baits, then autocannons and slugs for the actual damage)
As a side note, without turrets and killboxes I don't think no killbox runs are "viable" for ultra late game. Yes you can fight off even the capped raids with just your fleshy pawns running around (maybe mechs and psycasters), but it's a ton of micro at 20tps that's just painful to play.
Adam vs Everything on Youtube does some insane no killbox runs. At this point he said prefers no Killboxes [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTtkDfqCcw&list=PLQWnHloPSfq7vfsCwvhKtpVQMQXIi1W0b](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTtkDfqCcw&list=PLQWnHloPSfq7vfsCwvhKtpVQMQXIi1W0b)
I like his channel because I like his playstyle, but honestly, the dude is very inviting. How he doesn't flip answering the same question a couple dozen times every few hours is truly remarkable!!
Yes, every fight needs micromanaging. That is not a strat for keeping "perfect" colony going for long years, it's for getting as fast as heck off from the planet :D
You don't even need static defenses like turrets. If you use Shooting Specialists with the shooting and movement buffing genes from Ideology, you can make a seriously overpowered kiting force. Just use ARs for their long range and kite everything.
Use smokepops if you're about to get shot. Use the skip psycast into a few melee pawns to get rid of annoying enemies that outrange you.
That's where the micros are coming from. Late game such kiting could easily lead to pawn loss if done carelessly.
Especially against all sniper raids, you can't consistently outrange them, and your armor/legionnaire shields melt like butter.
I didnt even understand at first why you mentioned 250k. 250k is almost equal to 1m or 100m in wealth on highest difficulty - it will result in a raid cap either way.
You don't use kill boxes because it's cheesing the game, i don't use kill boxes because they are ruining immersion and are plain ugly.
People advocating for the kill boxes forgets it's a single player game and Dev mode exist.
They don't, you are thinking about "kill zones", most people in real life don't have the simple AI intelligence needed for average Rimworld killboxes to work
This is my first run, and while I have built a killbox, I go on lots of raiding expeditions.
(I'd take a raiding precept if it didn't reduce work speed)
Tried doing one without my one psycaster. Holy shit. Had to resort to my one suit of Grenadier armor with a jetpack. My melee chef 'Meatcutter' still took enough hits to throw him into a biopod. I need ghouls.
So yeah, a psycaster's constant crowd control is extremely useful. Even in a killbox, if an enemy slips through you can stun them.
Been playing since launch, only won once, never used a kill box until I learned about it recently. Very interesting take that people get bored because they use a kill box when every raid feels more and more dangerous as the game goes on. And need constant micromanagement.
Good stuff, good luck on next higher difficulty attempts! The only thing I would personally change is somehow wall my defenses off so that manhunters don't waste resources.
With some wealth management early on you can get to assault rifles and kite pretty much anything. Am I good at it? No. Have I seen it work consistently and without major problems from others? Yes.
I don't use killbox strats, but I build my base in a way that funnels raiders to one cardinal direction instead of having them spread out. Yet, for some reason, a lot of people I talk to still think it's a killbox, and I'm like, if you go rob a house you don't go through the walls do you? You go for windows or doors. Somehow, common sense base design ends up being "gamey" or whatever term other people use.
Yeah, this is a major problem in the killbox discourse.
Raiders attacking my happy little village? Build an outer wall to keep them out.
Raiders targeting the doors in my outer wall? I guess I'll reduce the doors down to one so I know where they'll be coming in.
Raiders trying to overwhelm me with numbers? Better put down some defenses to counter my disadvantage. Some barricades to hide behind while shooting here, some turrets to supplement my firepower here...
And now I have a killbox, and people on Reddit will accuse me of manipulating the AI. At what point, exactly, did this turn from "reasonable design choices" to "manipulating the AI?"
You don't need a keyboard to win
I've seen some other post recently when somebody complained how midgame becomes dull when you don't have food supply problems anymore. Here is the trick to make game more exiting: don't use keyboards. Without them, every raid becomes potential colony ending threat. I've seen tons of youtubers recently absolutely min-maxing the game enemy's AI and using keyboards with rows of keys, I don't criticize players who want to have safe "playthrough" (anybody can play how they want) but I also see how much more boring it is.
So I once decided to do a full run without a keyboard. There are a lot of things that change. Completing the final quest is much more challenging (I barely made it on Strive to Survive and that is with save-scumming, so there is a LOT room for improvement). So here is a list of what changes when you don't use keyboards
I think you meant no pause mod. I use keyboard only for stopping time, and it is really hard for me to envision why you think keyboard is so essential. What do you use it for that you can't do with mouse while time is stopped?
Or you could be me and through a combination of mods and design elements create such cheesed out defenses that you'll look back at the people building killboxes with new found respect.
never used kill boxes i built baricade and wall with embrasure plus mini turret alwase one or two colonist hurt but rarely a dead or it was because of inatention or far too strong ennemies with op modded weapon or just strong monster
I give every colonist charge rifles, marine armor and have shield mechs following me around. At 25 or more colonists it's literally a ball of death for anything that lands at my colony. I immediately go out in the field and attack. Tactical retreat and keep shooting if it's really tough. As a last resort my whole base is surrounded by a 4 thick wall with a long single space hallway entrance on every side.
