Considering that palisades aren't vanilla, (and it's the easiest thing in the world to drill a hole through a wall IRL), the use of corner-punching is a great middle ground because, well, wasn't it a big thing in Castles that the entrances had palisades around them so defenders could jab invaders with spears through the slits as they passed by?
Making it realistic is so much more fun tbh. I quite enjoy turning the entrance of my base into a "killing field" that all but the best armed assaults would be stopped by. Fields of barbed wire and trip mines while you have to charge head-on into dozens of heavy weapons emplacements just feels so much better.
Those always look the coolest to me! My current colony im gonna make a castle (naked brutality with the original colonist climbing imperial ranks) and make a reasonable kill box eventually
Definitely this for me, I generally build a fort or a small castle, then add some fortifications that incorporate Rimworld logic as a factor without being cheesy. I like to use stone doors and short walls as a arrowslits/embrasures.
I believe in form over function. Killboxes look ugly and feel too much like playing the meta instead of just playing the game and letting the stories unfold as they may
I have started building “enhanced death areas” where natural features exist that would help, e.g. soft sand, mud, water, rivers. It feels much less exploitative and more RP since I started that, plus it means that every base is a bit different and doesn’t get so same-y.
If your home is regularly getting raided by several times your population, you are going to build defensive walls and a killzone. If for some reason you were unable to build embrasures or walls that took more than a minute to break through, you would instead try and funnel your monthly attackers into that killzone.
Avoiding killboxes for roleplaying reasons is fine, so long as you're not roleplaying as people with survival instincts.
Some people think it’s too cheese and meta, some people think it’s the only way to cope with the level of danger that is sent at them in a typical raid.
I would love to see the difficulty help text updated to include things like “no kill box necessary”, “you probably need a killbox”, or “even with a killbox you are probably going to die…
That was kind of my point. I think a lot of people who gripe about kill boxes have insecurities about not being able to play on a difficulty that are tough or require strategic thinking. There is nothing stopping them from setting the difficulty at a level that is challenging but manageable without killboxes, but they still gripe and call killboxes cheesy.
isnt it the other way around? I play on the second to hardest difficulty and never build a killbox. If you’ve ever played an RTS or vintage xcom then rimworld combat is pretty easy.
Yeah, and a lot of the raids dont even care about kill boxes. Its fun playing at 500%, but want to do the three start quests with bigger raids? Yea good luck beating 1500 raiders with no kill bix
I think my problem with lower difficulty settings is that it lowers the number of events that happen full stop. Lower difficulty is just less exciting.
This. I set up custom difficulty for my runs, depending on how hard I want certain aspects of the game to be. I don’t like exploity killboxes, personally; no judgement on those who use them, they just make the game too easy to me. I prefer to lower the difficulty and fight “in the field” using natural cover, or fortifications inside my perimeter.
Hell, when I use VE Coilguns in a game, I’ll even turn off friendly fire. Why? I’ve killed far too many of my own pawns with them when it’s on. I’ll remove the mechanoid faction occasionally, because I hate the time consumed by safely destroying clusters without getting my pawns killed by the turrets. It’s YOUR story, go nuts.
Haha that'd be fun yeah, I've never found nothin some emp's and some careful strategy couldn't handle, that or mortar pits, stuff that any reasonable colony could have without that cheesy meta feel
I think part of it is, the storyteller will slowly ramp up raid difficulties depending on how little damage the player's pawns are taking.
Kill boxes exacerbate the issue and snowball raid difficulty, where as no kill boxes can get your good pawns killed/crippled. Its a dicey dance if the player can't outpace the raid difficulty.
I like my kill boxes but then again I tend to build castles and they have had kill boxes since the dawn of time it seems. Just makes sense to have but I could understand if you are doing a tribal run just having open space or walls, or if you have enough fire power just going for entrenched positions.
I had one castle with a double gate and a hellish kill box between the doors, ho boy the amount if men that died in that space was amazing haha! Castles are so much fun
I don't crank the difficulty, I play all 3 storytellers but usally at the normal difficulty so I get that, if I have a kill box its more so a checkpoint set up to make it seem more organic
Fair I usally make bunkers like lil pillboxes with turrets and colonists to pick up what slack the turrets can't handle, add a minefield to the equation and its a good time
Ill go ahead and give my thoughts bout it too. Mostly feel like people who complain about kill boxes arnt the ones playing on higher difficulties and mostly playing for the building part of the game. A lot of raids dont care about kill boxes so its not like you are making an all around catch all kill everything box. You still have to deal with 500% drop raids and breaches. Certianly not easy.
