Embrasures

A wall with a firing port to allow shooting from relative safety.

## About embrasures

Embrasures are extremely useful for pillboxes or killboxes. Embrasures provide more cover than sandbags and enemies cannot walk through them.

Beware of tribal boomers or pirate grenadiers, as they can throw or shoot explosives through embrasures and injure or kill your colonists. Because of this, it is recommended to lay barbed wire infront of the embrasure. Or, resources permitting, you could place sandbags infront of the embrasures and then barbed wire infront of the sandbags. This way, the sandbags could intercept enemy rockets and limit the damage of the blast. And because of the barbed wire, enemies cannot use the sandbags as cover. If sandbags are out the question, barricades will work fine aswell.

## Cheesing with embrasures

Pawns cannot walk through embrasures. You can use this to cheese early tribal raids, early pirate raids, manhunter pack events and scythers.

Melee fighters with the exception of sappers can only look through embrasures. They can only attack in melee, which allows your pawns to shoot them without retaliation. Some people look down upon using the embrasure because of this tactic.

## Things to note when using embrasures

The efficiency of embrasures drops drastically against lancers and shooters with high shooting skill. As the enemies can only see the head of the targeted pawn, every hit will be a headshot and could potentially be fatal. Helmets are recommended, but normal steel helmets will not protect too well against charged ammo and AP ammo. Because of this, try to disable the high level shooters. Most raids usually end up with just a few high level shooters. You could disable the high level shooter with traps or, situation permitting, by outranging them with other weapons (A sniper rifle or a binocular + mortar combo if they are stationary for long enough and do not possess long ranged weapons themselves) or by isolating them and crushing them with a capable melee pawn protected by a shield (belt).

If none of the options above are an option. You could also tell pawns to hold their fire, this will make them duck and as a result make them leave the sight of the ranged enemies targetting them, making them pick another target, or force them to move closer. Be wary that this may give other attackers the chance to close the gap between them and the emplacement butchering their comrades.

Another option which could be risky and expensive, but may give your colony a chance to see another day. Is to challenge the shooters in the open fields. Only attempt this if you are certain you have the armour or firepower advantage. Pawns standing up and not peering through an embrasure have less chance of getting headshot, but of course have a risk of getting less deadly, but nonetheless crippling injuries. This will be negated with thick armour, however, make sure to check the durability of the armour in your posession; armour which was capable of stopping bullets one encounter, may not be able to in the next due to durability.

Also make sure that embrasures are made from non-flammable materials, your pillboxes are roofed without light sources inside (otherwise pawns within are illuminated by the light source and thus easier to hit) if you use stationary weapons (grenade launchers, machine guns, etc) keep the ammo out of the pillbox and do not place shelves with (explosive) ammo in the back of your pillboxes, or direclt on the other side of the wall outside the pillbox. The blast radius of certain explosives may pass through the wall and cause a cook-off. It is recommended to make the back walls of the pillbox (If you are placing the shelves there) atleast 2 walls thick.