Here is how you can build some defensive structures which will protect your colony a little bit better especially when you start getting hit with some tougher raids and some big man hunter packs. All of these structures can be built with the most basic material. You can create these hurdles by using deadfall traps, walls, slate, and stone tiles of any kind. Another important thing is sand bags, and you can also use fire foam poppers if you have them. These fire foam poppers are incredibly useful especially in a structure like a bunker because very often you will go against people as you start getting raiders that have better and better gear, that are using Molotov cocktails, incendiary launchers, and different ways to make fire. Instead of getting your base lit up, you can protect it with the help of all these basic items mentioned above.
It is always good to have these fire foam poppers, in case something goes wrong, and even more interesting thing is that these are very easy to build. If we take a miscellaneous area, we will notice that it only costs 75 sheets of steel and one component.
Placement of Conduits
An important thing is that you are not supposed to have conduits going through the bunker because if any of these parts get lit up or blown up, it will cause problems for the entirety of the bunker. You can have these conduits going around the bunker somehow.
Defending Against Elephant Hunter Pack
Right now, what we are going to defend against is an elephant hunter pack.
As you can see, there are seven of them. Elephants are very tough creatures, and you cannot sustain lots of damage going against them, but you also get a lot of money if you manage to kill them all, especially a ton of a meat, and a ton of tusks that you can sell.
Basic Structure of the Defense Area
The way you make your basic structures that are going to be making your defense area is crucial.
First, you will notice that we have a big hallway which has a choke point of two squares. This is because our deadfall traps can be laid in a checkered pattern. This checkered pattern allows our colonists to weave and bob through these deadfall traps without getting any type of injury, while the opponents will often walk straight through them, killing several raiders and a lot of animals as they walk past. You can also notice some steel slags lying at the end of the hallway on the right side, that’s because this area over here is a dumping stockpile. I would suggest you make a dumping stockpile throughout your hallway, so that the creatures that get caught in the hallway are that much slower and are stuck in this funnel of death, while you can put your men inside the bunker to fire at them.
Deadfall traps are surprisingly powerful and you can make them just from anything. If you are an architect and you go over to the security option and you click on a deadfall traps, you can see that nearly any type of metal or stone can be made into a deadfall trap. The only difference is that some of them do more damage than others.
Bunker
As you look at the bunker, you will notice different layers of security and the first thing is three layers of sandbags. You don’t have to have this much sandbags; I just chose all these sandbags because I wanted to protect my colonists a little bit more and to force opponents to spend a lot more time to get into the bunker. The second thing you will notice is that there are tiles inside the bunker; the reason that there is a nothing like a tree or grasses growing inside is that they can potentially get caught on fire. If somehow the fire gets started, we got a little fire foam popper here that is just nearly encompassing the entirety of the bunker, as you can see here.
This bunker can be used for defense from all angles even if mechanoids drop right here perhaps. Despite having established this much tight security, we can get people inside each and every area of the bunker and utilize its cover instead of being able to utilize only one or two of its sides. As is obvious, the bunker was originally designed as a room. The reason is that I originally thought that I would put a roof on top of it which will bring all these tiles inside into this dark area.
Triple Accuracy Deficit
With roof placed in the room, the shooters who are shooting at your men will have to face triple accuracy deficit.
The first accuracy deficit is going to be your colonist hiding behind hardcover like any of these pillars. The second accuracy deficit is going to be because of the sandbags as they can intercept rounds. The third accuracy deficit is going to be here because any time an opponent shooting into darkness will shoot it will take a penalty to its accuracy. Also if there is any kind of weather or lightning or anything like that, your people will be covered and protected from the weather, and meanwhile opponents will have to deal with the weather as they come into the base area.
Setting Up Men for the Situation
As I mentioned earlier the elephants are coming, let me stack up my men and show you how I would utilize them and protect them in this type of situation if I was going to use this type of bunker:
First I’m going to recruit everyone that I would need for this assault; I am picking everyone on my team except for Dr. Jesse. If you have fewer people, this will obviously still work, but we are up against a massive difficult man hunter pack. The first thing I have to do is to move all my ranged people behind each of these blocks in the bunker. As I have six blocks on one side, I can use six long ranged fighters. I certainly have six long-range fighters, but I also have two melee fighters.
Weapons
I have some charge rifles and a couple of machine guns, and there is nothing out of the ordinary here. Also, none of my men are wearing any armor, so you take that into consideration. Right now I’m just micromanaging and putting all my long ranged people where all these slots are so that they take some shots at these elephants when they come through. You can see how I placed my men and at what positions.
Initially, all these elephants will slow down by all the deadfalls in the hallway and by the slag at the end of it. If some elephant will happen to escape the hallway, my ranged fighters will take care of them. You can see elephants passing through the hallway. The red colored elephants are already injured.
How to Shoot
Now what I want you to do is that when you are shooting an elephant, try the farthest elephant you can, and the reason is that a lot of these elephants are going to be injured by these different deadfall traps and they are going to die. So the aiming of your men is going to be wasted if they focus on the front elephants. So now we are going to pick an elephant and fire.
As you will fire these elephants, they are going to run completely insane instead of attacking. This is why this incendiary launcher is so strong against these animals. Now there is time to check who these elephants are going to be attacking. Slow the game and take your time because you don’t want to lose people.
Reposition Your Men for Better Security
As you can see the elephant in the front is going to be attacking a man in front of him, so I will move this man to a different place. As the elephants are so close now, there is no need to keep the range fighters in the fight. At this point, you need melee fighters that will be able to attack from a small distance.
When you fight like this, you will be able to put all these elephants down. See!
Now as all the elephants are down, all you need to do is put out the fire, grab all the elephant meat, and mainly attack rest of them to death. You can use your melee fighters to finish the elephants completely. These elephants have a ton of hit points which you can use to your advantage.
As you can see, with the help of this defense system, we managed to kill all the giant elephants without even getting a scratch on the bodies of our men.