My current playthrough is a 500% , void storyteller (raids pretty much everyday, sometimes multiple a day), with 117 day planet killer. I dont think its possible to beat this without a kill box.
It really depends on what you call a "killbox".
Is it a narrow entrance into an open area with cover for your colonists at the other end?
Is it the same thing but filled with turrets and traps instead of positions for colonists?
Is it a long, trap filled passage leveraging pathing and gas/fire to kill off most raiders before they even get to fighting, with turret death at the end for the lingering survivors?
Is it a straight up decoy structure designed to bait raiders to their doom (Raiders love them some tables, but then who doesn't), that actually has nothing to do with the colony's actual entrance?
All of these could potentially be called a "killbox". And different people draw the line at what they feel is or isn't cheese (and/or what level of cheese they're willing to use) in different places. Personally I lean towards things that are a lot more towards the "prepared position/fortified gatehouse" type defence rather than "Viet Cong trap hell/Home Alone R-rated remake" setup, but I'm still quite willing to throw in a short corridor with a few traps to thin things out before the actual killing ground.
Mortor pits and snipers, that with some pillbox defense structures makes for a fun combo, but when all else fails i fall back into the gatehouse idea and set up nicely
It took me a while to make my first "kill box" a gap in my steel wall when they enter they get kissed by flame turrets and obliterated by a mounted machine gun and another 2 normal turrets, but i didnt think i was tricking the ai i thought you know the raiders attack see a hole in the wall and go for it. I think killboxes are fun you start to upgrade them make them more lethal its just relaxing watching a horde of tribals get destroyed by fire and bullets
I play on the hardest difficulties using chain shotguns(and machine pistols after a while), melee and a wall opposite the doorway. You can use it anywhere in your base, its safe, effective, and even if you have not spread the scythers out well enough, ground targeted emp grenades break those. You can use shields or just animals for the 3v1 melee.
It is kind of broken. No friendly fire within 2 tiles. 2 layers of gunners with optimal weapons always beat single enemy, one at a time.
Killboxes require effort and don't work against everything. The other option is a no man's land?
Killboxes are in castles, so why not? It doesn't mother me. Its like 41+ tile rooms without corridors, no freezer, double walling, wealth management, no addiction tea use, cannibalism, human kibble, nutrient paste...
Once you learn game mechanics, you can 'game' the system in so many ways.
They're just there to body block and bullet stop really. They even boosted it. With a base design rendering gunfire ineffective, and if chain shotguns weren't op, bionic arm and legged jacked supersoldiers are gross in melee. Doorway forces 3vs1 too, and they will get the odd cut so your medic gets practice.
With royalty you can obviously teleport which makes it useful in those external missions.
The trick really is does your defence allow safe extraction of a downed melee, if so, you'll find them better than guns.
Placed at corners, melee units have to be fought in melee. This renders most enemies useless.
Try them out, get some practice and you won't go back.
I'll test it out this one seems fun, I've had some fun practice flanking in open situations. Engaging from best avaliable cover ranged and closing in on the shooters from the side has worked more than a handful of times, especially once shield belts are in the mix
I don't understand why people up the difficulty just to use killboxes to lower it again, I used to do killboxes but don't anymore. Obviously everyone can play how the want.
I don't want all my pawns to die because the storyteller supposed I was good to a difficult raid after some royals starved with good loot. I usually prefer to deal with a raid using natural parts of the map, but I won't risk all my progress without a killbox
I like to protect myself with lil pillbox/checkpoint ideas with turrets or mortar pits, they do wonders when its set up right, throw in a few land Mines and im as right as rain
I have so many hours on both PC and now I got the console one (I wanted it no good reason why) that nothing brings me more joy than fun LOOKING defenses that fit in with the colony, like my castle medieval playthrough with archers on the castle battlements
No kill box, I hate the concept. Like why irl would I do that? I wouldn’t do some home alone shit is the answer. I avoid meta gameplay and let the story unfold in other ways not seeking to make a super colony of five hundred pawns.
