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You know what else ruins a carefully designed layout, though? Being on FIRE.

Every colony has a fate. 

Wait, how is it easier?

Probably because i build obsessively squared colonies where everything is in nice order and just about perfectly symmetrical. There's probably a medical term or a condition for it, but Rimworld is the only place where i do it.  Anyway this is much easier to accomplish on a vast plain outdoors, since mountains tend to have stuff inside them you can't see until you dig in, like crypto chambers, unroofed regions etc. They ruin a carefully designed layout.

In short, it's just me.

Of course fire hazards, raids and sieges are much more worrisome for a colony built out of wood on an open field, but then i never build killboxes and only 1-3 turrets regardless of the colony size anyway.

I always dig into mountains because of sieges. And i don't like it, it's easier and more fun to build outside. Probably somebody has already suggested large-scale shields, but since personal shields are already in the game, why couldn't you build shield generators for your critical buildings and activate them during sieges? At a massive energy cost, of course.

Though it would only solve the getting ridiculously destroyed -part of the problem. Attacking siege crews is still usually suicidal.

Selling slaves isn't an option? Screw morale, if you're useless or won't join up, off with you. Either aboard a slave ship or into the cremation chamber. When the weak-minded colonists go berserk from being unable to deal with it, that just leaves the strong-willed to capture and sell them too.

Though it's kind of hard to enforce when you've got two colonists left, both with nervous or neurotic traits... One of my colonies was regularly purged by a single psychopathic and sanguine colonist. That was a jolly soldier.

I'd prefer the smooth floor even if it was the opposite, if it gave less beauty bonus than tiled floors. I just don't like some of the weird spots that look like loose rocks or dirt patches on smoothed floor which you cannot remove.

Wow, somebody takes the internet seriously.

[the]

I'm not a very good tactician so i tend to play with Randy in Builder mode. I've found it a far better bet for casual gameplay where i can build a solid colony without getting spanked by the first group of raiders. The other storytellers (including Phoebe) ruin everything in ever-increasing waves so fast it's not funny.

As i've played more and have gotten maybe just slightly better i've increased the difficulty to the next step since Randy the Builder tends to send just 1 or 2 raiders against your 5-6 colonists and a few turrets, even later on. I always imagined Randy was the obliterator among the storytellers, but at least in the two easiest settings he's... the easiest. 

There have been some storyteller changes in A9. Could I ask which one you're using so I can do some more testing?

Randy in builder mode.

I'm running A9 and the updated version of this mod, but my batteries just short circuited and i'm having animals going on killing sprees way more often than before. The mod isn't working for me. Anyone else experiencing the same?

alpha 9?

I don't seem to have any drawbacks running the current mod version in A9. I'm waiting for a couple essentials to be updated so i haven't tested thoroughly, but starting an ice sheet game works fine.

While on the topic of spamming gratitude, here's mine too. I'm not interested in lots of mods but Prepare Carefully and Less Incident Trolling are something i won't play without.

Doesn't the name attached to the pawn make it clear who is who?

Kinda, but quiet frankly, most of the colonist end up wearing the exact same thing and looking exactly the same that it becomes difficult to attach information to the name.

Instead of being "This is Jeff, the bitching cool cyborg with power armour and a Sniper rifle, and this is Billy the farmer with farmers hat, overalls and shovel" it becomes "This is Joe, and he is wearing power armour and has a LMG (because everyone one is) and he does..... uh... just a sec... *check stats* farming, he's a farmer. And this guy right next to him, Leroy, also wearing power armour and toting a LMG, is.. *checks stats* a hauler. And Ralph, who looks like the last two guys, also with a LMG is *checks stats* a cook".

Anyway my point is that the very small amount of differences between colonists, is so minor that it becomes hard to attach information to the name unless they are a pawn I created and I know the name - everyone else is pretty much 'minions' until I check what they do.

You can rename pawns. Attach an abbreviation, a letter/number combo to your colonists which you can identify them faster with. I add an F to my farmers for example. At some point i used numbers to indicate effectiveness but it became a chore. With 20+ colonists it's nice to see who are cannon fodder at a glance by finding everyone tagged with CF on the screen...

Certainly there are hundreds of stories like Grim. The guy was the first raider to assault my colony, and so he came alone. His leg got blown off in the firefight, and finally a headshot from my shooter left him braindamaged, but alive. After having his vegetables nurtured back to half-health, he was employed as a cleaner. However he had severe brain damage and a peg leg, so he was neither the brightest nor the fastest tool in the shed.

Seriously, i've never seen anything move that slow. A centipede would have outrun Grim easily. Grim needed rescuing regularly: the first time he nearly starved before he reached the food storage. As he finally picked up the food, he got knocked out from hypothermia because he couldn't get out of the freezer fast enough.

Soon after that a fire broke out in the yard while Grim was hauling rock chunks across. The poor bastard couldn't evade the flames and caught fire himself and got knocked out with serious burns. Still it wasn't fatal for him but i had to laugh so hard because the poor bastard was way more work for the rest of my colonists than what he contributed to the colony himself.

He got hypothermia like three-four times after that, in the colony food storage. Later on, when i had ordered some food survival packages to be hauled from the other end of the map, i forgot that Grim was also on hauling duty. So i got an alert for starvation and wondered what the hell, i have plenty of food, and focused on the event to find Grim alone in the middle of nowhere, never going to make it to the survival package nor back to the base alive.

I had to draw a square of food storage on the desert next to Grim and send another colonist to haul some food close to him. Grim survived again, just barely. I've never taken care of any other colonist as much as Grim.

These are the stories that make this game awesome for me personally. Just pure brilliance.

I was just wondering about the same topic. How far do the raiding forces escalate? Meaning, is it possible to maintain a small colony for as long as you want, or does the game force you to expand by sending stronger and stronger enemies until you're eventually defeated unless you set up mega-killboxes and house an army of colonists?

The thought reminds me of Banished where keeping a small settlement was impossible due to your settlers not reproducing unless you had empty housing for the new families. If not, your folk just died of old age and it was game over.