You can also have archer towers that protrude out from the wall by placing a single wall unit, connect it with beams and floor so your archer can run out and take shots at the enemies queuing up for slaughter, after you have taken care of theirs, of course. That way you don’t waste time overkill’s one enemy at a time, and instead spreading out your fire power. This is actual real life tactics and the reason why many castles’ gates and walls are built with funnel shape.
That's what I do nowadays, but it relies on killing their archers when you really don't have to fight most of them in the first place if you hide away. They'll stumble and come in 1-2 at a time like melee soldiers, letting you outnumber them really hard.
Its lot like defense is hard in this game. Equip everyone whith a crossbow, build a tower overlooking the entrance, 2 reinforced doors and thats it. Nothing gets through. The only danger is trebuchet, which can create some unexpected entrances into your base. So i advise to always play at high dificulty or even higher to make the challenge remotely interesting, and even then, you will probably survive easily
Traps is something to consider to. Make walls in a maze shape how you want it and set trap in a pattern. Always leave 1 tile open so your people can run true the maze safe because they know where the traps are, but the enemy runs true them all. 👍
Oh it's a super good strategy, but I just dislike them in most games. They also struggle on late game raids versus a ton of enemies, since it takes a lot of traps to kill one person and your maze has to get downright ridiculous
I'm on my first playthrough, and I pretty much immediately went with a single entrance stronghold with archer spots. I had a small walled compound with 2 medium ish buildings, one entrance, and a choke point entrance (essentially an extra wall off the front of the base with a small 3 wide pathway through) before I got attacked the first time, and pretty quickly realized it was going to be super strong. granted I'm only on the normal difficulty since it's my first time playing, but when they walk into my choke point they get instantly slammed with arrows. They used to make it to my "airlock" (5 doors in a row that they have to break down, in a perfect spot down the center line for my archers to shoot them in their chrome domes) and then die there but now they just die barely 20 feet into the first choke point, its honestly pretty funny to watch. should be even more OP once I finally get everyone's marksmanship trained up enough to use the good crossbows, rn I only have 4-5 crossbows and 3-4 longbows, the rest are all below 10 so they have to use short bows. trying to get them trained up is kind of a pain though
Ooh yeah. It does get a lot more difficult on higher difficulties, when there's enough that they absolutely will flood through, but chokes are always super effective in this game. I'm hoping they'll eventually add in harder seiges. Ladders, seige towers, ropes, and so on to make this strategy a bit less strong.
@@JustDontDie So I started a new run with the goal to make the biggest most OP settlement I could manage. I fucked with the files to give my settlers max stats, increase the amount of cows per pen, increased multi of how often settlers come, and some other random stuff. I tested every change and none of them caused issues so I started my run, and It was going fine but now I am running into a weird bug where once my settlers finish something (job sleeping etc) they stand still for sometimes several hours before starting their next job. theres plenty of stuff to do, theres 8 research tables and a barely field of 2000 that needs harvested, and my priorities are set right but no matter what I do they still have that issue. is there some way you know of to fix this, or am I just at the limit of the games engine with the massive sized stockpile I have as well as the huge cropfield?
you are putting the merlons down wrong. No offense. They are supposed to hang over the edge by linking to a floor on the wall. That allows the archers to shoot down easily.
No offense taken! I appreciate it! That said, while that was viable when I made this originally it I'm pretty sure that that was a bug that's since been patched out. You can no longer stand on merlons, because they destroy the floor beneath them meaning you can't shoot straight down. i.imgur.com/fDTflmY.png You used to be able to stand on the right merlon and shoot straight down but can't as of update #4, so I don't think there's an advantage to this now. Unless I'm misunderstanding you?