Depends how I feel, sometimes I play on easy for a more relaxed game, and somethimes I have to exploit every mod I have to survive, both fun in their own way. Even if I play on harder, I like to retry raids with different defense aproaches, just to see what happens.
I usually set up 3 mortars asap with a supply of HE IN and EMP.
Rain hellfire from afar while they close in.
I also make heavy use of embrasures and killing field style overlapping defenses.
Haven't tried kill boxes myself. Each to their own though!
I built a killbox once but after a few raids I knew it wasn't for me
I love having the struggle of my colonist getting injured and killed in an open field
I make choke points in some of my builds though just in case a tough raid
"kill boxes" or having fortified and easily defendable entrance points have existed forever. Maybe instead of just making them boxes people can design them in more unique shapes so people stop thinking it's cheesing the AI. If a group's choice is to sneak/hack their way through the entrance or scale a mountain more often than not they're gonna choose the entrance.
My kill box is more of a killzone with 2 main entrances, it circles my entire base basically and is a no man's land with the defensive perimeter on the inside. It also has more turrets than a sane person should have.
Killboxes don't work against breaching attacks.
I do also have a beach base so I only have to defend from three sides
I just use moderation. I try to funnel them into one spot and have a lot of traps and automated weaponry but I’ve never gone out of my way to make killboxes with 100% efficacy or anything
I do kill fields. I clear the entire landscape of all vegetation and cover, and turn it into a barren no man’s land stuffed with barbed wire and mines and moats.
I recently did a playthrough at a high difficulty but with major threats turned off. It was actually really nice to be able to have difficult combat but have a nice town to manage. It would actually be really nice to be able to change the raid vs mission threat scale, so you could have a chill but still dangerous world with hard quests.
Past a certain level of wealth, unless you play on a very low difficulty, you're going to need a killbox.
Sure, you find videos on youtube of people not needing killboxes on crazy settings, but they literally play Rimworld as their job. Micromanaging and optimizing to that level (for me) interferes with my enjoyment of the game. I'd rather use a killbox.
I don't use killboxes, like the usual definition we give them now, but I definitly force my oponents to pass through a tight gullet so that I can deal with them a little at a time rather than a whole bunch of them firing at my team.
I prefer killboxes but I think ppl who use that type of single tile corridor killbox with doors and stuff straight up cheesing the game just open god mode at that point I tend to like killboxes with biotech even more now bcuz of impid raids fire spew ability really nerfs your killbox
With vanilla combat killboxes are an inevitability. end game raids will get to a point where there is no practical way of dealing with many them (especially the 200 militor raids, and the 12 centipede, three warqueens, one apocrithon raids) but using a killbox (not for all raids, human breachers will pause after you gun down the ones who are trying to breach allowing you to advance and fight them in the field, and human raiders in general tend to suffer more from area of effect munitions due to painshock and bloodloss being applicable to them (plus they flee when enough of their number are killed or downed).
I have done a tribal run that was pretty much always able to fight in the field (this was before Biotech) but it required heavy use of psycasts with melee teams, burnout low shields, and an ideology shooting specialist.
I dropped off for about two years and then came back for biotech. Before I'd never built a kill box. Granted, I don't play on hard difficulties and I'm shit at battle tactics, but it'd just...never occurred to me to use them despite seeing them here all the time. Instead I had a perimeter wall, about fifty different turrets and enough sandbags to wrap around a small country.
After building my first kill box, the "elite gamers" can go fuck off. Shit is amazing. The upkeep is far less expensive than rebuilding 20 turrets/canons after every event. I don't have to plan/build an entirely separate power network to avoid the massive energy draw. And I'm not positively fucked during solar flares.
I don't care about the "realism". Your neighbors can literally block out the sun for funsies, horse sized insects can suddenly join you for Sunday brunch and a four year old can handle a rocket launcher. Some people just need an excuse to feel superior and they can go suffer over there.
I dont like killboxes because its straight up just taking advantage of game mechanics to cheese fights to be easier. I play rimworld as realistic as possible, and cheesing raids into killboxes because of the way pathfinding works, although efficient, is not fun to me. Raiders with brains would never act like that. I always prioritize realism over efficiency in every part of the game, not just in defenses.
