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True romance 

Bonding over a tasty raider dinner, "Lady and the Tramp" style

First...i think you need a mass dump stockpile a ways away from your base (zone it as "not a home zone" so you can molotov the corpses and clear them easily).

Secondly, flip the switch the moment you get another psychic or poison ship.  Save triggering the ship for the first nasty non-mech raid....then just leave the ship and mechs alone as long as you can and you'll be surprised how many raids divert into those mechs....you're "what if we don't get a raid in time" concern is alleviated by the ship forcing more often raids.

Lastly, get 1 animal madness pulser.  About 10 days into the ship startup, start using your animals....all of them...in base defense.  Once your animals are toast, use the psychic animal pulser on the next non-mech raid and every animal on the map will go manhunter (your pets included, hence waiting for yours to die off).  With that, a mech ship, and an allied faction, you have 3+ raids that you'll have help managing.

If you use animals, assign them all to one pawn, and have that pawn stand on the opposite side of the enemy from your other pawns, or at least to the side...that way the animals will hit a side that bullets aren't incoming from, which will cut down greatly on casualties.

From a metagame perspective, it is actually better to have all the tribal factions as enemies, and the outlanders as allies.
1) outlanders will respond and help in combat.
2) outlanders have more useful goods for trade
3) tribal raids are generally easier than outlander raids, especially with mortars
4) having more enemies, of easier types, will increase the pool of prospective factions when a raid is generated, making it more likely to get the easier factions (tribals) and less likely to get the hard factions (mechs)

There are separate mods for JUST embrasures, if you wanted to get that, but NOT have all the other baggage in combat extended

In particular, are there mods that do any of the following?

• Makes traps reusable?
• Allows colonists to improve their shooting skill via target practice?
• Makes mortars more accurate? (so they actually hit what they're aimed at sometimes)
• Makes doors and walls more durable? (so they don't crumble in minutes against unarmed assailants)

-TC

You know what?  I'd be quite interested in any mods that do any of these as well.

BUT i can at least answer the last one!  Rainbeau Flambe has some mods that add concrete to the game.  Concrete is more durable than granite by a small margin (i think like 600 or 650 hp total), but also unlocks steel reinforced and plasteel reinforced concrete with machining research, and those walls have 950 and 2000 hp respectively....plasteel reinforced doors have like 1430 hp too, about 2.5x as much as a granite wall.  The mod CAN be used on it's own, but you have to buy the materials to make concrete.  If you have fertile fields mod (also by Rainbeau flambe), you can dig up the sand and crushed rocks that concrete requires (which actually makes it arguably cheaper, faster to build, and tougher than any other walls....on the downside, concrete has a rather high sell price, and is produced in rather large bulk, so it can boost your wealth fast or tempt you to just generate concrete and sell it to quickly be able to buy whatever you want)

The dreaded chicken or turtle rush.

Manually rezone a ridiculously large amount of chickens or turtles (chickens for amazeballs fast breeding, turtles for hardiness) and move them all into the path of an incoming raid.  They absorb a huge amount of damage and fire and are very unlikely to form bonds.

i think consciousness being reduced to 0 can kill a pawn, so a 20% brain, plus 20% more consciousness damage from other sources could kill a pawn...I'm not 100% confident though.

For the rock chunks, they can't be dropped on traps, so if a chunk is generated somewhere (as can happen from metal objects being destroyed into slag, or a pawn who was hauling a rock chunk being drafted, or the fertile fields mod changing rough stone to gravel) the rock chunk will be placed at the nearest open tile, and doors count as open tiles, and items in doors block them open.  So it isn't a hauling issue, it's more a LACK of hauling, since chunks aren't automatically hauled, so your pawns won't clear them out without being specifically told to.

I do believe there is a mod that prevents items from being dropped in doorways though, so if that is an ongoing annoyance, it might be worth looking into.

Firefoam poppers against inferno cannons is a clever idea, I like that, I'll try to remember it when I get to that stage in my current game.

Agreed.  When I read that earlier in the thread, i just thought "that's brilliant!  I've NEVER thought of that!"

I forgot....also gamey...you could set up a second base a couple tiles away.  Purely defensive....no kitchens, fields, workshops, etc.  Then start caravaning your ship supplies and food over, and build the ship there.  It doesn't DESTROY the old, useless gear, but it still removes the wealth from the assault calculations.  You also get to make a MUCH more compact, defensible base, by focusing solely on sleeping quarters, dining/rec room, mortars, and a large area for the ship.  You'll also, quite amusingly, suddenly get reduced "expectations" mood boost since the new map will have drastically reduced wealth.

It might feel more "story acceptable" as well, since thematically you're abandoning a "home" to build a military installation which will be used for one specific purpose.  When you're ready to start the launch sequence, you could also think of the supplies you left behind as "well, we don't need these anymore, I hope someone can make use of them when we're gone."