I like to make a larger Kill box with a door only accessable from one tile. While one raider will try to break the door down the rest will mill around in the large outer courtyard constantly running into traps that I've filled the area with on every alternate tile. My villagers can weave between them to get past the traps unharmed, but the raiders can't so them constantly moving around means a lot of them just kill themselves from trap damage! Especially once you start building Iron traps they can end up killing almost as many raiders as the archers do.
ngl... every game ive played ive just made a surrounding wall as soon as possible and make 1 entry point into the base consisting of 2-3 layers of door. then i just place archers on the wall with Merlons and just let them shoot down at them. the entrance becomes an arrow raining choke point. every new settler i have i immediately make an archer. 0 melee fighters needed. its worked every time without fail. as time progresses and raids become larger i just make upgraded version of the same thing. 2-3 layers of door just consisting of larger health pool doors. and when a battering ram guy comes into range just select all archers to kill him before he reaches the door and its like a gatling of arrows. this simple strat even works at end game. i have to force myself to not do it XD im about to try doing all melee 0 archers to mix it up
I like that there is no single way to make a good base. Rimworld feels like it's too hard to win raids if you are too gun-focused, which I kind of don't like.
Remember to set your Melee Settlers to AGGRESSIVE mode, in the Management Tab. 👍👍🤴⭐ MERLONs... Put a line of flooring 1 tile over the outer edge of the wall, so you can Shoot down along the wall too.
I assume an archer is more accurate the closer the target, so does shooting from a 4 block tall tower increase this range thus decrease accuracy vs a 1 block tall tower?
Massive issue: You didn't build any merlons on the interior walls, so your archers were out in the open and constantly taking shots from theirs. They can shoot straight down through merlons, but enemy shots will typically bounce off. A huge improvement for the survivability and longevity of your archers.
You're totally right. I'd previously seen enemy archers prioritze my melee fighters the vast majority of the time and underestimated the effects of the merlons. I mixed in the curves at the entrances that kept melee fighters hidden but didn't appropriately re-add merlons to keep the archers that now got targeted safe.
@@JustDontDie really everything else is great, including how you mention specifically to aim for archers first with your own. it's just that one issue I noticed immediately, and then saw play out with your archers getting shot up during your test siege for video evidence.
You could, but I wanted to go over chokes that you man because I find them way more interesting and I'm assuming that the 'raid times out and leaves' will eventually disappear in later versions of the game once pathfinding issues are fixed.
@@JustDontDie Some tips, you can use Window since they have higher chance enemy miss their shoot to your range settlers and you should roof your tower or kill box so your range settlement didn't get 20% less accurate penalty during rain or fog.
@@tobroney5692 really? I never thought about that, I'll guess I'll keep that in mind, also I might gonna roof the bear trap since trebuchet just instant destroy that hard-to-craft trap
Catapults can be super rough. I still haven't found great ways to deal with them. If they enemies run away, you can sneak one person in to attack the operators to get them to stop shooting. You can also just tank the shots until the raid times out
@@JustDontDie They are the reason why I dont play survival anymore. I like to build nice and realistic looking bases, I dont want to cheese the game. At least with foot soldiers you could play how I do. With catapults I feel it is really rough. Especially when they appear in your 3rd incursion despite having the settings on very easy.
I'd never get that farinto the game cause my people stop doing important jobs like cook and run out of food. I've never made it 2 yrs without having to restart the game. I even cheese it up starting off with plenty of supplies and skills at the beginning.
Are you making lots of booze? It seems like chefs will prioritize any kind of booze making over food making, so if you have booze orders running, they'll never actually cook. They'll just make lots of booze to comfort themselves as they all starve to death...
@@JustDontDie I don't recall having made booze at that point, because I started them off with alot of booze (rp they came from a monestart that had specialized in booze).
@@mikeburgess1688 Huh, that's strange. I'm not really sure then. My current playthrough is almost 4 full years in and the only time they've not wanted to make food when it was available and meals were set to take the ingredients we had was when there was booze to make.
Yeah, the devs put it in to stop people from just walling off/mining out a moat and being immune to damage. But it causes issues with larger raids where the pathfinding means the enemy literally can't get in in time. Though I did figure out how to mod that out on new playthroughs.
