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Keep in mind, several people have tossed around FTL in modding rimworld, and I think someone might even have already done one version of it.  More than likely someone's already working on one now that we're closing in on 1.0.

e.g. I'd check in with what this guy has in mind for the future.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1240656304

Regarding the use case, this is actually solved with the somewhat opaque infestation formula:  If you don't have any buildings within 30 tiles of the overhead mountain, no infestation will occur, which is usually what happens when you've got miners boring deep holes.  There just needs to be more transparency on this.  And maybe a better infestation spawning formula :/

Adding a b18 version on request.  >600kb total so have to make a new post :/

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Honestly caravan activities kind of fill that role, I've done a bunch of sites/lumps on merciless and they can be pretty brutal but fun.  Tweaking that feels all that's necessary.  Right now they feel a bit too easy to cheese with sending in equipment, but some sites, like mortar always has the danger of death:  You either gotta bite the bullet and drop to center to stop the mortar fire or take another risk and drop at edge.

Counterpoint to this:  People tend not to opt in to danger.  I did it because it was necessary on sea ice, but you'll notice for instance, powergaers and general players alike, would not caravan when the rewards were small in B18.  That's an option to opt in to danger for fun, and overwhelmingly people opted out.

Regarding timed threats, the way I started using it in a mod is to just use:

"Ticks^1.1/25000
Divide by 8 if a caravan.
Divide by 3.5 if a site.
Multiply this by your difficulty factor."

Haven't got any feedback on it yet, although I'm working on an economy mod that will be part of that so I'm not in a hurry.  It doesn't handle biomes well, so this obviously can't just be the final version, though, and just doesn't care if you got hammered last raid.  You could always just slap on adaptation here with a weaker influence, and give each biome a raid coefficient and exponent.  So like Ice Sheet: mult:0.7;exp:0.9, Temperate: mult: 1.1;exp:1.1

Possibly an overall solution is to just have ticks be the largest factor, so that even if a pawn/wealth counts for something, it's not enough to "game" it or worry about it.  So putting it together something like...

Old: Ticks^1.1/25000
New: Ticks^1.1(*biome_exp)/40000(*biome_mult) + pawns*average_health*(wealth_curve)*A + wealth*B

Biome is kind of like a second difficulty level, so it's not like people would choose a biome based on raid sizes.  It'd probably be biased in favor of making the biome still harder than normal just doable.  But you can't just slap on "Ticks^1.1/25000" to Sea Ice and expect a fun experience lol.

But yeah that requires a lot of work at this stage to find out appropriate A/B/etc.  I do agree that the wealth*pawns was a good idea even if I'm gurmpy about it, my experience just seems to show that 110 peak is a bit high especially with bionics counting.

One criticism seerdecker mentiones was if you outpace the raid time it gets boring.  This is a fair criticism, but this is kinda true no matter what system you use:  with a system that tries to be "clever" if the player remains "clever" they will outgame it and also make the game "boring".  This is why I don't like seerdeckers idea of just tossing up what counts as wealth/utility for raids, even if it is an improvement.  A player is just going to have the weird process of calculating which factors he thinks skews raid sizes in his favor, when he should just be thinking what gives him the best colony and defense.

Well, my argument for a constant timed increase was simply that if you look at your colony fun points graphs, it is a constant increase anyways, superlinear even in most cases.  A timed increase that was linear would actually be more forgiving, while at the same time removing some metagaming weirdness.  Unless you're arguing both against the current raid system and timed increase, jimmy.

There could be an argument that maybe the different difficulties should actually have separate raid formulae altogether:  From the feedback I've seen in 1.0 thread, medium and under players don't really care for a constant increase at all, while rough and over do.  In which case a fully adaptive raid design like you suggest might even work best on medium and under.  Would be nice to see a poll on that.  I think people choosing medium don't care to metagame in the first place or at least only do so when it's overwhelmingly hard not to (e.g. no gold statues), so there would be no concern there.

Edit: meh, I've bickered enough, removed sillier parts of post.

Almost every game gets harder as the player progresses. DOOM, StarCraft, WoW, Portal, Street Fighter, Jagged Alliance 2, etc. It's an attempt to match challenge with player ability so the player is neither overwhelmed nor bored. But players don't tend to interpret, say, DOOM's increasingly difficulty fights as "punishment". Like, "Hey, I defeated a room full of 10 zombies, why am I now punished by having to fight a room of 15 zombies?" Nobody says this.

Here is the big misunderstanding I think:  Raid scaling by wealth is not equivalent to this scenario.  An equivalent scenario is if you scaled further enemies by, say, how much ammo + health + armor at a given time.  Most players would understandably find it odd if you took on a big bad baron of hell and, at the final end of the game, simply fought 12 basic possessed simply because you ran out of ammo and have to use a pistol.  What a let down that would be!  Conversely, you would be punished for doing well if you did well.

