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How long does this thing last? I've had it going for nearly two months. It has killed all of the wildlife on the map in the middle of the winter, the whole map is on fire from all of the boomrats and boomalopes exploding, so now I have a map devoid of any life whatsoever. No plants, no animals, and it's the middle of a long (first) winter, so I can't grow crops. I don't think I've ever had a colony fail so quickly, and certainly not go from thriving to dead because of one event!

One day, during a raid on the colony known as Salvation, a Pirate who went by Clip was shot in the back by one of his comrades. Stunned, he fell to the ground in pain, the sounds of battle dulling as darkness closed in.

.....
He awoke in a hospital bed, warm and comfortable. Upon cursory examination, the pirate found that his wounds had been expertly bandaged, and he felt quite healthy, considering. Carefully rising from the bed, Clip took a look around. He was in a clean, stone room, alone. The doors were locked. Too tired and weak to think too much on it, he settled in to wait. Not long afterward an older woman arrived with a tray of food for him. While Clip ate his first (rather excellent!) meal in Salvation, the woman - who called herself Stone - revealed to him that he'd been asleep for days. His fellow raiders were all dead, it seemed, and he found himself feeling oddly satisfied by this news. He'd been shot in the back, he reasoned, and that was decidedly unkind of his comrades. Now they were dead and he wasn't, and that was the right of it.

Stone left, and soon a younger man, Keuneke, came and relocated him to a room in the "guest" complex. He had free access, he was told, to his room and the rest of the small complex, and his needs would be met. Clip was astonished by the freedom and generosity he was afforded as a prisoner - for he was a prisoner, whatever the colonists called it. Food was available in a spacious chow hall, and there was a large courtyard open to himself and his fellow guests. The beds were comfortable and the rooms cool and comfortable. All in all, Clip thought, this place was a paradise.
When Keuneke returned and offered him a place in the community, Clip was stunned! Not a week ago he'd been shooting at this man and his friends. Today he was being offered a place among them, as an equal, and it was clear to him that if he refused, he would continue to enjoy the relative freedom of the guest complex unhindered. He wavered for less than a day before accepting, and was struck yet again by the unwavering goodness here. He was given fresh - if somewhat rough - cotton clothing and, due to his skill at arms, offered some lightly used combat apparel and free access to the armory. He chose a well-maintained - if somewhat worse for wear - pulse rifle.

Some weeks of working happily alongside his new friends later, he was called upon to defend the colony. He obliged happily. One of the three pirate bands based on the planet was setting a siege, it seemed, and Keuneke and Grim - the senior members of Salvation's ad hoc defense force - wanted him on the team heading out to disrupt and break the siege if it could. He performed admirably, returning to the colony ahead of the surviving pirates with a gravely wounded Keuneke on his back.
From then on, Clip was Keuneke's partner in the field, covering the sniper against enemies attempting to close. He performed admirably each time, racking up a list of minor wounds and even a lost eye in defense of the colony and his friend.

Then came the weeks of hell. Siege after siege set up on the fringes of Salvation's operational range, and the colony's soldiers were pressed to their limits keeping pressure on the besieging forces. The guest complex's dining hall burned during the second siege, and several colonists were severely burned securing the safety of the prisoners. The soldiers accumulated wounds, and there never seemed to be enough time to heal before another siege was set up. By the third siege, Clip, Keuneke, and Grim were the only colonists hale enough to harry the siege camp. In the ensuing battle, Keuneke had his last remaining biological limb destroyed by a sniper round. Clip moved up to provide cover for Grim to gather Keuneke and retreat. It was then that a wild-eyed pirate charged Clip, cursing the colonist for a traitor as he plunged a small shiv into Clip's abdomen and twisted. The soldier reeled backward, and Grim dropped Keuneke long enough to put a round in the pirate's brain. Clip still lived, but he knew in that moment that he would die this day. That shiv had pierced something vital, and he could feel pain and cold blossoming from that small wound.
Grim was carrying Keuneke again, waving and calling for Clip to retreat. The turncoat pirate shook his head, taking up his rifle again. He'd cover their retreat, he told them.  He wasn't about to die in bed as the beleaguered colony struggled to fend off this attack or the next one. Instead, Clip, former pirate, took a knee behind a tree with his rifle, and with his first shot killed an advancing pirate. Then another. He retreated slowly, methodically, sustaining new wounds at an alarming rate. Finally within sight of the colony walls, Clip turned and stood his ground. There were three pirates left standing, a trail of the dead and wounded stretching back to their siege camp. Clip fired once, twice, but his wounds were too severe, his concentration and strength gone: his shots went wild. He knelt, numb, within sight of the home he'd only just found, and he smiled. He'd done it, he knew. The pirates would find the colony ready for them. His Salvation would survive this day.

As the pirates passed, one of them almost casually executed Clip - a single slash of his sword. In his dying moments, Clip almost pitied his killers.

The following morning, Keuneke himself came to retrieve his friend's body, wondering at the trail of corpses and blood in his wake. A new siege was already setting up, but this man deserved a solemn moment in Salvation.

.....
When the colonists left the planet that winter, they left clip behind, standing silent vigil over the colony that he had loved so briefly, under an oak tree, flanked by scenes from his life, rendered unto stone by his friends.


(His stomach was destroyed by that shiv. He would have starved to death in a hospital bed. Instead, I chose to have him go out fighting. He killed almost that entire siege himself before being cut down by a shielded swordsman. I thought he deserved a story.)

So, I 'lost' a game this morning to a tribal raid, and the Great Bow is the single culprit. I don't know the exact stats, but I know that in the early game, my riflemen cannot reliably out-range them. Worse, as far as I can tell (and this is probably confirmation bias), the Great Bow has the single highest chance in the game - above and beyond bladed melee weapons - to suddenly and forcibly remove a man's limbs. No other enemy in the game is scarier to me than one that can - with his very first shot (and dressed like Fred Flintstone, no less) - reduce my armored, 14 shooting bionic super-soldier to a weeping, legless cripple.
Am I the only one who finds this absurd? My technologically advanced, better armed, armored soldiers should not be at any great risk of losing limbs to men in loin cloths shooting pointy sticks.