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Well, so I've been playing a colony since some of the earlier 1.0 releases, and it's generally been going well... but launching the ship is god-damned impossible. Cassandra Hard. My first attempt was 6 years in. About 18 people at the time. I saved before I started so I could go back.

For the first few days it went all right, a bunch of raids but nothing I couldn't handle... but then it just keeps coming, averaging 3 raids/day. Never more than 16 to 18 hours between raids. I finally died to an extreme psychic drone driving all my males insane (because you can't really counter -48 mood), combined with 2 sapper groups from both sides and a mechanoid drop right in the base... all at once.

So I resolved to make more defenses, get more allies and be more ready. Today I tried a second time. 10 years into my colony. My colony is well defended, inner walls, out walls, two trap gauntlets, scattered turrets. 26 colonists, all fairly well armed (Charge/Assault Rifles a few Lances/Sniper Rifles, Plasteel Sword and Spears on melee), and well armoured (8 in Power Armor, the rest in Devilstrand Dusters, Pants, and Shirts with Steel Advanced Helms, and Flak Vests).

First time I got a pretty normal mechanoid raid, followed by pirates dropping right into my base. The pirates had at least 3 doomsday launchers, that they then fired off in close quarters, hollowing out the interior of my base and killing 4 or 5 pawns. Not wanting to lose the entire center of my base, with all my production and a lot of my most valuable stuff, I said fuck it, I'll try again.

So I reload, and it begins again. Mechanoid raids... approximately 3 per day. Because of the speed of centipedes, literally I'd be finishing up one mechanoid raid, and another one would start. After 13 raids, on day 4 a full Scyther raid drop right into the center of my base, notably right in my hospital and pretty much ended things.

I had all 4 factions allied, and I tried calling for help, but they sent near useless parties of 4-6 people, not even very well armed. Against 8 centipedes and another 8 scyther/lancers they did effectively nothing.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be possible without some ridiculous cheese. Your colonists barely have time to sleep and eat, much less heal, repair or rebuild. So if you take any damage, to either your colonists or your facility you'll eventually die, as you can't recover at all. I don't know what the goal here is, maybe launching the ship is supposed to be impossible without things going exactly right... but the difficulty jump between normal play and ship launch is a rather immense gap.

For the moment I've given up on launching a ship is it's just absurd. Maybe I'll try a few more of the new starts.

Seeking other feedback on the scythers, if anyone has some experience. Too easy? Too hard? Just right?

So I definitely think they're a bit overtuned... particularly in conjunction with drop pods. I've lost several people this colony to drop pods with scythers, and it's hard to come up with good counterplay. You have limited time as they destroy furniture and doors in a a rather short time. Ideally you use EMP grenades, as fighting without them is pretty much certain death. Last night a group came in, and they downed my EMP grenadier in  a single hit as he popped the door to toss one in (which admittedly was bad play, shoulda had a melee breach the door with him behind them, but they were getting close to breaking out and I panicked a bit). After that even with 5 or 6 pawns shooting, 2 melee pawns in front, and 4 or 5 animals, against 3 scythers in close quarters losses were substantial: 2 dead alpaca, 1 dead pig, 1 dead Elephant, 2 dead colonists (1 melee, 1 ranged), all colonists having injuries.

On the flip side, if they land outside my base, traps make short work of them. It seems you just changed traps back to hit colonists or at least colony animals again (as one took out one of my Alpaca on 1958), which is sad ... If that's not a bug it's rough, back once again to weird door hallways and such. Personally I'd prefer if traps had a large speed debuff for colonists/allies but couldn't trip (possibly allowing tripping if wandering confused or on fire).

Alrighty, been playing a decent game (3 years in) Cassandra Hard, traditional start.

A few observations/issues:
- I'm playing on a plains map, but it appears infestation frequency is unaffected by this fact. I've gotten 3 infestations so far, once a year, all in the same one room that was built over an outcropping I mined out. It's kind of ridiculous that if you build a full mountain base or a full plains base with a single room where an outcropping used to be you get the same infestation chance. I do love the infestation warning now though, feels a lot less unfair.
- Doors appear to be impossible to light, the door square is always 0% brightness even when both sides are lit. This causes a slowdown on going through doors that seems... wrong. I thought it was just door opening but then I put in wood and steel autodoors and they still slowed down, and I realized that was the cause.
- This has always been true, but wild animals can open doors and wander through all your defenses, then proceed to eat your stored food or your young animals. In this playthrough I had a cold snap, and about 20 rats, squirrels bunnies and raccoons all ran into my base and ate my stored hay. I had to manually kill them all. I've also lost 7 different baby Alpaca and Calves to Mountain Lions, Wargs and Wolves who just wander into my base and then eat them. The first notification I get is that my poor baby animal is being attacked and is usually dead in seconds. Wild animals shouldn't be able to open doors just because they're not currently hostile. The new trap change should help with this a bit hopefully, but it's still really annoying that you can't defend against predators until the last second... so you need to preemptively kill all predatory animals on your map or your baby Alpacas are doomed.

A few things I love:
- Vegetation actually growing back is amazing. 3 years in and my map isn't a wasteland... that's a first.
- The opportunistic hauling and inventory stack consolidating remove a lot of micromanaging.
- The new prosthetics and being able to craft them is really cool. It's made 1 armed people a lot less of a liability early to mid game, as you can get a prosthetic arm pretty quick. And the archotech gear is a great motivator for world questing. I actually spent a lot of time making of all things tribalware, because they wanted 13 of them, and no one was a particularly skilled crafter... so I need to make around 25 before I got 13 good ones. But it was worth it for an archotech eye.

I'm having an odd issue where the debuff from Smokeleaf is still affecting my stats (-30 consciousness and movement) even after the debuff wears off. And it seems to stay stuck on until I reload from a save. Seems to repro on a brand new game, just give them some smokeleaf, tell them to smoke it and wait for it to wear off. And it's not just a tooltip/reporting effect, they definitely move slower still.

Version 0.15.1282 (latest Steam unstable)