RimWorld Tips to Beat Tribal Extreme Difficulty

by vampiresoap

1. Pause the game and plan your entire future base using the planning tool on day 1.

2. The best starting position is a large fertile space enclosed on 3 sides by mountains. That way you only ever need to defend one side of your colony.

3. DO NOT dig into the mountain. The constant risk of infestations far outweighs the rewards of building inside the mountain. More on this later.

4. Inner walls (crafting, storage and living areas) ==> Crop Fields ==> Outer Stone Walls. That way you have a self-sustaining community, which is very important because sometimes you HAVE to close all the doors and wait out something like the boomrat manhunter packs…especially if you play as a tribe.

5. Get your defensive positions roofed to provide the darkness cover bonus. Conversely, take out the roofs at the “usual” raider entrances.

6. Early on just build stone walls around your colony and leave only one open door. Put 3 melee guys and 3 shooters to plug the hole. Put stones in the hallway so raiders can’t shoot at you from around the corner. Remember to get the positions of your defenders roofed as well. (Also see the attached image)

GGG <== Roof these positions
MMM <== Roof these positions
WEW

G= Gunners, M= Melee, W= Wall, E= Raider Entrance. This way raider shooters are forced into melee against 6 opponents, completely eliminating their early game range advantage.

7. Craft and collect sniper rifles ASAP! These are the most reliable weapons to counter sieges and mechanoid ships. Additionally, sniper rifles are mostly inferior to automatic weapons during normal raids, so save a storage area specifically for them so your colonists can easily switch to using them during sieges.

8. Intentionally dig out a large portion of a mountain that is far, far away from your base. Build wooden walls while you dig, and order your guys to damage them a little. Infestations will then usually spawn in this place. When it happens, order your snipers to target the damaged wooden walls so the rock roof collapses on top of the bugs. Build wooden walls, clear the rubble and repeat the process.

9. Build cheap little “outposts” around the map in anticipation of a siege.

10. Grow healroots early in anticipation of diseases, specifically malaria.

11. Steel deadfall traps do almost twice the damage as the stone ones.

12. The explosion radius of a turret is 3. So leave 3 tiles in between turrets and put down power conduits outside of the blast zone. Also, build sandbags around turrets to provide cover bonuses. Roof them too if you can.

13. Optimally, your outer walls should be JUST at the maximal range of your turrets so they can shoot at your enemies right when the raiders enter your colony.

That’s all I can think of for now. I didn’t include “obvious” tips like surprising and meleeing centipedes or getting gun turrets ASAP because I thought they’d be…obvious but I really encourage you guys to add some more advanced tips to this guide, so players can look this up in the future and learn something 

 On the other hand, feel free to correct me too! Thanks for reading 

PS: In this image I have the medieval times and weapon techs mods installed, which actually makes the game much harder as it takes WAY longer to get the turret tech. (The tech tree goes like this: Medieval=> Gunpowder=> Electricity=> Microelectronics=> Repeating Action=> Machining=> Self Loading Action=> Gun Turrets) But normally you should get microelectronics and then gun turrets ASAP