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Being new to the game the stupidest thing I'd say I've ever done was..
Not ever building gun turrets, and instead using dead fall traps.

I have played quite a bit and I went the other way. I started off using turrets and not gun traps and now that I am more experienced I exclusively use traps and not turrets.

1) To use shields and stand in front of my ranged attackers. This applies even when I have walls for cover if I don't have sandbags on the side I want to fire around. When a lot of attackers are coming this means they'll get to my melee guy first so my shooter can continue firing over him easily.
2) Melee attackers are extremely useful against snipers and enemies with indirect fire (grenades, incendiary launchers, etc). Hide around a corner and let them approach and then jump them. A pawn with a melee weapon and a decent skill will make short work of a pawn with no melee weapon, generally without taking much damage, and the damage will generally just be bruising rather than cuts.

Those are the major uses. I don't always bother with a killbox so having the melee pawns with shields as a line in front of my shooters is often useful. I prefer walls and cover of course, but sometimes the situation is too fluid to rely on my static defense configuration.

I think you (OP) are looking at the scenario wrong. You're trying to compare balance between things that were never meant to be balanced. RimWorld is not a game with balanced sub-systems. It's all about understanding the imbalances and trying to come up with a risk mitigation strategy to increase the odds of survival. So from that perspective, nothing has to be balanced against each other, it must simply have a purpose (and that purpose does not have to provide a benefit, it could be a penalty, or a mix).

And I think you missed my point 0, which is right smack on the start of the article, and is numbered '0' for a reason.

I did not miss that. It is subjective and I disagree. I usually want about 20% of my colonists to be melee.

I think you (OP) are looking at the scenario wrong. You're trying to compare balance between things that were never meant to be balanced. RimWorld is not a game with balanced sub-systems. It's all about understanding the imbalances and trying to come up with a risk mitigation strategy to increase the odds of survival. So from that perspective, nothing has to be balanced against each other, it must simply have a purpose (and that purpose does not have to provide a benefit, it could be a penalty, or a mix).

I would never compare melee and shooting for balance. If you consider shooting better, I would ask "If I get a character with a high melee skill and 0 shooting skill, would I make use of them as a melee character?" If the answer is always no, then maybe that's a reason to re-evaluate melee combat, but I certainly do not think that answer is "no".

What is this "near" nonsense?  Put your dining room *in* the freezer.  Have your smithy *in* the metal stockpile.  Have your crafting spot *in* the smokeleaf stockpile.  And so on.

Yes, my pigs live in my meatlocker (set to -7'C so the poor piggies don't freeze).

I wonder if I could turn my greenhouses into bedrooms... they'd get a huge size bonus.  But anyone asleep at harvest time would get unhappy.

I specifically don't do this because of the huge beauty penalty. It's much easier to keep your colonists happy if you minimize mood penalties, which means avoiding ugly rooms. It's all fine and well as long as your colonists aren't borderline breaking but the whole point of RimWorld is minimizing the sources of problems since you cannot control everything.

Okay, I tested again, you are correct, the issue is not just Deadman's, they will equip this sometimes, but something is still wrong, and I am not sure what.

Could somebody please help me to understand whatever I am missing?

Here's a picture walkthrough:

Colonist's are set to "Worker", which is just not wearing armor. So far so good.

I make a new Outfit "ArmorOnly" which is just Armor Vests and Helmets. Set everybody to this new Outfit.

I have a moderate stockpile of such armor. Most of it is Deadman's and garbage quality and durability, but I have it, and it's better than nothing, right?

My colonist's properly acknowledge the change in Outfit by running over to the stockpile and stripping all of their clothes off, but only a few random colonists actually equip some armor. Most of them prefer to remain naked.

What am I doing wrong? Why won't they all equip armor and helmet?

Why are your "soldier" outfits naked except for armor? You probably still want your colonists wearing clothing. Your soldier config should be the same as your non-soldier config, just with armor also enabled.

That shouldn't cause the problem where they don't put the armor on, but it is weird.

Actually you can mitigate - or even virtually eliminate - the Zzzt event.
The short circuit goes off only if you have conduit connected to a battery (Duh!, but it must be said). It still tries to fire for batteries NOT connected to conduit, but it will fizzle and you'll never even notice. So, say you have two banks of batteries, one bank connected to the grid and the other not connected to any conduit. You'll get about half the short circuits, because sometimes the event will choose the isolated battery. Obviously batteries not connected to the grid can't charge or provide power, sooo.... use a switch. Connect a switch so that no conduit touches any battery. The risk of a zzzt still exists while the switch is on to charge the batteries. But once, charged, turn the switch off and enjoy no more short circuit explosions. Turn the switch on (again at the risk of a short circuit) only when you need backup power.

