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There are some tactics you can use to make combat animals a bit more effective but those who know, know not to talk about it since it will get nerfed if it reaches public consciousness.

I have been shouting about my overpowered Alpaca Strike Forces for months. The secret strategy is to have lots and lots of them and stampede them into the enemy on an open field, preferably coming around a corner.

The reason Tynan hasn't nerfed it into the ground is that (I am speculating) balance for highly experienced players is not the highest priority. Having more players interact positively with more game systems is more important. Making some animals obviously good is a useful lure for players to try ranching when they otherwise would shy away from it forever. It's the same reason that Magic: The Gathering pre-con decks always have a blatantly horrible card* - every new player will eventually replace it and get lured into the deckbuilding aspect of the game.

*http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=139511

What are some ways the player could opt in to more dangerous raids at their own pace, in a mechanically and thematically coherent way? What are some lures that would make a player want or have to do those things?

The game can't ever become easier or safer as a colony improves, because then it would become boring. Dangers have to scale in line with the player's ability to handle them, keeping the risk level the same.

See how ARPGs like Diablo deal with this. The player never makes any lasting progress on difficulty, but progresses on story and aesthetics. Chain Lightning versus level 30 monsters isn't any easier than Shock Bolts at level 1, but it looks and sounds so much cooler, and the control feels smoother. Often, the late-game monsters are the same as the level 1 monsters except for a palette swap. But having cycled through other monsters still feels like progress.

RimWorld lets the player decorate bedrooms, buy guns, orchestrate complex production lines, heal maimed colonists, train pets, install air conditioning - all sorts of goals to strive for, achieve, and feel good about. The problem with wealth-based raid scaling is that every accomplishment is poisoned by a feeling of helplessness. The colony is endangered because all threats get bigger. How can the player prepare against "all threats get bigger"?

But the player can prepare against specific, telegraphed dangers. I like the themed, motivated raid idea. Specific, well-communicated player accomplishments should unlock larger sizes of different raid types, which try to push the player back on that accomplishment.
- Thieves scale by how much carryable loot you have. And they try to steal it.
- Tribals scale by how much electricity you are using. And they try to destroy it.
- Mechanoids scale by how many Advanced Components you have or are using. And they try to destroy them.
- Infestations scale by how many excavated mountain tiles you are occupying. And they try to push you off of them.
- Slavers scale by the value of your colonists. And they try to kidnap them.
- Maddened herbivores eat your grain, carnivores eat your animals, boomrats burn your furniture.
Threats feel more actionable if they are specific. If I know that my Alpaca ranch is going to attract swarms of maddened wolves, I can prepare for wolves. Which feels much better than a vague knowledge that everything will become more dangerous.

I also like that a motivated raid has limited (but painful) consequences for opting out. Currently, fighting a raid to the death feels mandatory.

I agree. I'm trying to make it more worthwhile to keep animals for things other than defense or hauling.

I totally agree with the goal, once upon a time I did a ton of analysis and balancing to try to make the farming case viable (several alphas ago), but it's hard as hell to actually get all the balance points working. Especially given how straightforward hunting is, and how manhunter packs deliver mass meat/leather. It's hard for raising animals to compete with that without being ridiculous in other ways.

Makes sense. But if domestic animals can't compete with maddened rhino meat, then... don't make them try? Give them reasons to exist that don't have easy substitutes. Hauling, combat, and Boomalopes' chemfuel work this way.
- There's a B18 mod that adds Chocolate Bunnies. Hilarious and unique. Doesn't matter if it's inefficient.
- Nuzzling feels like a random, incidental effect. Instead of a random colonist, pets should only nuzzle their master. That way, I'd feel like I have control over it and be motivated to get a pet for each colonist.
- Playing with a pet could be a recreation source.
- Milk and eggs are just substitutes for meat right now. If they (or chocolate or insect jelly) were required for lavish meals, they would have a distinct, specific purpose.
- If woollen furniture had a comfort bonus, then wool wouldn't just be a substitute for mid-tier leathers.

Alternately, you could let farms stay weak at high difficulty, but some QoL would make it more fun for lower difficulties:
- Assigning animals to multiple zones would be nice.
- An estimate of nutrition needs would be nice, especially on maps with winter.
- Managing unfertilized versus healthy/ruined fertilized eggs is clunky. Ruined fertilized eggs should transmute into unfertilized to simplify things.

