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It's interesting you say that as a few posts down from yours some people were saying the mech clusters make the game too hard.

What difficulty are you playing on now? would turning it up a notch be better?

Randy Rough, my complaint has nothing to do with Clusters though.

I've always avoided big rimworld mods like Glitterworlds, Rimfeller, GeneticRim More Vanilla Turrets, Embrasures, etc because I felt they added optiosn that were simply way too powerful to your arsenal. I always enjoyed the well-tuned balance of Vanilla rimworld, where all methods of defending your colony come with serious advantages and drawbacks, but with the addition of this DLC, it seems the balance has been thrown way off.

For the relatively small sacrifice of having to make one fancy throne/bedroom and having one colonist be useless to your colony in times of peace, you gain a colonist who is singlehanded more powerful than the rest of your colony combined. Psycasts like Berserk allow you to single handedly destroy entire enemy raids without firing a single shot, whereas before you would have to burn an expensive rare artifact to get rid of an especially strong raider, with Berserk and a little micromanagement, you can get the entire raid to kill itself without firing a shot yourself.

Psycasts like wallraise have incredible potential for abuse, allowing you to allow only a couple pawns of a raid into your killbox, wall of their friends and kill them easily with overwhelming firepower. Burden, vertigo pulse and skip allow you to trivialize any melee raids or manhunter packs since you can slow them to a crawl allowing ample time to gun them down, then simply teleport them away the instant they get close. Almost all the psy powers are absurdly powerful, especially considering how small the sacrifice to gain them is.

Then there's the bladelinked weapons, which almost completely remove any reason to use normal melee weapons from the game, these things seem to be 2, maybe 3 times more powerful than their non-linked counterparts, I regularly have my pawns singlehandedly melee a grizzly bear or megasloth to death without suffering a single scratch using them.

I sent a convoy of 4 colonists to raid a pirate base, however none of them ever had to fire a shot, since my Baron singlehandedly wiped out half their forces by simple getting them to kill eachother in berserking rages, then going invisable and meleeing the stragglers to death easily. Despite being outnumbers 4 to 12 and having to clean up 5 turrets guarding the base, the only injuries my colonists sustained from the raid was a nick on the leg from a turret when i got careless destroying the base's powergrid afterward.

This is all not even mentioning that you can call in 3 different types of reinforcements for no cost at all to your colony once you've got a Baron colonist.

I don't like to complain about balance in games, and I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me, but in it's current state, the entire carefully balanced vanilla experience has been overwhelmed by the far, far superior options added in the Royalty DLC. There is no longer any real reason to have your colonists all pick up a gun and fight it out with the raiders, or to build elaborate killboxes or heat-traps, or to train massive amounts of labrador retrievers to maul your enemies, all these defensive strategies are far far more expensive and less effective than simply grinding some royal favour with the empire and building a fancy room.

Is anyone else noticing this?

I got one colonist out with my ship a few weeks and a couple of updates back, assuming the ship cost hasn't changed since then here's my feedback.

It seemed like the main cost of the ship was in labour not in resources, (what was it, 36 advanced components? That was a whole lot of work, even for my lvl 17 crafter working all day). Because of the time it takes to build so many Adv components I started the ship escape sequence before I had all my ship parts built, and managed to finish the last component of it on the same day that the reactor finished charging. All in all I felt the ship cost, time to charge and final sequence are pretty well tuned, challenging but not too hard.

Also I've had a similar experience with caravan recreation and stress as the others in this thread, I feel like either caravan needs to provide a decent amount of recreation, or maybe just apply a flat mood bonus, 'On the Road +5' or something of that sort.

I've noticed that packing a large amount of things for a caravan really breaks the game. While packing colonists refuse to stop for recreation so if the packing takes longer than a day or so my colonists will start breaking nonstop because they're recreation starved. I hope something can be done to fix this because it's really hampering the effectiveness of my caravans.

Everyone seems to be talking about avoiding wealth growth as a way of reducing raid size and seeing it as a negative thing, but perhaps it doesn't have to be that way.

Maybe some sort of 'mercenary' mechanic could be added to the game, allowing you to pay friendly factions as mercenaries to protect your colony. Essentially the idea behind this would be that you pay a 'subscription fee' to a faction, say X amount of wealth/silver every Y days and in exchange they protect you, either bolstering your defenses with heavily armed pawns of their own that would simply hang around your base (maybe even manning defense stations that you tell to man instead of simply running headlong into battle and dying like the current friendlies) or weakening enemy raids (simply reducing enemy raid size by some multiplier).