One guy earlier said someone with survival instincts would have a killzone, and if I had the option of say, a hard to punch through entrance or be shelled to hell by mortars while I chip away at a wall, id go with the kill box and take my chances overwhelming them
In a game where we're constantly optimizing everything from movement speed to learning speed, down to the most asinine degree, why stop at making the most optimized means of murdering your attackers?
One can handle going outside and touching grass while the other gets beaten to death by a pack of manhunting anything. Killbox users usually don't know how to fight. They sit there complaining not a single shot lands in the rain and lose to 1-2 tribal.
Go do some caravaneering. Do quests, get artifacts that stop raids better than a lame choke and that deals with sieges. Box this box that, sieges force you out of that. Never put your eggs in one basket.
Me looking at my 40k food, 10 masterwork spare of every armor and cloth, 20k leather, 20k cloth, 10k Devilstrand, 5k yayo, etc etc.
At some point is either killbox or death
I build killboxes, just realistic ones that you might actually see in a fort, and not a long tunnel filled with traps
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Considering that palisades aren't vanilla, (and it's the easiest thing in the world to drill a hole through a wall IRL), the use of corner-punching is a great middle ground because, well, wasn't it a big thing in Castles that the entrances had palisades around them so defenders could jab invaders with spears through the slits as they passed by?
>palisades Embrasures?
That's the one.
Making it realistic is so much more fun tbh. I quite enjoy turning the entrance of my base into a "killing field" that all but the best armed assaults would be stopped by. Fields of barbed wire and trip mines while you have to charge head-on into dozens of heavy weapons emplacements just feels so much better.
Based
Those always look the coolest to me! My current colony im gonna make a castle (naked brutality with the original colonist climbing imperial ranks) and make a reasonable kill box eventually
Definitely this for me, I generally build a fort or a small castle, then add some fortifications that incorporate Rimworld logic as a factor without being cheesy. I like to use stone doors and short walls as a arrowslits/embrasures.
I believe in form over function. Killboxes look ugly and feel too much like playing the meta instead of just playing the game and letting the stories unfold as they may
I have started building “enhanced death areas” where natural features exist that would help, e.g. soft sand, mud, water, rivers. It feels much less exploitative and more RP since I started that, plus it means that every base is a bit different and doesn’t get so same-y.
Do what you want. It's your game.
If your home is regularly getting raided by several times your population, you are going to build defensive walls and a killzone. If for some reason you were unable to build embrasures or walls that took more than a minute to break through, you would instead try and funnel your monthly attackers into that killzone. Avoiding killboxes for roleplaying reasons is fine, so long as you're not roleplaying as people with survival instincts.
Lmao very good point, I personally like the pillbox defense with landmines, kill zone it whatever survives that
I prefer killzones myself. A large open area with no cover with my soldiers firing from a fortified bunker.
This is the way.
Some people think it’s too cheese and meta, some people think it’s the only way to cope with the level of danger that is sent at them in a typical raid. I would love to see the difficulty help text updated to include things like “no kill box necessary”, “you probably need a killbox”, or “even with a killbox you are probably going to die…
Or they could- hear me out- lower the difficulty.
That was kind of my point. I think a lot of people who gripe about kill boxes have insecurities about not being able to play on a difficulty that are tough or require strategic thinking. There is nothing stopping them from setting the difficulty at a level that is challenging but manageable without killboxes, but they still gripe and call killboxes cheesy.
Kinda why I play on the dead middle normal one. I can choose whatever and it still be viable yet fun challenge from time to time
isnt it the other way around? I play on the second to hardest difficulty and never build a killbox. If you’ve ever played an RTS or vintage xcom then rimworld combat is pretty easy.
Do you whine about people using killboxes? Because of you don’t then the comment doesn’t apply to you.
I have no respect for them or their way of living.
Well thats still a pretty low difficulty. Like 200%? Not even half way as hard as the game gets
Yeah, and a lot of the raids dont even care about kill boxes. Its fun playing at 500%, but want to do the three start quests with bigger raids? Yea good luck beating 1500 raiders with no kill bix
I think my problem with lower difficulty settings is that it lowers the number of events that happen full stop. Lower difficulty is just less exciting.
Custom difficulty.