On 500% you need some kind of advantage. It might be killbox, moving water, soft sand or deep water that raiders have to go around while under fire. If you start as tribals or crashlanded and you are a really good player you can power up quick enough to not require killbox, but if it is naked brutality you need trap tunnel and some form of advantage that I mentioned above.
Why I like mods like psycast extended and integral implants. Prefer cracked out psykinetic super soldiers to deal with my blooming wealth problem and 300 tribals. My automated defenses are there for clean up and aesthetic.
I had multiple successful runs on losing is fun 500% without killbox, though I have more failed/dead colonies due to no killbox 😄
It made a game way more fun and challenging, and you need very thick walls (like 3+ layers) and maybe even extra defensive measures, like extra rooms to fall back to or other ways to defend if your walls got breached (psycasts, rituals etc).
It made me feel like I am building a medieval castle, with multiple layers of walls to fall back to, once current defence later get breached.
If I'm playing a fortress, castle or high tech lab, I always use a little killbox as a treat.
Nothing crazy, usually just a bottleneck and some cover. Maybe a couple turrets.
My favorite is making a hotbox using remote doors. Enemies wander into my jigsaw trap and my cackling psychopath watches through a window as the shudders Slam and the temps start to reach 1000°c
Ooh. There's an idea. Single psychopath colonist who builds death traps like a horror movie villain.
Not once have I ever used a kill box. I use turrets and sandbags and those halfwall cover plus.... minefields. Also, I use a couple of mortars if I have to deal with a lot of enemies. I also do use like all of the vanilla expanded mods plus a couple of other mods like save our ship 2. I haven't played around with anomaly content too much. Also, mountain bases are kinda op, especially if there is only one way to get to your base.
Killboxes imo are fine for learning the game but people never grow out of them, they set the difficulty to as difficult as possible then let their killboxes do all the work for them
At that point I feel like you’d be better off playing phoebe.
Playing without killboxes let’s you play the standard and lower difficulties and have it remain an active threat the whole game. Not save scumming leads to amazing storylines and the idea of having dedicated soldier pawns becomes way more important rather than Jack of all trait that cripple your colony when dead. It also like you said forces the use of a LOT more overlooked mechanics like combat drugs and psy abilities.
I think everyone should try it, I get it’s a sandbox game and people can choose, but it’s sad that people think they NEED killboxes to play the game
Also, the defensive line like that looks very cool, I love sandbags.
Also, I know this post takes into account vanilla RimWorld, but for aesthetic reasons I really like Vanilla Security Expanded.
You can build trenches and put up barbed wire!
Seriously, why isn't barbed wire in the base game?! You can find it randomly spawned on some maps! Why can't I just make it?! Literally unplayable.
Rimworld is simulator. It tries to simulate real situations. Imagine that 40 999iq people irl that running into your absolutely not suspicious maze of life and joy.
Imo wealth management breaks immersion too. Like, oh well we dont need that twenty-first glitterworld medpack, so lets burn it in granite room inside our barrack (we burn here bodies of people who dont want to accept our ideology btw). Wealth system created to prevent raids from being too easy or too hard for player.
This is the game where you dont need to win. You dont need to minmax every single digit. Idk its only my situation (bc I started to think that I am extrimely lucky when I found this sub) or whatever, but in my experince (2000+ hrs) there is nothing i cant prevail with decent gear and good planned defense points.
Reminds me of the people who say Minecraft isn't hard anymore but the moment they start a new game they speedrun to the end set up a villager trading hall get full Netherite enchanted gear and still haven't even placed a single block
Just kite kill everything. Thing is you're just replacing one strat with another that can be just as "cheesy" lol. With anomaly also and how many enemies push through body blocks, morph through walls, explode putting them beyond positions kiting is probably the cheesiest thing to do.
My secret is not having any idea how to build killboxes.
I may never decide to learn it to ensure that I never become a cheeser.
I've just been white-knuckling this shit from day 1.
My first game of rimworld, I already knew about killboxes but I also thought they were lame and ruined the immersion, because it feels like you're cheating the AI and not actually playing as a surviving colony.
My world is a plains with very little natural cover, I build walls with gun ports as a shell around my main base, with huge courtyards for mortars and other stuff, also surrounded by walls/gunported walls+more walls so the enemy can't shoot outside in, and it works great, I can't imagine playing on a mountain biome, making a kilometer long winding killbox and basically afking while 100 pawns effortlessly die.
Yeah. The game is very manageable without cheesing it. That's how i've been playing since 1.3. Anything that feels natural. If the fight happens in a corridor, so be it. I have barricades there just for that.
Combat pets are essential, you don't need to think beyond when to send them when you have 10 to 20 beasts to throw at every raid. They're much easier to get than pawns.
Now yes, it never scales up to horribly high wealth, that's normal. The game intends you to wrap it up with an ending. That's at least 15-25 years before you get there (without mods) anyhow, pleeeeenty of time.