Hmm I just started to play.. I appreciate your strat but I still think it is cheesy to have to resort to this? I mean is this how the devs wanted the game to be played in the final battles. By no means am I saying ANYTHING you are doing is wrong it just seems to me that they would want a more like large scale battle or strategic defense plan? I'm assuming changes will come. For now I appreciate your video and I will use this technique.. I recently lost a playthrough thinking I could just out micro the enemies but they sent like 18 against my 9 and well.. it did not go well. I was not prepared. Nice video!!
Thanks! I feel that though. I do think it's just an early access thing. I didn't play back then, but enemies used to bring seige ladders. I'm hoping there will eventually be some similar kind of way to avoid them having to run through a tiny choke will exist in the future. Or to at least make it harder. They bring ladders that scale one tile early on, then 3 later on, then a seige tower eventually so you can't break the ladder/kill the enemies setting it up/etc. You definitely can micro a lot, but the only way to really defeat a foe that outnumbers you so much with micro is also pretty cheesy, where you leave one fast person out as bait and have him run circles while archers shoot away. Other than that, I haven't had much/any success microing like you would marines in starcraft or anything like that. Villagers just attack too slow for it to be super effective. It does help a bit when your defenses fail though.
You won't lose to the raid, but you may not kill enough before they retreat and the game counts it as your loss. Melee is over twice as much DPS, which lets you kill more enemies total without risking much if set up right.
You can also have archer towers that protrude out from the wall by placing a single wall unit, connect it with beams and floor so your archer can run out and take shots at the enemies queuing up for slaughter, after you have taken care of theirs, of course. That way you don’t waste time overkill’s one enemy at a time, and instead spreading out your fire power. This is actual real life tactics and the reason why many castles’ gates and walls are built with funnel shape.
That's what I do nowadays, but it relies on killing their archers when you really don't have to fight most of them in the first place if you hide away. They'll stumble and come in 1-2 at a time like melee soldiers, letting you outnumber them really hard.
Its lot like defense is hard in this game. Equip everyone whith a crossbow, build a tower overlooking the entrance, 2 reinforced doors and thats it. Nothing gets through. The only danger is trebuchet, which can create some unexpected entrances into your base. So i advise to always play at high dificulty or even higher to make the challenge remotely interesting, and even then, you will probably survive easily
how do u best deal with trebs?
Traps is something to consider to. Make walls in a maze shape how you want it and set trap in a pattern. Always leave 1 tile open so your people can run true the maze safe because they know where the traps are, but the enemy runs true them all. 👍
Oh it's a super good strategy, but I just dislike them in most games. They also struggle on late game raids versus a ton of enemies, since it takes a lot of traps to kill one person and your maze has to get downright ridiculous
I'm on my first playthrough, and I pretty much immediately went with a single entrance stronghold with archer spots. I had a small walled compound with 2 medium ish buildings, one entrance, and a choke point entrance (essentially an extra wall off the front of the base with a small 3 wide pathway through) before I got attacked the first time, and pretty quickly realized it was going to be super strong. granted I'm only on the normal difficulty since it's my first time playing, but when they walk into my choke point they get instantly slammed with arrows. They used to make it to my "airlock" (5 doors in a row that they have to break down, in a perfect spot down the center line for my archers to shoot them in their chrome domes) and then die there but now they just die barely 20 feet into the first choke point, its honestly pretty funny to watch. should be even more OP once I finally get everyone's marksmanship trained up enough to use the good crossbows, rn I only have 4-5 crossbows and 3-4 longbows, the rest are all below 10 so they have to use short bows. trying to get them trained up is kind of a pain though
Ooh yeah. It does get a lot more difficult on higher difficulties, when there's enough that they absolutely will flood through, but chokes are always super effective in this game. I'm hoping they'll eventually add in harder seiges. Ladders, seige towers, ropes, and so on to make this strategy a bit less strong.
@@JustDontDie So I started a new run with the goal to make the biggest most OP settlement I could manage.
I fucked with the files to give my settlers max stats, increase the amount of cows per pen, increased multi of how often settlers come, and some other random stuff.
