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There is a notification when a bullet is absorbed by armor. It's easiest to observe when sniping centipedes. Every now and then you will hear a pickaxe sound and the centipede will jerk backwards slightly without emitting the pain sound.

Best cheap defences are, without doubt:

• Snow
  
• Marsh
  If you don't live in a biome with those, well, you can migrate. But they are dramatic force multipliers, especially if you use some kind of divide and conquer tactic like having your internal passages free of snow and making enemies spread over a large area.

The current system is detailed, but not necessarily even that realistic. I would like to try a simpler system, like the one from very early Rimworld alphas, where characters had just HP bars. It could be some kind of compromise, like no limb loss until at 50% health or lower. Yes, it's nice to quickly headshot an incoming enemy, but it cuts both ways, and the determining factor is random, almost completely out of your control.

Tynan normally favors gameplay over realism. In this case he's clinging to realistic a mechanic that is not especially fun. It boggles my mind. I guess he just knows no better, hasn't played story generating board games like Eldritch Horror and Robinson Cruzoe: Adventures on Cursed Island.

Another proposal.

It's strange that your settlers are the only people that have any idea what a mechanoid is. After all, they're made of juicy components, steel and plasteel. They can be thousands years old. We can't expect wild animals like vultures to dine come and dine on them. But outlanders might come with a card and carry them home to disassemble. Pirates might specialize in extracting mechanoid weapons, which could be bad news in future raids if you let them do that. Tribals might want to throw them into a volcano, take home and worship them, or sell them to a shaman.

You know, I'm annoyed by the prevalence of topic-based (PHP) message boards on the internet. They are harmful to free thinking and intelligent discussion. It's natural for discussion to flow and jump from one topic to another. Imposing artificial bans on what is said where really bothers me (except notoriously incendiary topics like religion and politics).

I much prefer old-school forums based on newsgroups, usenet, and Disqus (but I hate the fact the last one is centrally controlled, slow, and very heavy on user tracking)

Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlNhD0oS5pk

I don't know why you call that "resource scarcity". 23 steel deadfall traps are worth 75*23 = 1725 steel. The OP suggests he's concerned about early game, too (no high research). Constructing this takes a lot of resources.

I think you should have bought that Power Claw. It's really an okay bionic. It shines on characters with high Melee and Shooting skills (both 10+). No, he won't become a sniper, but give him some mid range weapon and put him in the front row. You get an average shooter and a scary melee combatant in one.

[matter]

Worse still is that these stupid injuries matter.  Not just losing a thumb, losing a single pinky can make a world-class master constructor fail to build something to the point of wasting resources with more frequency than someone with many hours less experience.

Here is the counter-play to such inane outcomes:

- Don't take damage.

That's it.  Under the current rules, the game is sufficiently punitive in this regard that the direct incentive to avoid permanent damage to productivity is to work every mechanic possible to avoid taking damage at all, because no amount of armor or preparation can protect you from unlucky hits to eyes, fingers, or toes.

I fully agree with this. If Tynan can't come up with some less contrived mechanic, this shows crisis of his imagination.

It doesn't feel like colonist are becoming scarred, grizzled veterans. It feels like they're falling apart. You will NEVER make up for a loss of a finger with skill. If Jim is level 20, Joe is level 14, Joe will eventually get better than Jim. For most skills it's only a matter of time until they reach level 20, and if you lack job opportunities to raise Joe 14 -> 20, this means Jim's skill would also decay down from 20. Maybe if there were also scars that made characters look more terrifying in battle, negotiations, or fascinate the opposite sex. Scars and traumas that made characters pursue different skills and jobs they were previously not interested in (there's trauma savant, but incredibly rare). Something that would make people feel participating in combat is not a strict loss, but that it can influence and modify people.

I know the movie "First Blood", starring Sylvester Stalone, is not a great example of realism. But the psychological aspect of it is very interesting, and how past experiences make Johny Rambo freak out if pushed. Now imagine the story was instead about Rambo losing finger after finger.

There are examples of very interesting characters that are cripples, such as Glokta in "Blade Itself". But it takes great storytelling to pull that off, not randomly generated nutrient paste.

I'll use Eldritch Horror (the board game) example again. EH is similar game in many aspects in that you have a team of people working together and they can accumulate various injuries. Unlike Rimworld, it's very goal-oriented (with time limit) and tightly designed. It's a game that deals out a plethora of random punishments on players, mostly when you fail some kind of challenge. But the kind of players it attracts are not bothered by having characters with paranoia, leg wound, hypothermia. Those are semi-permanent, they go away with time or may be removed by a lucky roll on 'rest' action. Unlike in Rimworld, these injuries make future encounters more dangerous, pushing characters close to death. To a degree, players like them because they make great stories when suddenly luck runs out or a crawling, bleeding character saves the world by a fluke. What many EH players hate however, are "impairment" tokens from some expansions. Those are permanent stat decreases and extremely rare to get rid of. Impairment tokens function very much like scars/lost limbs in Rimworld, and player response is similar.