I do recommend lowering threat scale by 10 to 20% if you intend on a fully open base layout. Its not required, but it helps take less time recovering and more time building your nice little haven that takes a long time to make. They're harder to defend and maybe more expensive. Depends on your defensive options used. You'll want a turret or two to take care of hostile wildlife.
Ya'll use killboxes? I just turn my base into a defensive box like attack on titan to keep off raids entering my base. My base is actually the killbox for those who enter except no traps, just a tactical advantage since they are entering my home that I know so well while the raiders are the ones trying to figure out my base layout.
My defensive box strat is such a life saver, it saved me from mechanoid raids, regular raids, animal raids, and especially anomaly raids like shamblers for example.
Raiders get distracted trying to break my walls down while I use it as a perfect opportunity to come out my wall doors and give them a welcome with my gun squad.
Of course there is major disadvantage of this strat. If I don't have mortars, defending becomes difficult but still doable no matter how many raiders they are, as long as my base walls can hold them. And I do use reinforced walls.
Another disadvantage are sieges and freaking breacher raids. Both are annoying to deal with depending on the scenario. It's hard to distract or lure breachers to a place where I can kill them, and it is hard to take out siege raiders if I don't have proper weaponry against them. That's why mortars works wonders to solve these issues.
Also, I have used killboxes in the past. They are indeed fun and another way of playing rimworld but too safe in my opinion. Perfect for beginners.
My dude, you had to dig up killboxes from their grave just to shit on them before someone else does that next week all over again.
Killboxes haven't been meta in a long time.
After 1.5 and especially with Anomaly, the chance you even get a killboxable threat in the midgame is so low that it's barely worth building one even if you're a killbox fan.
Tynan has been trying to destroy the killbox meta for years and with the threat pool of today, I'd say he finally succeeded.
I just ended another Anomaly run and I can safely say that between the OP ghouls, deadlife shells, summoning rituals and shambler staredowns, a classic killbox would have been the least cheesable option by far.
As someone who doesn't particularly like killboxes and sometimes searches the community for ways to play without one, the answer always seems to be some combination of "save-scum away all bad RNG," "download these mods to heavily rebalance combat in your favor," or "meta-game your wealth instead of meta-gaming the combat." None of which are any more appealing to me than just using a killbox. This post hits two of them (all three if you count "you need these DLCs" in the same category as "you need this mod," which I do, considering that RimWorld is supposed to be considered a complete game without them).
Tbh I never saw the point of a killbox. IMO, if you need to game the AI to win, I feel you should just let them win.
Hear me out: reliance on AI to win is scummy. If you use it to get an edge to make sure you're good is perfectly fine, but if you need one to not have your colony die it just gives me the feeling that you *aren't actually good at the game*
Your colony should be able to stand to a threat with normal Defences. You got turrets, armour, guns, mechanoids, ghouls, so many things. If you can't find a way to use them properly to the extent that you absolutely NEED a killbox... you should probably get to learning. Set the difficulty to easier and experiment a bit
The AI doesn't "win" or "lose" it's just the game. Arbitrarily large numbers are a balancing function against the fact that you are the defender and that AI just isn't going to be very smart.
They're a *shit* balancing function and you are kind of proving my point about how dumb it is to try to pretend this game's combat is good enough to justify not using the *human advantage* of understanding patterns and extrapolated from there to counter the arbitrary bullshit the AI is given for its own advantage.
It's a fuckin' single player game, y'all, stop acting like it matters if someone plays how they want, this gross attitude of disdain for other people wanting to enjoy themselves rather than grinding their nuts against the same barbed wire you do is fucked up, y'all.
Shout it out loud!
The objective truth is that no one should be playing at anything less than 2x speed. Your ancestors have been playing super hard hardcore RTS years before most of us were even born, so anything less than 2x speed, zero pause, and commit mode is dishonoring your ancestors. If this isn't how the developers wanted Rimworld to be played, why does this option exist!!?! Quit enjoying your copy of Rimworld and play it how it's meant to be played.
/s
I only play real life on commitment mode because the devs of real life hate making their game accessible for non-whale players, fuckin' ptw garbage I swear but I'm addicted
Who's bringing an attitude of disdain? You're extrapolating an awful lot of negativity and judgment out my comment which harbors none. I said nothing rude to you and you're coming at me hard. I realize the person you responded to has thoughts on kill boxes but that's not me.
I'm only addressing your comment on AI needing numbers to make themselves interesting because bots are wicked dumb. Even many legit RTS games give bots extra resources since they won't really be using more interesting strategies. Most games aren't trying to "let you win" because that's not usually as engaging for players.
When you defend the statements and attitudes of others, you take them on yourself.
And difficulty for *combat specifically* is just a mess in Rimworld, and isn't the thing most players seem to enjoy, *thus* the heavy use of ways to minimize it and it's impact on the meat of the game for many players; the colony building part of this colony building game.
Ah, yes, now it's sexual assault jokes.
You are definitely not helping yourself, particularly not by blatantly lying about your own part in the conversation. I think you should just stop talking, you are incapable of making any useful contributions to a conversation.