I tested every change and none of them caused issues so I started my run, and It was going fine but now I am running into a weird bug where once my settlers finish something (job sleeping etc) they stand still for sometimes several hours before starting their next job.
theres plenty of stuff to do, theres 8 research tables and a barely field of 2000 that needs harvested, and my priorities are set right but no matter what I do they still have that issue.
is there some way you know of to fix this, or am I just at the limit of the games engine with the massive sized stockpile I have as well as the huge cropfield?
You should get the NEXUS Mod that lets you do it in Game for each character @@BigMan7o0
you are putting the merlons down wrong. No offense. They are supposed to hang over the edge by linking to a floor on the wall. That allows the archers to shoot down easily.
No offense taken! I appreciate it! That said, while that was viable when I made this originally it I'm pretty sure that that was a bug that's since been patched out. You can no longer stand on merlons, because they destroy the floor beneath them meaning you can't shoot straight down.
i.imgur.com/fDTflmY.png You used to be able to stand on the right merlon and shoot straight down but can't as of update #4, so I don't think there's an advantage to this now. Unless I'm misunderstanding you?
I like to make a larger Kill box with a door only accessable from one tile. While one raider will try to break the door down the rest will mill around in the large outer courtyard constantly running into traps that I've filled the area with on every alternate tile. My villagers can weave between them to get past the traps unharmed, but the raiders can't so them constantly moving around means a lot of them just kill themselves from trap damage! Especially once you start building Iron traps they can end up killing almost as many raiders as the archers do.
These vids help a lot, thanks
Glad to hear it!
ngl... every game ive played ive just made a surrounding wall as soon as possible and make 1 entry point into the base consisting of 2-3 layers of door. then i just place archers on the wall with Merlons and just let them shoot down at them. the entrance becomes an arrow raining choke point. every new settler i have i immediately make an archer. 0 melee fighters needed. its worked every time without fail. as time progresses and raids become larger i just make upgraded version of the same thing. 2-3 layers of door just consisting of larger health pool doors. and when a battering ram guy comes into range just select all archers to kill him before he reaches the door and its like a gatling of arrows. this simple strat even works at end game. i have to force myself to not do it XD im about to try doing all melee 0 archers to mix it up
I like that there is no single way to make a good base.
Rimworld feels like it's too hard to win raids if you are too gun-focused, which I kind of don't like.
Remember to set your Melee Settlers to AGGRESSIVE mode, in the Management Tab. 👍👍🤴⭐
MERLONs... Put a line of flooring 1 tile over the outer edge of the wall, so you can Shoot down along the wall too.
I assume an archer is more accurate the closer the target, so does shooting from a 4 block tall tower increase this range thus decrease accuracy vs a 1 block tall tower?
It does not. It seems to calculate range via horizontal distance only.
@@JustDontDie ok thanks!
Massive issue: You didn't build any merlons on the interior walls, so your archers were out in the open and constantly taking shots from theirs. They can shoot straight down through merlons, but enemy shots will typically bounce off. A huge improvement for the survivability and longevity of your archers.
You're totally right. I'd previously seen enemy archers prioritze my melee fighters the vast majority of the time and underestimated the effects of the merlons. I mixed in the curves at the entrances that kept melee fighters hidden but didn't appropriately re-add merlons to keep the archers that now got targeted safe.
@@JustDontDie really everything else is great, including how you mention specifically to aim for archers first with your own. it's just that one issue I noticed immediately, and then saw play out with your archers getting shot up during your test siege for video evidence.
You know you can interact with the ramparts (and mostly every other building piece) to change shape and rotate, so your corners look nice, right? :P
Yup! But for a tutorial, I figure going with the default option is better so it's easier for newer players to follow along :)
Haven't you try to make a small tunnel and use bear trap?
Then again the only issue is the raid since the raid have timer before they call a day
You could, but I wanted to go over chokes that you man because I find them way more interesting and I'm assuming that the 'raid times out and leaves' will eventually disappear in later versions of the game once pathfinding issues are fixed.
@@JustDontDie Some tips, you can use Window since they have higher chance enemy miss their shoot to your range settlers and you should roof your tower or kill box so your range settlement didn't get 20% less accurate penalty during rain or fog.
Catapults?