Rimworld's situation is slightly worse than that even, though: much wealth is not useful in a fight and it's unclear to newer players that wealth is the main determining factor.  Using the DOOM analogy, it would be as if enemy scaling also considered how many times you jumped in the game.  It would be a bizarre and pointless sense of progression, but a smooth one nonetheless that can be worked around in weird ways and hurts some players randomly (probably ex oblivion players  ).

The equivalent scenario here to what DOOM actually does would be timed based raids:  In DOOM the progression simply increases the further you play and in Rimworld it would increase the longer you play.

Yeah I've been thinking about that sort of thing, wondering if its outside of the scope of the mod, though.  In order to change crops, I'd have to make it meaningful:  All of the foods more or less are the same, so limiting a map to, say "corn+cloth" isn't much different than "corn+rice+potatoes+cloth".  Which I guess is why you made the 3rd suggestion.  And not allowing a food type feels a bit too punishing.

I guess it's only built that way because the amount of firepower you can cram in one place is much larger than in b18.  I can extend this on the sides and build more cannons to make a "box" but there's just no need really. 10 cannons + 4 snipers is like 40 b18 mini-turrets.

You can use sniper turrets in killboxes   Unless you make an amusing scenario options choice, dudes don't explode, so you can cram them wherever.

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What bugs me is that wealth should be a major indicator for raids. Ofc people want that legendary stuff you got going or the huge supplies you have. I actually have never bothered with controlling my wealth, but there are fair points that increasing colony wealth doesnt do anything and just makes life harder.
I dont think there is a perfect solution and "exploits" will always happen.

Wealth based raids really only works for one faction lore-wise: "space pirates".  Maybe tribals.  If a very important mechanic isn't working well, lore should be tossed aside anyways.  It's not like regular raids makes sense anyways (pretty sure pirates would give up after the second shot), so lore is given second thought in the first place.

Things get silly if you look at raids in a sensible way.  I wonder where these 100 man tribal sapper raids are coming from to attack my completely isolated island ice cap colony.

Yeah with a large base I've got several dedicated janitors and I still have to restrict my home zone to be smaller than my "real base" just to get cleaning done.

Ultimately I think it's best if we just got something like haul animals for cleaning, so I think this particular idea ends up being just a band-aid solution.

Someone mentioned in another mod I'm working on, strategy mode, that they'd like to see supply and demand economics.

Looks like I might actually be able do this.  So here's my brain dump if anyone wants to join in:

Current goals:

-Eliminate all item sell factors/taintedness

-Have a "supply level" for things, where both it's label and general category has a supply level and modify it's market value.  With neutral being a 5% multiplier in player's favor, with high supply/low supply being, say, 40%/-40% at a very flooded/bought out level.

-Supply is dealt with in raw silver value.  So if you sell 500 flake @14, it will add "500x14" to the "supply"

-End of season the supply levels "normalize a bit": supply goes towards 0 from either positive or negative, with further away from 0 going faster to 0.  Bad IRL logic, good game logic I'm thinking.  I'm thinking either game ticks or colony wealth will also alter the rate of neutralizing, with high wealth colonies able to supply/buy lots of a given item.  Wealth would be bad for vanilla, good for strategy mode.

Example:  Selling craptons of flake will flood both the drug category supply and the item "flake" supply.  Selling all raider drops will rapidly flood weapons, though maybe you could make some money crafting in the beginning.  that said, the flooding of weapons will make weapons cheaper for you to buy.  I like this

The way this is currently working in code is that it won't alter your wealth, just your trade prices, so it might lead to some odd behavior with players doing wealth shenanigans.  Since this is mostly for strategy mode, that won't matter, although this is definitely going to be a separate mod.

Other possible addons:

-Recessions/Booms
-Supply by faction?  Worth the additional work?  Sounds like it would be confusing and not good.

I think combat readiness is a great mod if you're playing in a sandboxy way, sort of like a very adaptive difficulty.  However, I don't think it's great on a colony planning level, as there would be no real point to building any sort of defenses: the enemy would just scale exactly to those defenses.  And it kind of relies on the modder to have perfect knowledge of how much your preparation is worth in raid value, which I think it's better to be blind to.  One thing I think 1.0 kind of failed on is combat animals, and it's because it's pretty hard to choose a right number for how much raid points an animal is worth.  So you really shouldn't.

Time based doesn't necessarily mean time only.  While vanilla has like 1000 lines of code in various areas related to the raid size, making it time based doesn't necessarily mean you need to make it a one liner.  But you can do a 1 liner if you like: exponents < 1 take care of what you say and slowly cap it in a gradual way.  Although having looked at a lot of graphs, I think you want it to be the other way around and be > 1, as wealth grows almost quadratically in rimworld.

The other part I agree with, however, that simply means there should be new units with higher points per unit.  The actually formula for raid points would be increasing all the time.