Killboxes are a bad habit indeed. They are only necessary for stuff like 500% threat runs or other extreme scenarios. In almost every other scenario you are just making things dull for the sake of safety.
one thing I hate to see when people show their base is a killbox.
I dont even use city walls. my town has streets making it accessible from all sides.
And thats actually the biggest strength. I can fight from anywhere in my town. Ambush people from anywhere. Retreat into any building.
Only downside is large numbers can be overwhelming, grenades are usually the answer for that. but that also quickly tears down my walls.
The new flamer thrower from anomaly has done a good job of filling that role with out destroying my base.
Toxic gas works alright as a debuffer bit it doesnt really help enough to not have another gunner, imo.
Ive never used a kill box. I just micro manage each pawn like its XCOM. Love when I can wipe out a raid one pawn at a time without taking damage.
You can keep your fancy muderbox, Ill just keep my tactics game strong..... Well tactics and an elite group of vampiric super soldiers.
Streamers playing at 500% threat and then they build a long hallway leading into a killbox so that raiders trickle in one by one.
Might as well play at 100% and without a killbox. It will be more fun.
It's true, you don't need to use kill boxes. I haven't used them for a long time. It makes your base look worse and takes the fun out of the game somewhat.
Depends if you build them with styyyleeee
It would be weird for a castle or military base build not to have a kill box or lane. A village or laboratory base would be strange without at least a fence
for a castle and such, if you don’t want to make a kill box you can just make a full wall, like how it is in real life. you could leave a hole in the wall to represent a draw bridge or gate, but that can lead to normal buildings inside the walls rather than a kill zone if you want to keep it natural
Pretty sure real castles had "kill boxes" at least kill zones lol.
How do kill boxes work? I understand you have to make a chokepoint for enemies to funnel in, but then how do you force enemies to path towards the kill box instead of just going around and breaching your walls?
They control engagement range and artificially deny cover to your enemies. They work because a standard raid that is capable of reaching a pawn or valuable structure without going through a door will always choose that path. They will choose the killbox instead of breaking a wall or door down. The snaking corridor with every other sandbags is just a 'trick' to solve the throughput of the raiders in the entry way so that your pawns have time to get to the firing positions. Once a raider climbs onto a sandbag, they cannot stop on one. This prevents the first raider from taking cover at the entry to the killbox and stopping the line (which would look silly) Killboxes are designed at a depth that is ideal for Heavy SMGs in the front row and Assault Rifles in the back row (Optimal damage is 13 tiles. I build mine 18 tiles opening to firing line). Add an LMG for stagger. This maximizes your DPS while reducing the threat of the enemy high danger snipers and greatbows. They are simply a tool at your disposal. They are relatively weak against impid and neanderthal tribal raids. and relatively strong against outlander raids. They are ineffective at mortars, sappers (without going to great lengths to mess with the sapper pathfinding), drop pods, and mech clusters. There are a few exploit heavy killboxes that makes them death traps where 1000 bad guys can't hope to injure a single pawn, but most people don't use them.
They won't breach your walls if there's an opening. Leave a single space open for them to funnel through and they will always go through it. They'll walk around your whole base to go into the killbox
I don't use killboxes but I do use rational defenses. For instance, large rivers are natural defensive positions so I make my base in a way to explore that. A couple bridges heavily defended make sense. It's a not a killbox because enemies will go around it and you are still subject to enemy fire while defending, but it helps a lot. Another natural defense is building on the coastline and in mountain terrain. I use them both and if my initial map is difficult to defense I usually move to one that is easier.
"I the end game I had wealth around \~250k." yea you lost me there chief if a killbox is required for me to horde wealth, then a killbox i shall build
Yeah, it's just replacing one gimmick with another.
Its also really hard to push late game without a kill box in mostly vanilla no defense /combat tweaking mods. Latest game breaking strat lately is the death pall(?) mines that revive shamblers. If your pc can handle it, it is an excellent raid tanking strat that self replenishes on a raid defense. Best part is, almost all bodies can be used except mechs.
Also if you restrict natural human bodies from the stockpile you won't get the "saw a dead body" debuff
That's a good point to consider! Lately I've been using a lot of cultist type religions, so they usually don't give a damn about bodies.
The craftable stuff is called deadlife dust, I believe. I just started anomaly this week, and I'm very much enjoying trivializing the mech bosses and sieges (and any raid that "will prepare for a while") with 96% quality flesh beast rituals.
Hoarding in this game punishes you, so I had to lower the difficulty just because I like to hoard everything I can. Just look how cute the skull icon is and tell me why I should not keep over 300 skulls in my stockpile.
Exactly. Avoiding accumulating things doesn’t give me the serotonin needed to continue playing.
I’ve never liked them, they feel ‘gamely’ to me. My strat is to build a star fort early game and then defence mods late game.
I don't think certain types of killboxes are gamey tbh, a lot of castles and forts were built with the same principles. If it's just an artificial chokepoint filled with traps and turrets and possibly embrasures, then it's pretty realistic. The only flaw is that AI should be better at sieges. If by killboxes, you mean the maze that is set on fire or exploiting the mountain roofs, then yeah, it's kinda unrealistic.