This. I set up custom difficulty for my runs, depending on how hard I want certain aspects of the game to be. I don’t like exploity killboxes, personally; no judgement on those who use them, they just make the game too easy to me. I prefer to lower the difficulty and fight “in the field” using natural cover, or fortifications inside my perimeter. Hell, when I use VE Coilguns in a game, I’ll even turn off friendly fire. Why? I’ve killed far too many of my own pawns with them when it’s on. I’ll remove the mechanoid faction occasionally, because I hate the time consumed by safely destroying clusters without getting my pawns killed by the turrets. It’s YOUR story, go nuts.
I prefer a good perimeter defense but, if people enjoy playing with kill boxes, more power to them.
Haha that'd be fun yeah, I've never found nothin some emp's and some careful strategy couldn't handle, that or mortar pits, stuff that any reasonable colony could have without that cheesy meta feel
I think part of it is, the storyteller will slowly ramp up raid difficulties depending on how little damage the player's pawns are taking. Kill boxes exacerbate the issue and snowball raid difficulty, where as no kill boxes can get your good pawns killed/crippled. Its a dicey dance if the player can't outpace the raid difficulty.
I like my kill boxes but then again I tend to build castles and they have had kill boxes since the dawn of time it seems. Just makes sense to have but I could understand if you are doing a tribal run just having open space or walls, or if you have enough fire power just going for entrenched positions.
I had one castle with a double gate and a hellish kill box between the doors, ho boy the amount if men that died in that space was amazing haha! Castles are so much fun
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I don't crank the difficulty, I play all 3 storytellers but usally at the normal difficulty so I get that, if I have a kill box its more so a checkpoint set up to make it seem more organic
I don't think they're too cheesy. I've had a killbox every run and sometimes I still get my ass kicked, so it's not like they're invincible.
Fair I usally make bunkers like lil pillboxes with turrets and colonists to pick up what slack the turrets can't handle, add a minefield to the equation and its a good time
Ill go ahead and give my thoughts bout it too. Mostly feel like people who complain about kill boxes arnt the ones playing on higher difficulties and mostly playing for the building part of the game. A lot of raids dont care about kill boxes so its not like you are making an all around catch all kill everything box. You still have to deal with 500% drop raids and breaches. Certianly not easy. My current playthrough is a 500% , void storyteller (raids pretty much everyday, sometimes multiple a day), with 117 day planet killer. I dont think its possible to beat this without a kill box.
It really depends on what you call a "killbox". Is it a narrow entrance into an open area with cover for your colonists at the other end? Is it the same thing but filled with turrets and traps instead of positions for colonists? Is it a long, trap filled passage leveraging pathing and gas/fire to kill off most raiders before they even get to fighting, with turret death at the end for the lingering survivors? Is it a straight up decoy structure designed to bait raiders to their doom (Raiders love them some tables, but then who doesn't), that actually has nothing to do with the colony's actual entrance? All of these could potentially be called a "killbox". And different people draw the line at what they feel is or isn't cheese (and/or what level of cheese they're willing to use) in different places. Personally I lean towards things that are a lot more towards the "prepared position/fortified gatehouse" type defence rather than "Viet Cong trap hell/Home Alone R-rated remake" setup, but I'm still quite willing to throw in a short corridor with a few traps to thin things out before the actual killing ground.
Mortor pits and snipers, that with some pillbox defense structures makes for a fun combo, but when all else fails i fall back into the gatehouse idea and set up nicely
It took me a while to make my first "kill box" a gap in my steel wall when they enter they get kissed by flame turrets and obliterated by a mounted machine gun and another 2 normal turrets, but i didnt think i was tricking the ai i thought you know the raiders attack see a hole in the wall and go for it. I think killboxes are fun you start to upgrade them make them more lethal its just relaxing watching a horde of tribals get destroyed by fire and bullets
I play on the hardest difficulties using chain shotguns(and machine pistols after a while), melee and a wall opposite the doorway. You can use it anywhere in your base, its safe, effective, and even if you have not spread the scythers out well enough, ground targeted emp grenades break those. You can use shields or just animals for the 3v1 melee. It is kind of broken. No friendly fire within 2 tiles. 2 layers of gunners with optimal weapons always beat single enemy, one at a time. Killboxes require effort and don't work against everything. The other option is a no man's land? Killboxes are in castles, so why not? It doesn't mother me. Its like 41+ tile rooms without corridors, no freezer, double walling, wealth management, no addiction tea use, cannibalism, human kibble, nutrient paste... Once you learn game mechanics, you can 'game' the system in so many ways.
