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And let me guess, "shooter" accuracy is capped at 100% ? So you can NEVER make up for poor weapon with great skill ? Even if you're a "careful shooter", that incendiary launcher just won't hit ?

Yes, it's capped, I believe by the "post-processing" you see on the stats screen.

Shooter is capped but you can still get 100% hit rate.  The most common example is a good shooter with a good sniper rifle vs a centipede.  Due to 200% size multiplier you can hit 100% of all shots on the centipede, though it will deflect some due to its armor every shot will hit.

If you have quality materials it is actually possible to get enough baseline damage reduction to keep limbs when hit by stuff like charge lance without armor, just good clothing.  It's the head that is the problem, since you can't layer it.  Power helmet is the only way you're taking a sniper hit to head and living.  Even then you're dead if it hits brain.

The game's math makes using armor to sustain enemy gunfire a losing proposition, and you should usually be looking for methods to avoid taking shots at all, or at minimum to avoid high-damage single shots.

"taking advantage of": 1 trap

"abusing": 10 traps

Since drawing the line is subjective players usually say: no trap

If you ban traps, turrets, cover/targeting algorithms, kiting, etc you ban playing the game.

What I'm looking for is self-consistent rationale as to why one tactic is okay and not another.

For example, you can 100% all centipedes forever using kiting.  That's 10x.  That fits your definition of "abuse".  Or is this abuse okay for some reason other abuse is exploitative?

If you're just looking for some kind of variant play just say so, but I suspect that isn't the motivation when saying "no exploits".

By all means, DON'T choose the simpler solution and don't migrate to a more hospitable land. No, make a caravan come to you.

If you're going to play there at all, you might as well take advantage of the options provided.  For whatever reason, those caravans can reach you much faster than you can travel to other bases.  Since you don't have starting resources to set up enough power for sun lamp + hydroponics and still cover other needs comm console is much stronger.

Migration turns it into a tundra or boreal start with a delay, but you have enough starting food to cover ground and can raid pirates for even more stuff along the way.  Without trade, you just don't get resources to grow, excepting cargo drops + occasional slag chunk to smelt.

you define exploit as taking advantage of how the game works

I would change "taking advantage of" for "abusing", but yes, it's the idea.

"Abusing" means nothing in this context.  You need to pin down a definition of where you draw the line or you might as well say you don't want to "ychterstile" the game.  If ychterstile is a moving target the discussion isn't meaningful.

State your rules.

Since it is an issue, I'm mostly concerned about the choke point exploit that many people seem to use. It's the most used and extremely effective, though I've seen a screenshot where the entire base is some sort of bunker, wich seems more legit to me. Not that I'm criticising anyone, it just breaks some of the immersion for me.

Chokes are much more effective against standard raids.  They can still work against mechs and help against scythers (they're kind of bad vs centipedes compared to bog-standard kiting) but aren't the optimal method usually.

But in practice, how is a choke point "worse" than using a wall, peeking around to shoot the scyther, hiding before it can return fire (many weapons can do this), then waiting until it stops "waiting for targets" to shoot again?  If you do that it is possible to constantly shoot the mechs without them returning fire, and that's before we get into personal shields to draw fire.

With similar or identical outcomes or practical risk and arguably more cost for the "exploitative" behavior (turrets actually cost power and more resources), what is the rationale for saying one thing is an "exploit" while another thing is not an exploit?

I'm not big on the word games.  State what constitutes "exploit" in your mind explicitly so I know the rule set we're conceiving.

There are lots of ways the pathfinding AI can be used to player advantage, and if you stripped all of them you couldn't play.  So which actions are you banning for the purposes of the question?

Don't forget you can request trade caravans. I've never used it so far so I don't know if there are any limits other than silver to how often you can do it.

Another idea for Social: rework discounts. Instead of a pitiful 0.5% / level discount for everything, there would be a larger discount but only for some randomly chosen items. Some kind of hash function would be used to select which. For example in one caravan you might talk the trader into lowering the price of stone mace, military helmet and chemfuel. Another time it would be alphabeavers, t-shirts, beer, wool and granite. It would give an impression of bargain hunting, and would provoke players to experiment with different items. Higher Social skill would give you discount for more items.

You have to wait several days in between requests.  It is possible in late game colonies that your production --> purchasing power outstrips trader good availability, even more so for useful goods.  The game's kind of "over" at that point but it can happen.

Incidentally on standard sea ice (not the extreme challenge where it is literally always too cold to call caravans) it should be among your top priorities, definitely a first build after shelter/power and higher priority than hydroponics.

Visitors eat your food too.  They do it in vanilla, and it is very noticeable in sea ice.

I feel 100% justified in blowing them to smithereens as they're effectively raiding my single biggest supply bottleneck, but I need them for the trades.

[growing job seems to be a major source of out of control wealth]

Very good post, XeoNovaDan.

The growing job seems to be a major source of out of control wealth:
* selling simple meals
* parkas
* joints
* furniture (wooden plus armchairs)
* beer (used to be profitable)
* infinite wooden sculptures from tree farming

I think it's because in many biomes you can plant as much as you wish, and plants have no upkeep cost. You only plant and harvest. You literally make something out of nothing, then sell it. Mining has finite resources on the map. Loot comes from raiders. You get some plasteel from mechanoids. Leather and meat from hunting are finite.

Raids (offensive and defensive) also let you make something out of nothing.  The main difference is that for defending raids, you're rate limited by event proc.  Growing is rate-limited by the pawn(s) doing it and only marginally constrained by space on most biomes (with sea ice, ice sheet, and to a lesser extent extreme desert being exceptions).