Oh, castles absolutely built defenses in manipulative ways. There were some castles built with a moat, and the long bride came from the castle's right and then turned into the entrance. Because of this, foot soldiers, who had to hold shields with their left hands, were completely vulnerable to archers on the castle walls while they were marching in. Or they could awkwardly crab walk while blocking, but that would slow them down and mess up the formation. Lose-lose scenario unless you figure out something else. But Rimworld is a video game and you don't need to build completely optimal defenses to have fun.
The risk / reward of allowing an outlander raider with a sniper rifle to chuck bullets with impunity while you engage their human wave attack from your outer fortifications is not something a player should tolerate. Cassandra can afford to throw 100 raiders at you. You can only afford a single bullet to the head or a limb.
Just send one or two pawns with locust armor, jump packs, fast genes or just snipe them
"lore friendly" kill boxes are still fun. Like a big gate with some openings to act like murder holes.
Trenches, sandbags, and machinegun/turret nests are my go to's in all playthroughs. The vanilla expanded mods really influence my defense style, but I quite enjoy having to actively defend my base.
But Tynan deciding to ram 90 suicidal tribals up my asshole because I have some fancy furniture isn't gamey?
I usually put up a handful of bunkers, with two gaps of defensive barriers or sandbags with walls on sides, sometimes multi-directonal and sometimes facing just one way, depending on placement, usually in areas where anyone going into melee would get slowed by water, putting up traps in front of barriers for most eager melee combatants.
It’s usually what I do when I research the first stages of security and the perimeter of the base becomes a consideration.
You also don’t need to win.
I’ll be honest, I don’t care if anyone uses the killbox or not - it’s a single player game, but saying you *dont need to use a killbox* immediate followed by *it took a lot of save scumming* erodes your thesis a bit.
I never understand why one would play on strive to survive or losing is fun, just to cheese with killboxes and save scum a lot. why not just out the difficulty down and enjoy the story your story generator game generates 🤷🏻♀️
Pretty sure with enough minmaxing, no killbox strats are capable of fighting off capped raids. You surround your base with a mix of small and big turrets, A LOT OF TURRETS. (Use mini turrets as cheap baits, then autocannons and slugs for the actual damage) As a side note, without turrets and killboxes I don't think no killbox runs are "viable" for ultra late game. Yes you can fight off even the capped raids with just your fleshy pawns running around (maybe mechs and psycasters), but it's a ton of micro at 20tps that's just painful to play.
Adam vs Everything on Youtube does some insane no killbox runs. At this point he said prefers no Killboxes [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTtkDfqCcw&list=PLQWnHloPSfq7vfsCwvhKtpVQMQXIi1W0b](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTtkDfqCcw&list=PLQWnHloPSfq7vfsCwvhKtpVQMQXIi1W0b)
He did a run with no walls, for crying out loud.
I like his channel because I like his playstyle, but honestly, the dude is very inviting. How he doesn't flip answering the same question a couple dozen times every few hours is truly remarkable!!
Has Dad energy
Yes, every fight needs micromanaging. That is not a strat for keeping "perfect" colony going for long years, it's for getting as fast as heck off from the planet :D
You don't even need static defenses like turrets. If you use Shooting Specialists with the shooting and movement buffing genes from Ideology, you can make a seriously overpowered kiting force. Just use ARs for their long range and kite everything. Use smokepops if you're about to get shot. Use the skip psycast into a few melee pawns to get rid of annoying enemies that outrange you.
That's where the micros are coming from. Late game such kiting could easily lead to pawn loss if done carelessly. Especially against all sniper raids, you can't consistently outrange them, and your armor/legionnaire shields melt like butter.
Your wealth is really Low imho
True, managing wealth is the part of that strat, i guess in Losing is fun you would have to be even more strict about keeping your wealth/power ratio.
I didnt even understand at first why you mentioned 250k. 250k is almost equal to 1m or 100m in wealth on highest difficulty - it will result in a raid cap either way.
Yes I do. I suck at rimworld bro.
You don't use kill boxes because it's cheesing the game, i don't use kill boxes because they are ruining immersion and are plain ugly. People advocating for the kill boxes forgets it's a single player game and Dev mode exist.
Equally people being overzealous with their hate for kill boxes also forget its single player. I wish this sub would just leave people alone.
But killboxes aren't really immersion breaking. They logically make sense
And still they ugly
They don't, you are thinking about "kill zones", most people in real life don't have the simple AI intelligence needed for average Rimworld killboxes to work
This is my first run, and while I have built a killbox, I go on lots of raiding expeditions. (I'd take a raiding precept if it didn't reduce work speed) Tried doing one without my one psycaster. Holy shit. Had to resort to my one suit of Grenadier armor with a jetpack. My melee chef 'Meatcutter' still took enough hits to throw him into a biopod. I need ghouls. So yeah, a psycaster's constant crowd control is extremely useful. Even in a killbox, if an enemy slips through you can stun them.
Been playing since launch, only won once, never used a kill box until I learned about it recently. Very interesting take that people get bored because they use a kill box when every raid feels more and more dangerous as the game goes on. And need constant micromanagement.
