So I haven't played in a while. What's new?

[Goo Poni]

Last I played was Rimworld 0.254 which I had a few problems with that made me stop playing after reaching "endgame" a couple times. Pretty much all of my issues were to do with the way Rimworld plays out. You can have a failcascade ending a several hour long game in a heartbeat and by the time it's noticed, it's out of your control, everyone becomes super depressed, cracks, stops eating and dies while a firestorm started by the 50-man raider party burns your everything. Yay. Some people like losing. I don't. "You're not supposed to win." Yeah, no me gusta.

Raids
There would come a point where raids were no longer raids. They were mercenary armies of questionable size vs your 10-15 colonists. Simply moving out to face them was not possible and your people have such high metabolisms that fighting for a couple minutes and they're in desperate need of food and at risk of cracking. Meanwhile, the raids can repeatedly suffer massive losses, you can only suffer a couple before achieving critical mass and losing. The early raids can end a game before it gets started because a raid dropped in with a couple grenadiers which will, to put it simply, fuck your shit so badly, why bother? At such an early stage in the game, you only have a couple pistols, maybe the midgame sniper rifle and several very poor shots. You can't interdict grenadiers fast enough before they blow apart the base, ruin any semblance of cover and instantly cripple any colonist caught in the blast. Late game raids, you can't hold against them. They have seriously massed firepower in their favour and even a full colony of crack shots that have mastered gunnery and are all armed with M-24s while stood in cover cannot stand against them, I've edited saves to try. I ended up giving in and building one of those waffles because it was the only thing I could do to whittle down their numbers to something manageable. Should a raiding party really necessitate building killzones or otherwise just go out there and senselessly die?

Fires
Haha, fires. I don't even need to go on about fires for very long. I just need to point out the lack of fire safety your colonists exercise when fighting an initially small fire, setting themselves on fire and then setting each other on fire while the tiny fire builds into an uncontrollable inferno because everyone is bloody well running around like headless chickens trying to pat themselves out until they drop to the floor from burns.

Trying to avoid critical mission failure
Something that I personally found to become a chore after a while. Once raids were of a sufficiently silly size that you couldn't simply get everyone in cover with whatever weapons you had and instead needed everyone to drop what they're doing, skip dinner and cower in fear of the approaching army, the game just turned into a loop of "raid, slaughter raid, have someone crack from seeing all the dead bodies, move dead bodies to a field of the dead outside base, set fire to bodies, clear away weapons left behind, squeeze in dinner and a couple hours kip, the next raid has landed". If at some point you actually lost a colonist or more, the next raid was basically going to walk over you because you don't have enough firepower to stop the flood of meat.


Taking a skimming look at the patch notes, I really don't like the look of those centipedes that are supposedly the babby stuff of what's to come. Grenadiers with absurd levels of HP that blow away massive chunks of the landscape and set fire to whatever remains from sniper rifle ranges. That's just what I needed. Yay.
Tell me I'm imagining things before I start mumbling about the inevitability of death.

[Nasikabatrachus]

Mental breaks aren't nearly as much of a threat in more recent versions. Stone walls are effective, fireproof fortifications; a double or triple-thick stone rampart would solve most raider problems and ensure your colony's survival. The latest alpha is, if anything, too easy, and you might actually find that the biggest challenge you'll face is being fooled into thinking there aren't going to be any difficult raids. Some people find mechanoids difficult to deal with, but most mechanoid raids only involve one centipede, and when you understand them well enough, all they take to kill is time. Their inferno cannons don't exactly ravage the landscape, either, and their weapons are usually outranged by a lee-enfield. If you see a centipede try to attack a turret, you'll probably be amused because it will attack from too far away to consistently threaten the turret.

Honestly, if I were you, I would wait until the next alpha, when sieges come in, but if these are your main concerns you'll probably find that, at the very least, you typically don't have to lose if you really don't want to. Just don't put all of your food into a prison room, or your people will starve before you figure out why.