A system like this is already in place in the game with friendlies, but imo they tend to be a little too useless lategame since their numbers and gear seem vary so much. A dedicated money for protection system would provide a way to sacrifice wealth for safety, allowing people who simply want to get rich without having significant setbacks for it to have a proper system to achieve their goals, slowing their growth but preventing catastrophic losses in raids. This would also allow players to increase their wealth growth rate at the cost of greater risk of catastrophe from raids.

I don't know if this is a good idea, but it's just a thought I had

I have had this occur multiple times on this playthrough so far and it seems pretty clear what is happening. When an animal is outside of their allowed area and is pathing back to their allowed area (such as when a drafted animal is heading back to his allowed area) he appears to take the fastest possible path. The only problem with this is that the fastest possible path is usually lined with traps in my base. While the animals are normally able to path around these when heading back to their allowed area they will simply walk straight through them and die.

Storyteller: Cassandra, started rough
Difficulty: started rough but switched to savage about two years in
Biome/hilliness: Desert, small hills
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 330 something ish I think? not sure
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10 hours
Complete mod list: Numbers

Just finished my playthrough by sending the ship out. Starting with the classic crashlanded scenario in the desert and set up a basic base next to a river. I was doing a playthrough where I had one of my starting colonists designated a VIP and I had the goal of keeping her alive for the entire playthrough and getting her off the planet at all costs.

The first few years went by quite well, I was lucky to have a decent amount of soil so I was farming potatoes and corn and was raising a large (~30ish) army of labradors to fight my battles for me. I have to say the labrador army felt really balanced, at their best they could really do some damage but it certainly did take a lot of food and work to keep up and on harder raids I could have 5-15 labradors die just in one raid. My first and second colonist deaths were sudden, one of my colonists was struck in the heart by a scyther's first shot and killed instantly as he ran to cover and the other had her sternum shot out by a uranium turret a day after a battle when oen of the downed enemies got up to walk away and my the turret missed and shot my colonist instead. I lost two more colonists to friendly fire from turrets, both one shot through the back of the head when I forgot to tell the turret to cease fire.

After losing two of my colonists to a sapper raid that managed to get inside my base with grenades and rocket launchers (and kill 15 of my hounds in the process) I accepted a prisoner quest to save a prisoner from a pirate camp with some turrets and a guard. I formed a caravan of four of my best pawns and a camel, packed 6 days of food for the 2 day journey and set on my way. The rescue went off without a hitch, but on the way back is where the trouble came in. I had sent one of my colonists who was addicted to luciferium along with the caravan, but I had forgotten to pack a pill with him, and on the way back he began to enter luci withdrawal. To make the matter even worse, he was my VIP, the colonist I had sworn to protect even if it meant the life of every other colonist I had. I quickly sent a one man caravan out carrying nothing but some food and one pill of luci and set up a second colony where my VIP and his caravan stopped to rendezvous with the pillbearer. We got to the colony, the VIP took his pill and then decided before we go to raid an ancient danger, that too went off without a hitch but unfortunately the days without recreation, beds or tables had taken their toll on the colonists. Just after the ancient danger raid was finished four of my now 6 colonists (4 colonists from the initial caravan, one rescued prisoner and the pillbearer) decided to have a mental break. Normally this wouldn't be so bad but unfortunately for me, my VIP decided now would be a great time to go catatonic. With my VIP catatonic I could not leave the camp with him in tow, carrying his unconscious body was simply not an option the caravan screen gave me. So as we were running out of food we threw the VIP into one of the ancient danger cryptopods and made our way home. Once home we loaded pod launchers and sent two colonists over with some wood, steel, components and food, we planned to simply babysit the VIP in his catatonic state until he woke up and we could go home. After a few close raids at the camp our VIP finally woke up and we managed to evac him back to the safety of the motherbase. The entire process had been much more trouble then it should have been but ultimately it was really fun and i'm glad it happened.

Shortly after that we decided to build the ship to evac our VIP, we set it up, built the reactor, some of the components and one cryopod, only the VIP was allowed to leave. We powered up the reactor and prepared for a fight, i had never made the ship before so I didn't really know what to expect. The ship was not quite complete yet as I had only built one engine not knowing that I needed three so I was racing against time somewhat trying to procure enough uranium and advanced components to finish the final two engines.

