Strategies for Mech Clusters [Royalty]

[codyo]

I'm wondering what are your strategies for dealing with these drop-in mech bases that have turrets and mech with maximum firing ranges of your own guns. High damage. High burst fire rates that negates any low accuracy. And so on.

Besides bombing them with EMP and high-explosives, how do you deal with them without your colonists immediately getting shredded when walking into view? I'm low on colonists already and they're not exactly disposable with how few recruitment chances I'm getting.

[RicRider]

I've been dealing with them very effectively by combining more melee characters than I usually am used to with the new smoke grenades/launchers. Basically RimWorld feels a lot more like a tactical RPG now when it comes to the battles as I find myself constantly pausing and microing things like setting up a smoke screen for melee to advance on the ranged mechs and turrets while my ranged people deal with scythers.

I'm also doing a lot more terraforming of the map than I'm used to and setting up choke points in different places with traps and IEDs instead of just building one killbox. I haven't faced any centipedes yet but I hope by then I have recon or marine armor for my melee and I'm hoping to be able to bash their skulls in.

[codyo]

...smoke screen for melee to advance on the ranged mechs and turrets while my ranged people deal with scythers.

I've actually had some success with smokescreens too for when lancer mechs approach. Except it's more like psionic smoke
I'll have to invest more in these kinds of weapons for the future then.

[codyo]

I've just went through a quest where 4 mech clusters dropped. Where one dropped inside my base(I got a free anti-mortar shield now). Another with automatic mortars dropped somewhere else. A third had a centipede factory. The fourth came with an EMI building that stops all electrical equipment. Man this is kinda overwhelming. I still haven't destroyed the fourth cluster, I'm going to be stuck in the stone-age until my colonists recover from the other 3. At least I completed the quest. I was supposed to keep 4 visitors alive and I did that. I'm sure they weren't expecting to leave the colony with missing limbs, infections and new mental scars when the quest began.

I'm playing on the "Rough" Cassandra difficulty so I guess this is what I deserve. This is tough Tynan.