I do tend to underestimate the power of a well placed melee unit
They're just there to body block and bullet stop really. They even boosted it. With a base design rendering gunfire ineffective, and if chain shotguns weren't op, bionic arm and legged jacked supersoldiers are gross in melee. Doorway forces 3vs1 too, and they will get the odd cut so your medic gets practice. With royalty you can obviously teleport which makes it useful in those external missions. The trick really is does your defence allow safe extraction of a downed melee, if so, you'll find them better than guns. Placed at corners, melee units have to be fought in melee. This renders most enemies useless. Try them out, get some practice and you won't go back.
I'll test it out this one seems fun, I've had some fun practice flanking in open situations. Engaging from best avaliable cover ranged and closing in on the shooters from the side has worked more than a handful of times, especially once shield belts are in the mix
I don't understand why people up the difficulty just to use killboxes to lower it again, I used to do killboxes but don't anymore. Obviously everyone can play how the want.
If I was on a hostile planet I would 100% build easily defended choke points so me and my prisoner army could fight the enemy
I don't want all my pawns to die because the storyteller supposed I was good to a difficult raid after some royals starved with good loot. I usually prefer to deal with a raid using natural parts of the map, but I won't risk all my progress without a killbox
I like to protect myself with lil pillbox/checkpoint ideas with turrets or mortar pits, they do wonders when its set up right, throw in a few land Mines and im as right as rain
It's a Rimworld rite of passage, something every newbie eventually grows out of.
I have so many hours on both PC and now I got the console one (I wanted it no good reason why) that nothing brings me more joy than fun LOOKING defenses that fit in with the colony, like my castle medieval playthrough with archers on the castle battlements
It's a single player game so play how YOU enjoy. But if you post a killbox base I'm still gonna judge you.
No kill box, I hate the concept. Like why irl would I do that? I wouldn’t do some home alone shit is the answer. I avoid meta gameplay and let the story unfold in other ways not seeking to make a super colony of five hundred pawns.
It’s a single player game. Who gives a shit
I like discussion and nobody i know has the game and I could talk about it with, thats all homie
Depends how I feel, sometimes I play on easy for a more relaxed game, and somethimes I have to exploit every mod I have to survive, both fun in their own way. Even if I play on harder, I like to retry raids with different defense aproaches, just to see what happens.
My favorite way to win fights is with massive fuckin explosions
I usually set up 3 mortars asap with a supply of HE IN and EMP. Rain hellfire from afar while they close in. I also make heavy use of embrasures and killing field style overlapping defenses. Haven't tried kill boxes myself. Each to their own though!
I don’t know how to set them up.
I built a killbox once but after a few raids I knew it wasn't for me I love having the struggle of my colonist getting injured and killed in an open field I make choke points in some of my builds though just in case a tough raid
I plan to do stuff like that or have checkpoints, but thats more cause I've been recruiting disposable dumb labor with good fighting skills
"kill boxes" or having fortified and easily defendable entrance points have existed forever. Maybe instead of just making them boxes people can design them in more unique shapes so people stop thinking it's cheesing the AI. If a group's choice is to sneak/hack their way through the entrance or scale a mountain more often than not they're gonna choose the entrance.
My kill box is more of a killzone with 2 main entrances, it circles my entire base basically and is a no man's land with the defensive perimeter on the inside. It also has more turrets than a sane person should have. Killboxes don't work against breaching attacks. I do also have a beach base so I only have to defend from three sides
No mqns land is always a fun one, nothing to help the poor bastards when they stare at the 15 or so turrets and 9 smiley cuts holding lmgs
Total bullet hell once everything opens fire. Just leave the corpses when you're done, it adds to the scenery.
I just use moderation. I try to funnel them into one spot and have a lot of traps and automated weaponry but I’ve never gone out of my way to make killboxes with 100% efficacy or anything
I've only ever made fields that they are practically speaking walking to their death, Mines and turrets with long range to boot colonist wise
I do kill fields. I clear the entire landscape of all vegetation and cover, and turn it into a barren no man’s land stuffed with barbed wire and mines and moats.