Edit: Wow, you guys are trolling hard on raid progression. What is so hard to get about 1) civil discussions, and 2) having lots of expensive stuff in a bad neighborhood attracts thieves?

[do]

Doubling the cost of IED traps is fine with me. They scale so well with raid size, it's pretty ridiculous. And only the ones that explode need to be replaced. I've been abusing them mercilessly. I have about one hundred IED traps in lattices on the approaches to the base. I just repelled a ~110 man tribal raid, losing only eight animals because I handled it all with explosives and bullets instead of an Alpaca Charge.

QoL request: with as many combat animals as I have, it is a chore to balance them among colonists. I'd really appreciate a basic auto-assigner button. Something simple, like: 1) assign all bonded animals, 2) walk down all other obedient animals from highest to lowest wildness, assigning each to the eligible colonist with fewest animals, breaking ties arbitrarily.

Rambling: I want to try playing with fire, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to integrate it into my defenses. The trouble is that it conflicts with my IED traps. I don't want a whole lattice of traps to go off, but I do want a whole entrance to turn into a wall of fire. I'll experiment with some incendiary traps, corridors, and dandelions. Dandelions secret OP?

[Story time!]

Story time!       yayyyyy

Cass, Survival Struggle, Permadeath, no mods
Tribal, Temperate Forest (50/60) with small hills.
Day 270ish, 300k wealth.
130 trained animals. Mostly Alpacas, the rest Labradors and Wargs.
13 colonists. Advanced, high quality gear and bionics.

An outlander siege! Twenty-three damnable raiders from the Omeda Union threaten our honest flock. But they make a fatal mistake! They decide to set up their makeshift fortifications right next to a Poison Ship that we have ignored for a whole quadrum (it is far enough away not to sour the dandelion fields). We have four mortars, and the second shot awakens the mechanoids. Sometimes, raids go wrong! See image...

...That is 7 centipedes and 26 scythers+lancers. That brigand Snow in the marine armor, who is in the middle of a yayo ritual when the mechanoids open fire, overdoses and falls to the ground twitching. The rest of the raiders are slaughtered in seconds. A couple mortar shots land, doing mild damage to some and killing two scythers. Now the mechanoids are headed to the pastures. Oh no! They'll cut our herd to pieces!

We have been experimenting with how to mix turrets and traps in with my herd. There are lattices of IED traps on all major approaches. On this side of the base, we have three mini-turrets in protective plus-shaped bastions and one uranium slug turret with a dominating field of fire.

The battle is bloody. Twenty-six animals die in the carnage - six of them to an IED mishap. Two of the colonists are caught in IED blasts, but are miraculously unharmed. Two mini-turrets explode and about a dozen IED traps serve their purpose. One colonist has painful burns on his leg - he leapt through flames to wedge his thrumbo tusk spear into a centipede's articulation servo, just as it was lining up a devastating volley. Such heroics and quick thinking! No other colonists sustained any injuries.

Our defenses have been proven by this battle, despite the painful loss of so many loyal animals. As expected, the enemy separated and fought expendable turrets, giving us time to group and focus fire on one front. We have lessons to apply. We need field bunkers for our sharpshooters to occupy, and we need wide hallways with short blinds, for our stampede to take enemy squads by surprise. But the integration of advanced technology has given us a powerful combined-arms defense system.

As the blasts and bleats cease and the field goes quiet, a blurred mind slowly comes back into focus. He remembers himself - Snow, an Omeda Platoon Officer - and stands up to take command. But his platoon lies charred and butchered on the ground. He doesn't see the attackers, or anyone at all. Still not in full control of his faculties, he panics and runs - stumbles, falls, crawls - off into the wilderness.

[attachment deleted due to age]

For profit centers, I am stuck on the Supply/Demand solution. It allows anything the player makes to be profitable to start, but prevents it from scaling forever. Rather than juggling efficiency curve balance on all the different production lines a player might think of, you can just nerf the concept of "Specialized Mass Production". Here's the simplest implementation I can think of that won't drown the player in information:
- For each type of item, add a status Supply Level: Glut, Normal, Shortage. These cause sell/buy price multipliers on the item.
- Whenever the player buys something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Shortage, depending on the value of the trade.
- Whenever the player sells something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Glut, depending on the value of the trade.
- Supply Levels revert to Normal over time. Any Supply Level change has a player notification.

So if it gets mangled by manhunters, you ll curse you day and rage quit

Well, why didn't you intervene to protect it? Why should caravans visit you if you don't offer protection?