That's interesting.  I knew batteries not connected to the grid wouldn't trigger a Zzzt! event, but I didn't realize that was because the event was being created and then rendered inert.  Does that mean I could drastically reduce my odds of the event occuring at all by having lots of individual batteries, each seperated from the grid by their own switch?

I haven't verified the info provided by Jimyoda but if correct, you wouldn't need a switch per battery (or even multiple switches). All batteries not connected to the grid would generate benign events regardless of how many sets of batteries you put them in. I usually make 1-2 sets of batteries that I leave full and disconnected from the grid with one battery always connected and I move batteries from the disconnected grids to connect them to power them up rather than flipping on the switch, but the switch is there in case I need a massive backup power supply.

In fact, this strategy works without switches at all. Just move the batteries when you need to connect/disconnect them.

I finally got around to giving this challenge a try. I've made about a dozen attempts so far, improving on each. It took me 2 failures to learn how much time I could spend building my first structure to get a fire going and prevent hypothermia. After that it was learning how far I could go to haul safely with whatever clothing I was able to scavenge based on the outside temperature. Engie died a few times trying to lug vlauable goods back to base.

My best attempt so far was bitter-sweet. 118 days, but it was a near total disaster almost the entire time. My base burned down nearly completely not once but twice. A muffalo parka is all that saved me and gave me time to rebuild, but I lost a ton of resources to the fires. At one point Engie was injured and slowly dying when a medic joined my colony. Bad traits and almost no skills, but a 13 in medicine and, importantly, juuust warm enough clothing to make it to my base. He saved Engie just barely then promptly started wandering aimlessly after stumbling upon my human corpse parking lot. He died of exposure, but Engie survived. A near miss! Later, someone calls for help. Engie is still recovering from injuries from a raid and just cannot afford combat, but it turns out it's Engie's husband calling for help. Whelp...I can't say no, even though I know he probably won't make it to base before dying of cold (it's the middle of winter and ~-200 outside). Sure enough, he dies on the way. I even tried sending Engie over to meet him to give him her parka in hopes both could make it back, but he didn't even have a jacket and died just feet from Engie.

Eventually three mechanoids did too much damage to my base to recover and Engie died from wounds during the battle.

Getting better though!

I vote for getting refinements-only out sooner, but then, I neither use nor create mods. 

Speaking of refinements, can we get a "minimum skill" slider for operations?  I'm tired of my backup-backup doc accidentally cutting someone's head off while trying to fit them with dentures (...) all because I got distracted and didn't micromanage the operation.

(While I'm on the subject... options to allow medicine to be used for certain injuries, but not for, say, bruises, would be nice.  That's another big micro task)

That's not a bad idea but Tynan said he is not looking at suggestions in this thread because that's not what the thread is for. I recommend you post in the suggestion forum.

Ah, just like Mondays

But...the screenshot is what I came here for! =(

Minor update released to fix an issue where no colonists would be listed when the colonist bar is hidden.

Welllll...there is an icon in the lower right that looks like 4 boxes in a grid that hides the colonist bar. However, I'm glad you mentioned Moody, because there's a known bug right now where Moody will not list any colonists if the colonist bar is hidden. This is because I'm using the colonist bar as the default sort order but it doesn't populate the list when hidden. I have a fix that should be ready for the next release.

If you're that wealthy I hope you have lots and lots of mortars. That would be so much fun! Minus the performance problems.

I'm going to use a specific example of a situation I ran into recently, but this concept applies to a lot of areas of the code base.

RimWorld has a sort order for displaying colonists, represented in the colonist bar (ColonistBar.cs). The logic for generating this sorted list is in a private method within ColonistBar.cs. This makes it difficult for mods to use the "RimWorld" sort order for pawns to present data in the same order. When the colonist bar is enabled, the public accessor ColonistBar.Entries provides the sorted list, but when disabled the list is empty. If there was a way to retrieve the sorted list of colonists regardless of whether the bar was enabled or not that would be helpful (whether that would be populating the entries even when the bar is hidden or a separate method somewhere else that the colonist bar uses).

More generally speaking there is a ton of business logic that's private or embedded in methods that do more than just that thing which forces mods to copy large chunks of RimWorld code, which is a maintenance nightmare. I realize that the reason the list is not being generated when the bar is hidden is to not run the calculations for generating the list, but I think there are going to be situations where such state-dependent calculations may be desirable by modders regardless of whether or not the one feature in the vanilla game that uses it is enabled at the time or not.