In my Fallout Shelter games I normally keep the entry room unstaffed, and build no rooms on the first floor. This means all Raiders, Ghouls and Death Claws go immediately to the 2nd floor, on which I have 2 full sized production rooms, stocked with my highest endurance dwellers equipped with my best weapons, and a Mr Handy on duty to help out.

My thought process is:

If I put a Mr Handy on the first floor, it will try to defend the entry room. If it does this alone, it is doing damage to 1 invader, while absorbing all the damage. If I put dwellers in the entrance, then I am doing 3x the damage, (and spreading the incoming damage out). However, if I redirect the Invaders into a full sized room for their first encounter, then the Invaders are taking 7x the damage for the damage they are doing.

Of course, this logic only works if there is nothing special about combat in the entrance room specifically and/or external invaders are not scaled by room size or quality generally.

4 Answers

My answer would be "No."

A downside to defending the door room not mentioned so far is that the guys guarding the door aren't doing anything else. Whatever productivity you may gain from having raid/deathclaw events end a few seconds sooner will be massively offset (in my view) by having two high-spec dwellers spending most of their time kicking their heels in the entrance room instead of patrolling the wasteland or questing or crafting or producing stuff (or getting ).

If your vault is so well staffed that you can spare two people to do that, then go ahead, but otherwise it's a waste.

Option 1: Defend the Entry Room.

Doing this does two things: reduces the damage to the rest of the dwellers in the other rooms; and increases the time it takes for invaders to reach the other rooms.

This can reduce the overall time that your Vault is "under siege" and losing productivity, as well as give you extra time to prepare (you can move Dwellers around, under siege, and they will automatically return to their rooms once the siege ends). However, Using a Mr. Handy purely as a defensive strategy is a bit of a waste, as they also have the "auto-collect" feature, which is very handy, and is more useful on a floor that actually has production rooms.

Option 2: Don't defend it.

Doing this means that the intruders immediately move into the Vault. Depending on your layout, this can draw out the overall time you are under attack, as well as creating the possibility of killing off your valuable workers, reducing morale, and losing productivity.

This is where your Mr. Handy is more useful. As well as defending the entire floor (he will follow the invaders through the entire floor), if he is destroyed, he will not cost any morale issues if you are incapable of reviving him.

EDIT: Dwellers do keep working until the attackers reach their rooms. You can still collect resources while the room is under attack, but they do keep working if their room is not under attack. (Thanks to OrangeDog for confirming this)

4

Since you are talking about death claws, you have at least 60 dwellers. What has worked form me is to have the default layout which is:

• the vault door
• elevator
• eletric generator

I also have a water purification on the second floor with handies in both. I mention this because this is how far the death claws make it. Early on they made it to the third floor but now with two door guard and six dwellers in the top floor all armed with 15 and higher weapons, they only make it to the second floor for about 5 seconds. Now the death claws are just a nuisance.

so my answer is yes, defend the door with your best and best weapons. You have enough dwellers to spare.

1

I have 70 and up dwellers, and i often go on quests and out into the wasteland. My advice is to stock up on guns, outfits , and start training people's stats that you don't use. Start breeding and making better people. I put 2 of my semi good guys in the vault entry, or my best if they are there at the time, and keep following around the raiders, or deathclaws. I put elevator next, but they don't go down it, then a 3 sized quarters, always empty, and when the enemies are coming, send reinforcements.then i have a radio room, but I switch them with the people following, and if they aren't dead yet, another elevator which they go down, and a 2 room power room, again to switch out with reinforcements. if they are about to die, send them to the bottom of the vault.