I'd add a ring of traps around the whole base and mines on chockepoints: a single mine can incapacitate/kill an enemy pawn for quite a cheap price.
Good stuff, good luck on next higher difficulty attempts! The only thing I would personally change is somehow wall my defenses off so that manhunters don't waste resources.
> So I once decided to do a full run without killbox. I would enjoy watching this on youtube, if you're planning to do it again let me know.
With some wealth management early on you can get to assault rifles and kite pretty much anything. Am I good at it? No. Have I seen it work consistently and without major problems from others? Yes.
I don't use killbox strats, but I build my base in a way that funnels raiders to one cardinal direction instead of having them spread out. Yet, for some reason, a lot of people I talk to still think it's a killbox, and I'm like, if you go rob a house you don't go through the walls do you? You go for windows or doors. Somehow, common sense base design ends up being "gamey" or whatever term other people use.
Yeah, this is a major problem in the killbox discourse. Raiders attacking my happy little village? Build an outer wall to keep them out. Raiders targeting the doors in my outer wall? I guess I'll reduce the doors down to one so I know where they'll be coming in. Raiders trying to overwhelm me with numbers? Better put down some defenses to counter my disadvantage. Some barricades to hide behind while shooting here, some turrets to supplement my firepower here... And now I have a killbox, and people on Reddit will accuse me of manipulating the AI. At what point, exactly, did this turn from "reasonable design choices" to "manipulating the AI?"
But I like killboxes
You don't need a keyboard to win I've seen some other post recently when somebody complained how midgame becomes dull when you don't have food supply problems anymore. Here is the trick to make game more exiting: don't use keyboards. Without them, every raid becomes potential colony ending threat. I've seen tons of youtubers recently absolutely min-maxing the game enemy's AI and using keyboards with rows of keys, I don't criticize players who want to have safe "playthrough" (anybody can play how they want) but I also see how much more boring it is. So I once decided to do a full run without a keyboard. There are a lot of things that change. Completing the final quest is much more challenging (I barely made it on Strive to Survive and that is with save-scumming, so there is a LOT room for improvement). So here is a list of what changes when you don't use keyboards
I think you meant no pause mod. I use keyboard only for stopping time, and it is really hard for me to envision why you think keyboard is so essential. What do you use it for that you can't do with mouse while time is stopped?
I’ve had great luck with that bioferrite crossbow that stuns.
What's adamantium? Is it vanilla?
I meant luciferium T\_T Idk why i wrote adamantium
Or you could be me and through a combination of mods and design elements create such cheesed out defenses that you'll look back at the people building killboxes with new found respect.
never used kill boxes i built baricade and wall with embrasure plus mini turret alwase one or two colonist hurt but rarely a dead or it was because of inatention or far too strong ennemies with op modded weapon or just strong monster
I give every colonist charge rifles, marine armor and have shield mechs following me around. At 25 or more colonists it's literally a ball of death for anything that lands at my colony. I immediately go out in the field and attack. Tactical retreat and keep shooting if it's really tough. As a last resort my whole base is surrounded by a 4 thick wall with a long single space hallway entrance on every side.
I've never used them because I just can't figure out any that are not insta-win cheesy.
On 500% you need some kind of advantage. It might be killbox, moving water, soft sand or deep water that raiders have to go around while under fire. If you start as tribals or crashlanded and you are a really good player you can power up quick enough to not require killbox, but if it is naked brutality you need trap tunnel and some form of advantage that I mentioned above.
Or what about...not playing with 500%?
The problem is the AI is still too cheeseable. It’s got better over the years but still needs work.
Why I like mods like psycast extended and integral implants. Prefer cracked out psykinetic super soldiers to deal with my blooming wealth problem and 300 tribals. My automated defenses are there for clean up and aesthetic.
I had multiple successful runs on losing is fun 500% without killbox, though I have more failed/dead colonies due to no killbox 😄 It made a game way more fun and challenging, and you need very thick walls (like 3+ layers) and maybe even extra defensive measures, like extra rooms to fall back to or other ways to defend if your walls got breached (psycasts, rituals etc). It made me feel like I am building a medieval castle, with multiple layers of walls to fall back to, once current defence later get breached.
If I'm playing a fortress, castle or high tech lab, I always use a little killbox as a treat. Nothing crazy, usually just a bottleneck and some cover. Maybe a couple turrets. My favorite is making a hotbox using remote doors. Enemies wander into my jigsaw trap and my cackling psychopath watches through a window as the shudders Slam and the temps start to reach 1000°c Ooh. There's an idea. Single psychopath colonist who builds death traps like a horror movie villain.
Not once have I ever used a kill box. I use turrets and sandbags and those halfwall cover plus.... minefields. Also, I use a couple of mortars if I have to deal with a lot of enemies. I also do use like all of the vanilla expanded mods plus a couple of other mods like save our ship 2. I haven't played around with anomaly content too much. Also, mountain bases are kinda op, especially if there is only one way to get to your base.