Also, only that caravan owner would blacklist you. Others would still come, but fewer.

On fixing Caravan exploits: if the caravan is significantly harmed for any reason, just have the owner of the caravan refuse to send another for 8 days per colonist or muffalo lost. Not fatal, but painful enough that I would actually take action to protect a caravan if I could. This would also be a welcome source of 2v1 fights, which are fun.

If prices dip in response to a player selling lots of something, that blunts the impact of any OP money-making strategy. Which is nice from a balance perspective. But colonies funded entirely by drug labs or human leather animal beds are funny. Sometimes lulz > balance.

Storyteller: Randy Random
Difficulty: Survival struggle
Biome: warm Temperate Forest, small hills
Permadeath
220 days in, at 252k wealth
Maybe 12 hours played in the last 2 days.
Lost Tribe, no mods

This is the scenario where the Alpaca Swarm should be strongest. I have 67 alpacas, 21 labradors, and 16 royally inbred wargs, handled by two burningly passionate trainers. The game was tense early, before this armada was reliable, but since then, only a few events have been seriously threatening. But I know from previous games that raid size is about to pick up, so I'm not calling victory just yet.

I don't know why people say that bonded animals are a negative. I counted the moodlets after a rough serious of battles, and my colonists had 5x +5 modifiers for having their favorite animals, and 3x -8 modifiers for having lost others. It washes out.

Choosing guns for the herdmasters is difficult. Of course my best shooters get charge/assault rifles or sniper rifles. But I feel like giving my bad shooters chain shotguns will create more alpacaburgers than I can stomach. Pump shotguns have higher accuracy, I think.

I've been trying to mix turrets and traps in with my defenses, with some success.
The mini-turrets don't kill much, but they pin down enemies long enough for me to position for the charge.
The auto-cannon is too expensive to feel good as a sacrificial front line, and small mistakes with letting it shoot at a brawl cost limbs or lives.

I feel like I should make a whole lattice of IED traps - they do serious damage.

Caravans feel great. I've done sales tours, trade requests, and a couple missions. I also backed out of a rescue mission that I didn't bring enough firepower for.

One of my melee colonists stepped too close to a scyther and got his waist cut off. Umm... he can't wear a shield belt anymore. I like to imagine him with his upper body just hovering 10 cm over his hips. I spent a healer mech serum on it, but it restored a missing finger instead. Dang.

When the IED goes off, usually one wall section ends up rubble. The IED isn't enough by itself, but other missed shots finish it. The sandbags almost always survive unless there's a second explosion.

I am playing an animal swarm game and experimenting with how to mix traps and turrets in with my 45 alpacas. My current design is to put a mini-turret in a little bastion. The walls force enemies to bunch up if they want to shoot at it, which makes the turret spray more effective.

The turret is meant to be sacrificed to buy time. It costs 100 steel and 3 components, but the wreckage has 1 component and 3 steel slag chunks, so the net cost isn't so bad. I don't know if the turret ever downs enemies, but the IED traps sure do. I'll probably plant some trees for enemies to hide behind.

[attachment deleted due to age]

I like most of the new art.
Meat cubes could use some fat marbling or bone.
A stack of rectangular things could have the top one rotated slightly.
A pile of things (pemmican, for example) needs dark hairlines between individual items. Otherwise it looks like a single amorphous blob. If the individual items need their texture shading muted for the hairlines to be visible, it's still probably worth it.

Storyteller: Randy Random
Difficulty: "Survival Struggle", permadeath
Biome: Temperate Forest (50/60 nominal growing days, feels like year-round)
Hours played in the last 3 days: 8-ish?
Tribal start, animal swarm strategy. 6th of Aprimay, 5502

I'll likely post some animal-related feedback later (preview: Alpacas correctly OP on warm, grassy biomes), but I wanted to note a most unusual happening:

Breixo - an abrasive misogynist - and Red - a bloodlusting psychopath woman - are two of my best growers. They hate each other so much that they had a social fight three days in a row. To deal with this, I offset their sleeping schedules so they aren't awake at the same time as much. I am seriously considering drawing a line down my growing zones to keep them apart more. If that doesn't solve the problem, I might amputate Red's ears to stop her from hearing the insults.

This is... um... awesome? A non-combat, non-food-related colony management challenge that isn't solved by generic mood buffs! Shouldn't this be much more common? I've never encountered this before in 400+ hours of playing.