User:Admiral Zubr/Defending with CE

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Summary

Combat Extended significantly changes the paradigm of combat in Rimworld, adding a degree of both ease and difficulty. Notably, combat can be much more punishing even with small mistakes, so be careful and always plan out your moves beforehand. Seemingly insignificant decisions could be a matter of colonist or even colony survival.

Structural defenses

One of the main points of CE is how, playing late game on higher difficulties, a killbox is not necessary (although you can still make one) to survive. Making a solid defense for your colony relies upon several factors, including the location, available materials and even number of pawns. Generally, you want sandbags or barricades for your initial defense. Keep in mind that, while sandbags can never burn, barricades are susceptible to fire if they are made of flammable materials such as wood or steel. If you don't want to or cannot build either of these, rock chunks are an extremely quick way to throw up even some cover. Sandbags/barricades make it so those ducking behind them are totally protected except for their head, which has a greatly reduced chance of being hit compared to normally standing. Headshots are often deadly and almost always incapacitating although not a certain death as many believe. Barbed wire and traps can prove an impediment, the latter often fatal, to raiders and animals.

Later on, embrasures are a good option. Embrasures are highly protective, render manhunter animals almost totally impotent and prove a major impediment for melee raiders, although they expose the torso of the pawn hiding behind them. As a torso shot has a massively increased chance of hitting a vital organ in CE, your colonists are far from impunity with these. Embrasures can be used for both external (such as in a wall) or internal (at vital chokepoints inside your colony) defense, giving them massive utility. Keep in mind that turrets can be placed behind embrasures. A good bunker design would have embrasures along with solid walls to avoid being hit, fully roofed and well-lit to increase the chances of hitting a target. Place sandbags or barricades directly in front of the embrasure to minimize explosive damage and barbed fire in front of said sandbags so raiders cannot get close and fire right through the embrasures.

If you're playing on a high difficulty, making a single "Maginot line" wall is going to rapidly become insufficient. Flamethrower-equipped raiders and high accuracy enemies will treat your embrasures like they're nothing and furthermore may, if you are unprepared, line up outside them and grease your entire colony while the ill-fated defenders try to prepare. Place a secondary wall, made of stone, uranium or plasteel a bit behind your embrasure wall to serve as both a way to stop raiders from using your own defenses against you and as a secondary line of defense if your outer wall is busted down. Using turrets behind your embrasures will both increase your defensive ability and prevent raiders from sprinting up unimpeded.

Armor

One of the deepest features of Combat Extended is, of course, the armor system. The needs of defenders will often be different than those of attackers as in real life and protection is no exception. Crouching behind sandbags, leaning up against a tree or standing behind an embrasure is only going to bring you so far. Since the earliest humans discovered that they could wear the skin of the beast they had just slain, armor has always been a factor in warfare and this need has never gone away, simply evolving as time marches on. Your armor requirements will vary on exactly what you're dealing with and the severity of in-game threats being thrown at you.

In the early game, you can get away with steel simple helmets, especially if you have fortifications like barricades, sandbags or rock chunks that protect most of the body except of the head. While these will scarcely protect you from a rifle bullet, their main function is not tanking damage from large weapons. Steel simple helmets, assuming normal or better quality, will be enough to protect your colonists from shrapnel, handgun rounds, shotgun pellets and beanbags. This is of extreme value, to say the least, because brain injuries are often fatal and if not will always cause brain scarring. Unless you like using your healer mech serum on brain-damaged fighters, having luciferium-addicted colonists or straight up dealing with losses that could've easily been avoided, you should immediately work on steel simple helmets.

Once pirates, outlanders and even mercenaries begin rolling in with strong weapons, steel helmets aren't going to cut it. At this stage, you want flak helmets and vests. Modern armies in 21st century Earth will almost always, given the funds, equip their front-line fighters with two main pieces of armor: vests and helmets. Flak helmets provide superior protection compared to simple helmets and flak vests will protect vitals like the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys from even rifles and shotgun slugs. Keep in mind that preventing a projectile from penetrating doesn't mean all is well, though. Bruising can and often will occur and the armor will be degraded, reducing future effectiveness. Flak vests and pants are nice to have, protecting mainly the extremities, but are hardly a necessity and only provide light protection. Flak armor won't be sufficient for your warriors once raids start coming with lots of mercenaries or mechanoids, so you need to begin using power armor later in the game.

Recon armor is good for colonists who need to maintain a good speed, like combat medics who may need to move quickly to stabilize your wounded fighters and rush them to your hospital. Marine armor is what you'll generally want to have with most of your combat pawns once it's available, greater armor than recon armor with only a small speed malus. While marine armor won't make your colonists into one-man armies or allow them to endlessly tank damage, it does negate most gunfire for a while. Fire weapons and explosive shockwaves are still massively damaging although armor can negate the latter fairly well. Cataphract armor is absolutely top-of-the-line and will give your colonists nearly unmatched protection. Thicker armor can actually provide your colonists with a lower suppression value, so a hail of bullets barely fazes them. This can be extremely useful against raiders arriving with automatic weapons, especially machine guns.

Large shields allow your colonists to use a one-handed weapon, like a handgun, mace or knife, albeit with worse accuracy and overall combat ability. Ballistic shields can tank massive amounts of gunfire, useful to allow your other fighters an opportunity to sneak up on a preoccupied raider. Other niche armor also has uses, like plate armor for wardens due to the great blunt protection.

Weapons

There are two main categories of weapons, ranged and melee. Ranged weapons vary from primitive pila to hyper advanced charge weapons, and likewise melee weapons range from clubs to plasma swords. The weapons that you will likely use for most of the game are usually firearms, yet even these vary in effectiveness and technology.

A few different types of firearms exist, namely pistols, rifles, submachine guns, shotguns and machine guns. To begin, pistols are small weapons firing weak cartridges, perfect for self-defense in a pinch. Give these to your builders, haulers, cleaners and children for self-defense against animals and raiders who immediately appear from the map edge without warning. Generally, a revolver will be better against small numbers of animals and armored raiders whereas an autopistol will work against large numbers of unarmored raiders and larger numbers of animals. A machine pistol is the weakest of the three but has the largest magazine and by far highest fire rate, great at gunning down tons of tribals or large manhunter packs of small animals but not much else. Do not send handgun-equipped colonists alone against anybody with a larger weapon as the paltry range and awful damage will lead to them being defeated easily.

Shotguns are some of the most versatile weapons with 4 types of ammunition: buckshot, slugs, beanbags and EMP. Buckshot will absolutely shred unarmored humans and almost any animal, making it useful in dissipating tribals. Slugs are only a single projectile, similar to a regular bullet, but are extremely strong: even if they don't penetrate armor, their huge blunt damage will likely down the target regardless. Beanbags are less lethal projectiles although a shot in the wrong place can easily kill the target, great for capturing raiders for recruitment and/or extraction of human resources. EMP shells are meant for killing mechanoids, dealing damage and temporarily stunning them for a while. EMPs can be used on humans although they cause little damage for the amount of resources they take. Shotguns are good for the early game and still have a use in the late game, especially against mech raids.

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