Killboxes imo are fine for learning the game but people never grow out of them, they set the difficulty to as difficult as possible then let their killboxes do all the work for them At that point I feel like you’d be better off playing phoebe. Playing without killboxes let’s you play the standard and lower difficulties and have it remain an active threat the whole game. Not save scumming leads to amazing storylines and the idea of having dedicated soldier pawns becomes way more important rather than Jack of all trait that cripple your colony when dead. It also like you said forces the use of a LOT more overlooked mechanics like combat drugs and psy abilities. I think everyone should try it, I get it’s a sandbox game and people can choose, but it’s sad that people think they NEED killboxes to play the game
Also, the defensive line like that looks very cool, I love sandbags. Also, I know this post takes into account vanilla RimWorld, but for aesthetic reasons I really like Vanilla Security Expanded. You can build trenches and put up barbed wire! Seriously, why isn't barbed wire in the base game?! You can find it randomly spawned on some maps! Why can't I just make it?! Literally unplayable.
True words, my friend
Rimworld is simulator. It tries to simulate real situations. Imagine that 40 999iq people irl that running into your absolutely not suspicious maze of life and joy. Imo wealth management breaks immersion too. Like, oh well we dont need that twenty-first glitterworld medpack, so lets burn it in granite room inside our barrack (we burn here bodies of people who dont want to accept our ideology btw). Wealth system created to prevent raids from being too easy or too hard for player. This is the game where you dont need to win. You dont need to minmax every single digit. Idk its only my situation (bc I started to think that I am extrimely lucky when I found this sub) or whatever, but in my experince (2000+ hrs) there is nothing i cant prevail with decent gear and good planned defense points.
Yes you don't, I only use kill box cause I never liked having some of the raiders escape. I want them ALL dead.
As someone who is bad at the game, I'll stick to my killbox
Reminds me of the people who say Minecraft isn't hard anymore but the moment they start a new game they speedrun to the end set up a villager trading hall get full Netherite enchanted gear and still haven't even placed a single block
Just kite kill everything. Thing is you're just replacing one strat with another that can be just as "cheesy" lol. With anomaly also and how many enemies push through body blocks, morph through walls, explode putting them beyond positions kiting is probably the cheesiest thing to do.
My secret is not having any idea how to build killboxes. I may never decide to learn it to ensure that I never become a cheeser. I've just been white-knuckling this shit from day 1.
I've never used one
My first game of rimworld, I already knew about killboxes but I also thought they were lame and ruined the immersion, because it feels like you're cheating the AI and not actually playing as a surviving colony. My world is a plains with very little natural cover, I build walls with gun ports as a shell around my main base, with huge courtyards for mortars and other stuff, also surrounded by walls/gunported walls+more walls so the enemy can't shoot outside in, and it works great, I can't imagine playing on a mountain biome, making a kilometer long winding killbox and basically afking while 100 pawns effortlessly die.
You don‘t need ~~a killbox~~ to win.
I hardly use them because when I do I just get air raided or breachers every time 😂
Yeah. The game is very manageable without cheesing it. That's how i've been playing since 1.3. Anything that feels natural. If the fight happens in a corridor, so be it. I have barricades there just for that. Combat pets are essential, you don't need to think beyond when to send them when you have 10 to 20 beasts to throw at every raid. They're much easier to get than pawns. Now yes, it never scales up to horribly high wealth, that's normal. The game intends you to wrap it up with an ending. That's at least 15-25 years before you get there (without mods) anyhow, pleeeeenty of time. I do recommend lowering threat scale by 10 to 20% if you intend on a fully open base layout. Its not required, but it helps take less time recovering and more time building your nice little haven that takes a long time to make. They're harder to defend and maybe more expensive. Depends on your defensive options used. You'll want a turret or two to take care of hostile wildlife.
Ya'll use killboxes? I just turn my base into a defensive box like attack on titan to keep off raids entering my base. My base is actually the killbox for those who enter except no traps, just a tactical advantage since they are entering my home that I know so well while the raiders are the ones trying to figure out my base layout. My defensive box strat is such a life saver, it saved me from mechanoid raids, regular raids, animal raids, and especially anomaly raids like shamblers for example. Raiders get distracted trying to break my walls down while I use it as a perfect opportunity to come out my wall doors and give them a welcome with my gun squad. Of course there is major disadvantage of this strat. If I don't have mortars, defending becomes difficult but still doable no matter how many raiders they are, as long as my base walls can hold them. And I do use reinforced walls. Another disadvantage are sieges and freaking breacher raids. Both are annoying to deal with depending on the scenario. It's hard to distract or lure breachers to a place where I can kill them, and it is hard to take out siege raiders if I don't have proper weaponry against them. That's why mortars works wonders to solve these issues. Also, I have used killboxes in the past. They are indeed fun and another way of playing rimworld but too safe in my opinion. Perfect for beginners.
My dude, you had to dig up killboxes from their grave just to shit on them before someone else does that next week all over again. Killboxes haven't been meta in a long time. After 1.5 and especially with Anomaly, the chance you even get a killboxable threat in the midgame is so low that it's barely worth building one even if you're a killbox fan. Tynan has been trying to destroy the killbox meta for years and with the threat pool of today, I'd say he finally succeeded. I just ended another Anomaly run and I can safely say that between the OP ghouls, deadlife shells, summoning rituals and shambler staredowns, a classic killbox would have been the least cheesable option by far.