The first few raids were tough, and we lost a few colonists, but we were managing pretty well. On the harder raids we would call for reinforcements and we were giving away tens of thousands of silver pieces to maintain our faction relationships. As the reactor timer ticked down though things got more and more hectic, short recovery times between raids had forced me to field smaller forces and our hound population was reduced from 50 to less than 20 suprisingly quickly. I lost a few colonists and there were perpetually colonists on mental breaks from the combined stress of them losing their wifes, daughters, fathers and bonded animals by the bushel but we were holding together. The worst raid was small tribal raid that should have been easy to deal with, they came as 3 small raiding groups simultaneously, but unfortunately I did not realize that until too late, if i had realized that the tribals were coming from three different raids i could have easily dealt with them, but my forces were all positioned to deal with only one raid. By the time I realized there were two other raiding parties they had a few of my stray colonists in their clutches. I scrambled to redirect my troops but the tribals were able to escape, taking 6 of my colonists hostage with them. This was a massive blow to me, up until then I had 15 colonists, now I had only 9, and one of them was catatonic, making my able bodied colonist count drop to 8, not including colonists tied up in sickbay and other mental breaks. I barely scraped by for the remainder of the countdown and my colonists were mental breaking left and right, luckily though we were able to hold on and we managed to get our VIP out without losing another colonist.

By the end the hallways of my base were painted red with blood, all of my colonists except the VIP were missing limbs, digits and eyes, but we had triumphed, we had got the VIP off the planet.

This was a really excellent playthrough, it was the first playthrough that I really started to use caravans and I found them to be really fun, I encountered no bugs and the balance seemed pretty good for the most part. I think i'm going to end my game here because I accomplished the goal i set out to accomplish , but this was definitely my best playthrough yet, and my first planet escape in 215 hours of play.

I liked the new deadfall traps a lot, I built them all out of stone as I was in a desert and I found them quite powerful, but still balanced as the 30 stone is takes to lay them adds up quick.

The uranium slug turrets were really really good, and I liked using them a lot, the power of those things is not to be trifled with, they one hit many pawns, (including some of my own colonists) and watching them instagib manhunting rhinos and elephants was really satisfying. I also feel like these are in a great place balancewise, they're extremely powerful long range, their massive explosion radius upon destruction, expensive cost and inability to fight close range balance them well IMO.

All in all this playthrough took 30 hours.

A few quick bits of feedback.
I think the being downed from just food poisoning thing is ridiculous and kind of obnoxious, if you don't have a high level chef it happens all the time and it really is annoying. Also currently waterwheels are way too strong, with the locking of solar panels behind a technology is means right now you pretty much have to drop by a river if you want viable earlygame power options in a low wood environment now.

Just lost a playthrough on Cassandra rough, lost a colony in a temperate plains biome.

From the very beginning I had a colonist with a high animals skill so I figured i'd try to build an army of animals to defend myself. Unfortunately having one colonist out of three tied up managing animals constantly caused a massive labour shortage in my colony. There were constantly things needing to be done and never enough hands to do them. Eventually this labour shortage led to serious morale problems, after a harsh raid in which every colonist was wounded one of my pawns snapped and decided to murder my best pawn, we grouped up by the doorway and beat her when she came in, but unfortunately the scuffle ended up with two of my pawns developing infections, effectively putting them both out of play as they had to bed rest in hopes of surviving the infection. This further compounded the labour storage and soon my potatoes were ready to harvest, but there was no one to harvest them, no one was cutting wood to build anything because everyone was busy with other vital tasks and my beastmaster seemed to prioritize taming wild animals over tame ones so I simply ended up with an army of untrained useless muffalo, alpaca and boar. Eventually a raid came, about 6 raiders armed to the teeth with SMGs and the like. My colonists, comparatively were armed with nothing but survival rifles, pistols and knives. My best fighter was out of play due to food poisoning so it was up to my brawler and another colonist to repel the army. Needless to say it went horribly, my brawler positioned herself behind the herd of sleeping animals and attempted to use them as a distraction, when the firing started they ran in every direction, and while they did successfully manage to draw some fire the herd never attacked as my beastmaster never trained any of them. The raiders were simply too well equipped for my colonists to fight, especially with our best fighter unconscious in bed. They downed every animal in the colony and kidnapped 2 colonists, leaving only one colonist, sick in bed and starving because of his gut worms.