@@yashida1999 I agree with this except merlon is actually better than window. It has 55% cover effectiveness while window only has 40%.
@@tobroney5692 really? I never thought about that, I'll guess I'll keep that in mind, also I might gonna roof the bear trap since trebuchet just instant destroy that hard-to-craft trap
not working when enemy have trebuchet :'(
Trebuchets can definitely make it harder and force you to either venture out with 1/2 soldiers or just turtle and take the shots. What's going wrong?
How to defend against catapults in your 3rd incursion?
Catapults can be super rough. I still haven't found great ways to deal with them. If they enemies run away, you can sneak one person in to attack the operators to get them to stop shooting. You can also just tank the shots until the raid times out
@@JustDontDie They are the reason why I dont play survival anymore. I like to build nice and realistic looking bases, I dont want to cheese the game. At least with foot soldiers you could play how I do. With catapults I feel it is really rough.
Especially when they appear in your 3rd incursion despite having the settings on very easy.
A very helpfull Video. 👍
Glad to hear it!
campfires, campfires everywhere
Haha, laying out bait definitely works too.
Nice video. I hate survival xD because i commit to the story and hate losing my villagers
Super fair. Combat definitely isn't for everyone, but I personally like being able to lose villagers. It makes those that remain mean even more.
i use traps , a lot of them + place my archers at the right place :)
great video otherwise. I will use this strategy. Thanks!!!!
My pleasure, I'm glad it helped!
I'd never get that farinto the game cause my people stop doing important jobs like cook and run out of food. I've never made it 2 yrs without having to restart the game. I even cheese it up starting off with plenty of supplies and skills at the beginning.
Are you making lots of booze? It seems like chefs will prioritize any kind of booze making over food making, so if you have booze orders running, they'll never actually cook. They'll just make lots of booze to comfort themselves as they all starve to death...
@@JustDontDie I don't recall having made booze at that point, because I started them off with alot of booze (rp they came from a monestart that had specialized in booze).
@@mikeburgess1688 Huh, that's strange. I'm not really sure then. My current playthrough is almost 4 full years in and the only time they've not wanted to make food when it was available and meals were set to take the ingredients we had was when there was booze to make.
@@JustDontDie I'm just noting to keep a better eye on them, keeping in mind your videos.
*Insert Fallout Gif*
Wait a minute, hold up
If the enemy fails to take your city...and they retreat...that's YOUR loss? OMGWTFBBQ?
Yeah, the devs put it in to stop people from just walling off/mining out a moat and being immune to damage. But it causes issues with larger raids where the pathfinding means the enemy literally can't get in in time. Though I did figure out how to mod that out on new playthroughs.
Hmm I just started to play.. I appreciate your strat but I still think it is cheesy to have to resort to this? I mean is this how the devs wanted the game to be played in the final battles.
By no means am I saying ANYTHING you are doing is wrong it just seems to me that they would want a more like large scale battle or strategic defense plan? I'm assuming changes will come.
For now I appreciate your video and I will use this technique.. I recently lost a playthrough thinking I could just out micro the enemies but they sent like 18 against my 9 and well.. it did not go well. I was not prepared.
Nice video!!
Thanks! I feel that though. I do think it's just an early access thing. I didn't play back then, but enemies used to bring seige ladders. I'm hoping there will eventually be some similar kind of way to avoid them having to run through a tiny choke will exist in the future. Or to at least make it harder. They bring ladders that scale one tile early on, then 3 later on, then a seige tower eventually so you can't break the ladder/kill the enemies setting it up/etc.
You definitely can micro a lot, but the only way to really defeat a foe that outnumbers you so much with micro is also pretty cheesy, where you leave one fast person out as bait and have him run circles while archers shoot away. Other than that, I haven't had much/any success microing like you would marines in starcraft or anything like that. Villagers just attack too slow for it to be super effective. It does help a bit when your defenses fail though.
Nothing 20 crossbows couldn't handled. What's this talk about more melee?
You won't lose to the raid, but you may not kill enough before they retreat and the game counts it as your loss. Melee is over twice as much DPS, which lets you kill more enemies total without risking much if set up right.