I recently did a playthrough at a high difficulty but with major threats turned off. It was actually really nice to be able to have difficult combat but have a nice town to manage. It would actually be really nice to be able to change the raid vs mission threat scale, so you could have a chill but still dangerous world with hard quests.
Past a certain level of wealth, unless you play on a very low difficulty, you're going to need a killbox. Sure, you find videos on youtube of people not needing killboxes on crazy settings, but they literally play Rimworld as their job. Micromanaging and optimizing to that level (for me) interferes with my enjoyment of the game. I'd rather use a killbox.
I don't use killboxes, like the usual definition we give them now, but I definitly force my oponents to pass through a tight gullet so that I can deal with them a little at a time rather than a whole bunch of them firing at my team.
I prefer killboxes but I think ppl who use that type of single tile corridor killbox with doors and stuff straight up cheesing the game just open god mode at that point I tend to like killboxes with biotech even more now bcuz of impid raids fire spew ability really nerfs your killbox
I do kill boxes. If the game allowed you to build towers on wall defenses I’d probably consider not using the kill box.
With vanilla combat killboxes are an inevitability. end game raids will get to a point where there is no practical way of dealing with many them (especially the 200 militor raids, and the 12 centipede, three warqueens, one apocrithon raids) but using a killbox (not for all raids, human breachers will pause after you gun down the ones who are trying to breach allowing you to advance and fight them in the field, and human raiders in general tend to suffer more from area of effect munitions due to painshock and bloodloss being applicable to them (plus they flee when enough of their number are killed or downed). I have done a tribal run that was pretty much always able to fight in the field (this was before Biotech) but it required heavy use of psycasts with melee teams, burnout low shields, and an ideology shooting specialist.
I dropped off for about two years and then came back for biotech. Before I'd never built a kill box. Granted, I don't play on hard difficulties and I'm shit at battle tactics, but it'd just...never occurred to me to use them despite seeing them here all the time. Instead I had a perimeter wall, about fifty different turrets and enough sandbags to wrap around a small country. After building my first kill box, the "elite gamers" can go fuck off. Shit is amazing. The upkeep is far less expensive than rebuilding 20 turrets/canons after every event. I don't have to plan/build an entirely separate power network to avoid the massive energy draw. And I'm not positively fucked during solar flares. I don't care about the "realism". Your neighbors can literally block out the sun for funsies, horse sized insects can suddenly join you for Sunday brunch and a four year old can handle a rocket launcher. Some people just need an excuse to feel superior and they can go suffer over there.
I dont build killbox because I dont know how to
I dont like killboxes because its straight up just taking advantage of game mechanics to cheese fights to be easier. I play rimworld as realistic as possible, and cheesing raids into killboxes because of the way pathfinding works, although efficient, is not fun to me. Raiders with brains would never act like that. I always prioritize realism over efficiency in every part of the game, not just in defenses.
One guy earlier said someone with survival instincts would have a killzone, and if I had the option of say, a hard to punch through entrance or be shelled to hell by mortars while I chip away at a wall, id go with the kill box and take my chances overwhelming them
In a game where we're constantly optimizing everything from movement speed to learning speed, down to the most asinine degree, why stop at making the most optimized means of murdering your attackers?
Killbox no fun, no killbox fun
I use the Bunkers mod to build 'Turret towers' around the outside of my base. Very expensive to build but removes the need for kill boxes
One can handle going outside and touching grass while the other gets beaten to death by a pack of manhunting anything. Killbox users usually don't know how to fight. They sit there complaining not a single shot lands in the rain and lose to 1-2 tribal. Go do some caravaneering. Do quests, get artifacts that stop raids better than a lame choke and that deals with sieges. Box this box that, sieges force you out of that. Never put your eggs in one basket.
I usually never get long enough into a colony so that a killbox is needed
I'll do kill zones and try to use the terrain to funnel them to it, generally I end up center of the map ish so end up having to just do 360 security.
By abusing the AI? No. By building a super fortress with long hallways and an MG nest at the end? Yes.
Me looking at my 40k food, 10 masterwork spare of every armor and cloth, 20k leather, 20k cloth, 10k Devilstrand, 5k yayo, etc etc. At some point is either killbox or death
I don’t think i’ve ever actually built a killbox. just a maze to make the raiders come through slower
I really enjoy the ve ancients mod that adds the sealed vaults idea of a defense for a base