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.