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I agree with Galileus and Otleaz.
One of the hard things about developing any game is achieving a proper balance.
Balancing requires taking into account all of the possibilities available to the player and making sure that those aren't either too powerful or to weak when confronting your opponent.

The simple fact that mines exist in the game means that the game balance has already considered them. "Don't like it don't use it" isn't therefore an option, since the game will otherwise be stacked against you.
The only reason it isn't like that currently is because the mines are overpowered (i.e. game isn't properly balanced yet), but that's subject to change.
You can, of course design "god-hand" mechanics into the game for those players who want to use them, but those are usually presented as cheats, which are not considered for balance.

So the solution here is to nerf the mines, improve the opponent's AI/weapons to deal with mines, or get rid of mines altogether.

Personally, I don't like mines or turrets that much. To me they're too technologically advanced for the setting.
I think having defensive structures is great, but I'd rather have more primitive ones, such as disguised holes, traps, bunkers and that sort of thing.
It'd be incredible if we could build networks of tunnels for guerilla strategies - think of Viet Cong tunnels during the Vietnam war - or for emergency escapes.

This problem is similar to one I faced writing my PhD thesis on production manufacturing.

My production scheduler had to automatically assign work pieces to one of the machines in a cluster with optimal efficiency.
The problem was that sometimes the closest machine would be busy at the time of decision, so the next closest available machine would be selected. However, given the travel time required to bring the piece to that machine, it would sometimes be more efficient for the piece to simply wait for a closer machine to finish.

The final algorithm I came up with essentially took the travel times, queue size and time-to-finish for each work machine, and selected the lowest (this is somewhat simplified, but if you're having trouble sleeping I can send you my thesis).

I'm not sure how much of a burden this would put on the game's already taxed AI, but my feeling is that a similar solution would fix the general problem of task assignment, which would work as well for 10 colonists as for 100.
I'm also not sure of how complex something like this can be in a game where each colonist can do a lot of different tasks - I had the benefit of each machine doing only one job.

One thing that surprised me was that the wildlife doesn't react to being shot. They just keep going on their business.
If you melee attack, that animal will attack back but that's it. I was expecting to have at least the muffalo herds join together fighting an aggressor, but they don't seem to care much.

I've never seen raiders attacking muffalo. I've seen them attacking a drifter for no reason though.

You really, really need to line the outside of those walls with concrete or something, as a firebreak. Otherwise you're likely to burn your own walls down when having a good, old-fashioned corpse burning.

I defined my home zone up to and including the walls. When stuff burns outside, my guys will put out wall fires from the inside, letting the graves burn and keeping the walls intact.
It's a bit of extra work. I guess I could set concrete on the ground outside the walls, so it would be less likely to burn.

Also, I'd extend the sandbags to the edge of the baffle wall, so they can't take cover at the edge of the sandbag wall and shoot in.

That's a good idea. I didn't know standing on top of sandbags would prevent them from taking cover. It's not been an issue since they can shoot my flanks from that position.

Seems it a few times on the forums now. I assume the raiders can't fire while travelling over those sandbags?
How many raiders do you think you could hold off your strat before they make it through & start attacking your colonists?

No idea. I'm getting raids of 15-20 guys, and no one has ever made it past the second hydroponics table yet.
I think they can shoot from the sandbags, but somehow they never try it. My guess is that the AI recognizes the disadvantage of those positions and prioritizes getting the raiders into the base.
If I bring my guys out of cover, the raiders will shoot them.

I've had situations where I wasn't quick enough getting my colonists in position, and the raiders cleared my corridor of death. In those cases, they tend to scatter: some will start attacking the base, and the others will try to attack my guys on the left or right.
It's all good, since they're separated it's easier to pick them out, even in open terrain.

I'm getting minimum 100 raider waves now so I need a lot of stuff. I don't want to exploit funneling too much as it feels like cheating but my blast charges in the central room work well currently while I think up future designs

Yeah, the hydroponics trick is cheating and I'm pretty sure will be fixed in the next release, but I'm guessing a sea of sandbags around the entrance would accomplish essentially the same.

Though it's never happened to me, I've read in this forum that sometimes the wildlife goes crazy and stampedes the base.
This is usually accompanied by the description of a game loss.

So I thought: why not prevent the possibility altogether? Animals can't go crazy if there are no animals to go crazy!
(Expecting the PETM - People for the Ethical Treatment of Muffalo to come knocking at my door)

At some point I realized turrets are not that useful:

• They go down too easily
• They're too big and don't have any cover, besides some crappy sandbags, so they get hit a lot, making the above problem even worse
• They occupy a large area, considering you can't put anything next to them for when they inevitably blow up
• You can't direct their shots
• They consume a lot of power, and you need a lot of turrets in order for them to be minimally effective

To me, the above is the answer to the "Rim World turret problem" - it doesn't exist because turrets suck 

Anyway, my current impregnable defence strategy depends on an army of colonists equipped with R-4s in flanking cover positions. The skulls are just there for style points.

Also, the graves just outside the wall get hit by lightning once in a while, which helpfully clears up old bodies and makes them available for the next wave of armed imbeciles.

@Kender I see, I hadn't seen those threads, thanks for the links.

@mumblemumble I was thinking more along the lines of having the traders simply pass the message to friends / family / authorities in civilized space.

And yes, I would expect them to want to. If not for simple common decency, then for economical reasons: it only makes sense to keep leeching the survivors rather than take the payout if you can guarantee you're the only trader interacting with them.
Since we have multiple traders, the only logical action is to take the payout rather than risk someone else taking it - classical prisoner's dilemma.

Furthermore, it also makes sense from a self-preservation point-of-view. Traders are themselves at risk of getting stranded on a remote planet, so it's in their own interest to foster a culture of helping those in need. It's the same reason sea ships will almost always come to the rescue of anyone in trouble at sea, sometimes at risk to themselves.
At the very least they're expected to call the proper authorities.

To add a related problem here:
I like to play on one monitor and have something else open in the other one (say, a web browser). It's the whole point of having multiple monitors.

However, when moving my mouse from one monitor to the other, say from the right monitor where the game is to the left one, sometimes the last detected mouse position in RimWorld is at the left border of the right screen.
This causes the map to continually scroll to the left, and the only way to stop it is to bring the mouse back to RimWorld and try to move the mouse quicker so that the last position is somewhere where it doesn't activate the scrolling.

It'd be nice if RimWorld would detect that the mouse is no longer over the game window, and disable scrolling.

There's something that's been bothering me a bit since I started playing the game.
In the beginning, the (very thin) plot tells us that our heroes have just escaped from their collapsing ship and crash-landed on the planet/moon.

Tynan stated somewhere in these forums that one possible endgame is to have the settlers build a spaceship so they can escape RimWorld, which means that they are stranded in this world in the outskirts of civilised space.

Now, for me, this conflicts with the fact that we can build a communicator and get regular visits from trading spaceships. If our heroes' problem was being stranded, wouldn't it be easy to simply ask one of the traders for help reaching civilization?

I have two 1920x1200 monitors, and every time I start the game, I get a weird resolution which makes everything sort of blurred.
I can fix it in the options screen (the max resolution available in the options screen is 1920x1200), but I have to do it at every startup.
The options screen identifies my full screen resolution as 3840x1200, which is technically correct, but that's for both monitors together. I guess this is what's causing the confusion at startup and the weird resolution.

Also, it seems the game always wants to start on the first monitor. The standard behaviour is for applications to open on the monitor where the mouse is.
It's not a big issue since it's easy enough to move the window once the game has started.

This is RW .254 on Linux Debian Unstable / Gnome 3.8.