[isn't]

A goal in my ideas was to make mechanoids distinct and inhuman. Plain healing is human-like, because many humans value human live -OR- it has a positive effect on morale that you know you'll be healed if you get shot. That sort of healing, even "auto-repair" can be added later for pirates or another unreleased high tech faction (like glitterworld exiles). You can explain it with nanobots, nanites, etc. Cannibalizing / utilitarian approaches only really fit to inhuman factions. It would be a missed opportunity to give mechanoids simple healing.

The answer isn't:
"Getting surprised by a suddenly repaired Mechinoid, when I stupidly sent a lone colonist to finish it off without support, really pisses me off and it is the games fault."

The answer is:
"I know Mechinoids can self repair when downed, so Im going to dedicate the group that downed it in the first place to spending more time ensuring that it is shot cold and dead immediately after combat. That way I don't have to worry about it and don't put any of my colonists in unnecessary danger."

And I think it would be marginally more exciting than drafting a bunch of colonists to take care of a pyromaniac. Like having to draft hunting colonists to hunt together and finish off downed animals. It would get repetitive and non-challenging FAST. It's a prime example of an idea that sounds cool on paper but would just be annoying.

So yeah, everything is "working as intended" in my opinion. The chance for straight pawns to hit on their own gender is very very low AFAIK but it can happen in real life. Some people don't even realize (or repress the fact) that they are gay until they one day find themselves in an environment where it's completely accepted, find the right person etc.

The movie "Brokeback Mountain" is basically about that.

I know a good article about friendship vs love, and how it's a dangerous, volatile mix. The article spends quite a bit of time elaborating how a friendship can sneakily turn into a homosexual relationship for people who really enjoy each other's company. That is, if they don't have inhibitions. Unfortunately, it's not in English.

Frankly, I think tribal enemies are imbalanced, and Extreme difficulty is imbalanced as well. You get imbalanced * imbalanced. Pirates are manageable (although I don't play on extreme). I doubt you can tame enough war animals to fight off an extreme tribal horde.

I think you will NEED IED traps either way, or some way to detonate mortar shells. Or handgrenades.

You might have a better chance looting an ancient danger room very early and trying to loot a minigun. If you have decent shooters, it should be possible to defeat them without catching too many bullets (you can add some deadfalls in case it's mostly scythers).

In my experience ancient danger rooms tend to have much better loot (cryosleep colonists) if you open them early because storyteller. It's possible to get more than one person with pre-installed bionics, wearing power armor, and with high tier weapons! And they might not be hostile ! Put the wounded back into caskets and retrieve them later. If there are mechanoid guardians that don't rush to base immediately AND lots of caskets, you can throw an explosive (for example an EMP grenade) at a casket to make all caskets eject. You may be able to salvage some people in the resulting chaos, especially if some of the spacers have smokepop belts. I call it "Smash and grab".

If you run out of danger rooms, you can... migrate to adjacent tile!

Using animals for meat only is awkward and not terribly efficient. Doubly awkward in a biome with winter - you have to stockpile plant matter for them to eat in winter, and now you're either growing food or harvesting berries while trying to keep them out of hands of colonists.

I keep trying to get Megasloths, which are like bears with good wool, but they tend to be scarce and you need a really good tamer for a nice chance.

Alternatively, you could make them shortcircuit in the rain when they're downed. All their fragile electronic parts and wires are exposed.

I don't think I would enjoy having to finish mechanoids quickly. It's not hard to do (unless you make the timer very short), it would feel like an extra chore. The OP complained about micromanagement.

If you want to explore the self-repair theme, I'd do something different. A third mechanoid type: Ghoul. A perverted, inhuman sort of "medic", which - instead of fixing downed humanoids - scavenges them for spare parts and guns and becomes more powerful with each part absorbed. Those ghouls would hang back.
Alternatively, just a simpler kind of medic mechanoid which takes parts from one downed mechanoid and installs them in another downed one. The disadvantage is that the medic would need at least 2 downed mechanoids of the same type to work, so it would only really kick in in larger mech raids.

The reason political and religious topics are often forbidden (even if by house rules) is you can talk about without having to prove anything. A strong opinion is enough and you can start shouting.