Even for skills that let you add enough value to material to turn a profit buying --> constructing, crafting or sculpting --> selling you wind up rate-limited on trader supply of the good.  For growing you instead cap out on what useful items are available for trade (trader resource offers are finite).

However while growing is lucrative, the main case against it is that it is only a piece of the puzzle in early-mid game survival.  You CAN live without growing anything at all, but you can't live without keeping pawns alive by definition.  Growing is (a little) down the totem pole in that regard, though its contribution to food is the most straightforward way to get it.

I'd like to see a gameplay argument for changing it rather than extremely shaky evidence that doesn't fit the game's time scale or other food balance.

Gameplay is a fair argument, but there's no shaky evidence with respect to people-eating giving you more food poisoning. Think of it as eating pigs, who can host a very similar slate of pathogens as humans. That's why eating pork rare is a very bad idea.

You can make that case for raw, much less so for cooked.  Other raw meats wouldn't be far behind, and if you REALLY wanted to push realism here the human meat would still be safer than meat sitting under a roof with no cooling for a few days before being consumed etc.

The game really needs to handle the blame of damage a little better/more consistently...and also stop sending caravans pacing back and forth in a maze of traps that's obviously off the path of any route into a base to such an extent that your own pawns never go there except to rearm or haul.

It would be nice if the game handled threat consistently, but other than that revenge events aren't too bad, because you can reasonably anticipate them.  If they gave the "under threat slowdown" they would be fine.

What isn't fine is predator hunting colonists/pets without any notification or slowdown whatsoever.  It is impossible to make a self-consistent case for that behavior w/o in effect advocating that raids and such shouldn't give notifications.

Making everything "equally useful" is unrealistic (in the sense that measuring + accomplishing this from a development perspective is so constraining that it's not worth doing).  What you do want is for situations presented by the game to make options more or less desirable.

In that vein, medicine, melee, and similar skills that don't see nearly the benefit of high skill as others do need a look, as many of these types of skills are fine w/ nobody interested and your top pawn being relatively low level at it.  Melee with good micro is an effective early game option to get more high-priced clothing to use or sell and prisoners, but it's not very dependent on the skill, more so just on engineering 3v1 or more beatdowns and avoiding infect-able injuries (or making time with them very short).

Construction:

Top tier.  Creating crucial defensive structures and shelter quickly can save colonies, but these scale into building for bulk goods (dining chairs) or exotic goods (armchairs) at high-end quality and the upper tiers even count as art.  Rapid conversion of resources into cash and necessary for most everything puts these guys way up.

Growing: 

Having this high helps food efficiency which is nice, and having access to devilstrand for armor is a plus.

Cooking: 

Another way to rapidly output cash if you have the resources and something you'll probably be spamming anyway.

Crafting: 

High quality clothing sells well, has a lot of possible input materials, and contributes to armor.  You can make weapons too if that tickles your fancy.

Research: 

Crucial early game as a tribe, but if you're not a tribe the game hands you most of what you need and the rest is available fast.

Medicine:

Junk stat for now, with few exceptions.  If you use glitterworld medicine, a skill 5 disinterested oaf can 100% operations in a regular bed.  If you don't, a luci boosted bionic 20 skill doctor can still fail sometimes.  They are often (due to 50% hit rate on average) the ones that get disease so can't help much there, and most other injuries are pretty trivially handled by anybody.

Shooting:

Helpful but careful shooter trait is better on snipers and the tuning still favors killboxes/traps.  Much less micro on a good one if doing door or cover/clear "waiting for targets" type micro.

Melee:

Underestimated.  Other than the sniper strats melee can safely do what shooters can.  The problem is that sieges and mechanoids make these guys disappear.  Well micro'd melee with personal shields is arguably less risky than shootouts (defeat in detail + mostly blunt damage).  Like shooting, however, the large #'s on high difficulty and better utility of just dumping raids w/o the micro muscles melee out as a relevant skill.  Swatting people down in 1 volley of swings with 3 plasteel longswords is great times though.

Art: 

It's decent.  You get $$$ and beauty/wealth added to rooms, and that makes mood management a cinch on all difficulties.  I got stuck with 3 of these recently and managed to get them all a table, lots of exotic goods caravans called in that run.

Animals:

Suffers similarly to melee but a few of them can trash those "land in your base" events and haulers are handy.

Social:

Trade prices are the most useful benefit, and it's non-trivial.

Mining:

Crucial to those under-mountain base builders.  Inconsequential in most cases if you're not going that route.

If starting with 3 people, I would prioritize construction, growing, crafting as one with at least "interested", and at least one guy that can shoot to make into a sniper.  I play tribes almost exclusively though, and usually have < 5 people at start, so I'm often taking what I can get.  I rate construction #1 by wide margin though.  It's so versatile and consistently necessary early game.

That's why not even human poop is used as a fertilizer. Germs and parasites would run havoc.

Nope, but the food poisoning was a good point.

It's only a good point if evidence supports it.

The disease rate from cannibalism given by the only example in the OP compared against the rate of eating normal, penalty-free foods in the game suggests that cannibalism should be safer, if we're using that logic.  It's already a massively penalized act that depends on having a trait and remains a penalty for butchering if you accept most useful colonists.  A serious case hasn't been made for the need for changing it.  Inconsistent partial-realism cases being shoehorned into this game would destroy it outright if done often.

I'd like to see a gameplay argument for changing it rather than extremely shaky evidence that doesn't fit the game's time scale or other food balance.