Weak caravan ambush

[Ukas]

I'm getting really weak ambushes, just now my caravan of 3 pawns and two muffalos was ambushed by a single rooster. It's been like this since 1.0, just curious is this vanilla behavior?

Mods I'm using are: Hugslib, EdB Prepare Carefully, [SYR] Set Up Camp, Facial Stuff 1.0, More Furniture 1.0, Stuffed Floors, [KV] Faction Control - 1.0, Psychology, Expanded Incidents, Colourful Sterile Tiles, Area Unlocker, [KV] Trading Spot - 1.0... and a bunch of hairmods. I uninstalled and reinstalled all the mods to see if it makes any difference, but looks like it didn't.

[togfox]

My experience is the same as yours. Caravan ambushes are not scary at all.

Base raids can get scary and exciting but caravan ambushes - never. I play on "medium" difficulty so that's probably a factor.

[Albion]

Factors are:

Time - as in "how long since you started the colony". The older, the heavier the raids. Not that impactful though.

Visibility - for frequency/chance of ambushes, not severity.

Wealth of colony/caravan - the more your caravan is worth the harder the raids will be. If you got 3 dudes with shitty gear and not much loaded on the muffalos, you'll be fine. However I once trekked across the entire planet to reach the hidden ship and had 20 bionically enhanced colonists (people also count as wealth), about 90 dromedaries and a ton of expensive stuff loaded up. You can guess what the ambushes looked like... 90 raiders are no joke!

Last but not least: Difficulty - the harder the game, the harder the raids.

[Kirby23590]

I guess the game counts for caravan wealth instead of colony wealth...

I mean their guys in my modded game had muskets and daggers and wooden weapons while my guys had Assault rifles and Automatic shotguns and a Melee Brawler that is high on go-juice with Marine armor and a Large Capacity Shield Belt...

They didn't stand a chance compared to mine...

I remember back in earlier alphas or betas that they were scary and that guy killed one of my caravaners with his machine pistol while i had 3 people and they were 5 or six of them...

[Ukas]

Caravan ambushes used to be a thing in earlier versions that's true.

In this case difficulty was Randy on rough, year 5503, colony wealth about 80-90k, 9 colonists in all. Ive been taking it easy with builing, sort of a starter base. Caravan wealth I suppose was pretty high as it was returning from an item stash mission, carrying a healer mech serum & a psychic emanator.

But the thing is, ambushes have always been similarly weak since 1.0. Missions can be demanding, like there can be 14 bears guarding an item stash or an outpost can have plenty of pirates with turrets, doomsday rocket launchers & mortars - but coming back the same caravan that took the victory against overwhelming odds is then ambushed by two-three cats... feels quite anti-climactic. If this is vanilla behavior, then hopefully ambushes will be changed, maybe not as hard as they were in A16, but still much harder than now.

[Shurp]

Caravan ambushes do seem very weak.   But I wonder if this is to help out herders?  If you have three pawns and 15 muffalo laden with goods the attack strength is probably quite a bit higher.

Then again, merchants that visit you always have a dozen or so guards.  Your caravans should too.  So regardless, ambush strength needs to be seriously increased.