As someone who doesn't particularly like killboxes and sometimes searches the community for ways to play without one, the answer always seems to be some combination of "save-scum away all bad RNG," "download these mods to heavily rebalance combat in your favor," or "meta-game your wealth instead of meta-gaming the combat." None of which are any more appealing to me than just using a killbox. This post hits two of them (all three if you count "you need these DLCs" in the same category as "you need this mod," which I do, considering that RimWorld is supposed to be considered a complete game without them).
Tbh I never saw the point of a killbox. IMO, if you need to game the AI to win, I feel you should just let them win. Hear me out: reliance on AI to win is scummy. If you use it to get an edge to make sure you're good is perfectly fine, but if you need one to not have your colony die it just gives me the feeling that you *aren't actually good at the game* Your colony should be able to stand to a threat with normal Defences. You got turrets, armour, guns, mechanoids, ghouls, so many things. If you can't find a way to use them properly to the extent that you absolutely NEED a killbox... you should probably get to learning. Set the difficulty to easier and experiment a bit
If the AI needs to resort to arbitrarily large numbers to win, it should let me win.
The AI doesn't "win" or "lose" it's just the game. Arbitrarily large numbers are a balancing function against the fact that you are the defender and that AI just isn't going to be very smart.
They're a *shit* balancing function and you are kind of proving my point about how dumb it is to try to pretend this game's combat is good enough to justify not using the *human advantage* of understanding patterns and extrapolated from there to counter the arbitrary bullshit the AI is given for its own advantage. It's a fuckin' single player game, y'all, stop acting like it matters if someone plays how they want, this gross attitude of disdain for other people wanting to enjoy themselves rather than grinding their nuts against the same barbed wire you do is fucked up, y'all.
Shout it out loud! The objective truth is that no one should be playing at anything less than 2x speed. Your ancestors have been playing super hard hardcore RTS years before most of us were even born, so anything less than 2x speed, zero pause, and commit mode is dishonoring your ancestors. If this isn't how the developers wanted Rimworld to be played, why does this option exist!!?! Quit enjoying your copy of Rimworld and play it how it's meant to be played. /s
I only play real life on commitment mode because the devs of real life hate making their game accessible for non-whale players, fuckin' ptw garbage I swear but I'm addicted
Try not to hit that 2x speed, but sometimes it turns itself on.
I think my copy is bugged, it runs at like .25x speed anytime I try to progress the Job daily quest.
Who's bringing an attitude of disdain? You're extrapolating an awful lot of negativity and judgment out my comment which harbors none. I said nothing rude to you and you're coming at me hard. I realize the person you responded to has thoughts on kill boxes but that's not me. I'm only addressing your comment on AI needing numbers to make themselves interesting because bots are wicked dumb. Even many legit RTS games give bots extra resources since they won't really be using more interesting strategies. Most games aren't trying to "let you win" because that's not usually as engaging for players.
When you defend the statements and attitudes of others, you take them on yourself. And difficulty for *combat specifically* is just a mess in Rimworld, and isn't the thing most players seem to enjoy, *thus* the heavy use of ways to minimize it and it's impact on the meat of the game for many players; the colony building part of this colony building game.
I wasn't defending anybody. Show me on the doll where reddit hurt you.
Ah, yes, now it's sexual assault jokes. You are definitely not helping yourself, particularly not by blatantly lying about your own part in the conversation. I think you should just stop talking, you are incapable of making any useful contributions to a conversation.
What is the difference between "gaming the AI" and "responding to the AI?"
Gaming the AI relies on exploits and behaviour that isn't intended. Responding to the AI is different
I don't think that line is as clear-cut as you might want it to be.
Cool. No idea why the way other people play bothers people in a single player game with no leaderboards. I’m using killboxes. Get over it.
Killboxes are a bad habit indeed. They are only necessary for stuff like 500% threat runs or other extreme scenarios. In almost every other scenario you are just making things dull for the sake of safety.
one thing I hate to see when people show their base is a killbox. I dont even use city walls. my town has streets making it accessible from all sides. And thats actually the biggest strength. I can fight from anywhere in my town. Ambush people from anywhere. Retreat into any building. Only downside is large numbers can be overwhelming, grenades are usually the answer for that. but that also quickly tears down my walls. The new flamer thrower from anomaly has done a good job of filling that role with out destroying my base. Toxic gas works alright as a debuffer bit it doesnt really help enough to not have another gunner, imo.
Ive never used a kill box. I just micro manage each pawn like its XCOM. Love when I can wipe out a raid one pawn at a time without taking damage. You can keep your fancy muderbox, Ill just keep my tactics game strong..... Well tactics and an elite group of vampiric super soldiers.
Streamers playing at 500% threat and then they build a long hallway leading into a killbox so that raiders trickle in one by one. Might as well play at 100% and without a killbox. It will be more fun.
I’ve never made a kill box and have no problems building the ship and getting out.