I can't say I support zone priorities as you've suggested.  We already have work priorities, which are the sole determining factor of which jobs pawns do.  It's one of the reasons the game works - if something goes wrong, the rules are generally simple enough to pinpoint WHY it went wrong, and can almost always be tracked back to dumb luck (in the case of combat) or player error (whoops i forgot to restrict the animals, or whoops i still had smelt steel slag chunks on with no radius, or whoops all my pawns have patient set to a higher priority than firefighting). 

Adding a new layer of priorities would SERIOUSLY complicate both how the game assigns tasks to the pawns (which, admittedly, would be handled by the game after being programmed), and how that information is transmitted to the player.  It would require players to know exactly how work task priorities and zone type priorities interact in each situation, and constantly monitor a whole new priority system as well as the interaction between the new and old system.  Essentially you'd be multiplying the complexity and capacity for error in assigning work zones and priorities by 3 or more, and the complaints and difficulty that some people already have with the work priority system would skyrocket.

I definitely support the ability to select multiple "allowed" zones for each pawn from your previous suggestion, and I even like the "banned zone" idea of "absolutely do not walk through here under any circumstances unless drafted" - but IMO zone priorities would complicate a system that the game relies on being very straightforward.

If you want to make the ship with a non-cheese strategy, calculate the resources you'll need for the ship, and make sure you've got that.  Convert EVERYTHING else in your base to steel, components, and plasteel (through trading whatever you can), as well as new guns, new armor, traps by the truckload, mortars, shells, firefoam, etc.  and like 20 days food.  Basically, your entire base becomes nothing but a military fortress with no purpose but surviving 15 days....no more tailoring, no growing zones, no mining, construction only for repairs and replacement, etc.  Then give it a shot.  Biggest tip I have in that case would be ringing your base in as many layers of walls as you can, and abuse the hell out of mortars, since each group needs to slow down and group up at any wall entry.

If you don't mind cheesing it some, then yeah, destroying everything you don't need that's boosting your value will help.

But after all, the ship startup is kinda like the end boss of the game anyways...it would be somewhat anticlimactic to go into that KNOWING you're going to win or lose....I kind of envy your current situation, as you have a legit "lets see if I'll make it!" situation going on.

I started using "mend and recycle" mod - the fact that vanilla Rimworld doesn't let you FIX regular clothing (but we can build a spaceship) or even rip apart clothing to get some of the cloth back is frankly unacceptable to me.  It's one of my top 5 "can't live without" mods...in fact it's probably #2, right behind Stack XXL.

Works pretty well....adds a "recycle apparel" bill to the tailor bench that lets you break down apparel to a small portion of it's base cost.  It also adds a "mending bench" and options in the mod settings to have the mending bench require power or not, to have mending apparel or weapons require "mending kits" (a craftable item) or nothing, whether or not mending items removes the "tainted" tag, and the chance of "failing" to mend a given item. 

IMO, it makes managing outfits so much easier...I just set my mending bench to repair everything non-tainted (i don't turn on "remove tainted"), and set my tailoring benches to recycle tainted apparel, as well as making bills for each type of clothing my colonists wear (usually pants, duster, button down shirt, cowboy hat) to "produce until you have [1]."  Then whenever some apparel decays to 50%, the colonist will take it off, put on the spare, and carry on with their day, while some crafter will come and repair the damaged one, making it the new spare.  Whenever I recruit someone, there is already a full set of clothing ready for them to put on, and since I will no longer have the 1 piece of clothing specified in the bills, my crafters will automatically start crafting a new set of spare clothes.

first of all, there is a target population and then a "soft cap" - the target population for cassandra, as you said (and if i remember right) is like 4-12, but there is a new cap, a bit higher, after which the new pawn events REALLY start cutting off.

Randy has the highest soft cap of normal storytellers.

Population limit secretly affects the odds of getting pawn events, things like escape pods, wanderer joins, refugees, and slavers actually having slaves.  It also somewhat effects the difficulty and resistance when you capture a prisoner, and seriously affects the chance of an enemy pawn dying when downed by damage (note, they won't go down from hits that wouldn't normally down them, but when they are downed (from damage), they'll be IMMENSELY likely to die even if no body parts are destroyed or the overall damage suggests they shouldn't be dead)

colonists will prefer the highest stat items:

-if you have an undamaged cloth t-shirt, and the pawn is wearing a 12% alpaca wool button down shirt...the button down shirt has better insulation, so the pawn will wear it.  Same thing with item quality.  A pawn will prefer a 8% tainted "excellent" cloth duster over a 95% "normal" cloth duster.

As Pangaea said, assigning outfits is definitely a good idea.  Notably restricting the hit points, and disallowing tainted apparel.  One slight correction is that you want the hit point slider set to 51%-100%...since 50% clothing counts as tattered...it's a tiny overlap, but man it gets annoying when pawns keep putting on the same stupid 50% shirt.

I noticed the same thing just yesterday....one of my pawns took 2 heavy charge blaster shots to the sternum.  Sternum was at 25 damage out of 20 HP.