Incident the First
Back in an alpha 4 game, I'd recently captured a prisoner and was trying to recruit him to the colony's cause. Unfortunately, though, food was extremely scarce after a badly-timed crop blight and the colony was desperately harvesting nearby wild bushes to avoid starvation.
One of my wardens decided to give the prisoner a feed using the last cooked meal in the stockpile. The prisoner was asleep at the time so the warden decided to just leave the food on the floor. A minute or so later I noticed another one of my colonists in the prison room eating the meal instead... and because there were no table and chairs in the colony, they'd decided to just enjoy their meal on top of the prisoner. Clearly his sentiment was something like: "Filthy raider scum, no food for you! Now stay still!"
Incident the Second
Another day, another colony. The place had been running for just nearly a year when a damaged ship part crashed just outside the perimeter. After having only just kicked a raider siege out of their back yard, my colonists were worn down and still running around in the aftermath trying to fix their digs back up. A telepsychopathic AI wasn't exactly on their Christmas list. Still, hope was not lost - a couple of days pass and things settle down enough for me to wonder how best to tackle the timebomb outside. Then another siege starts.
Resigning myself to accept this was likely to be a game over, I checked where the new raiding party was setting up. It was within a sniper rifle's distance of the ship wreckage. Suddenly, I had an idea, and drafted my least-injured colonist into action. I sent her toward a "service entrance" that exited the colony walls just a stone's throw away from the wreckage. Crossing my fingers, I got her to ping the crashed ship with a pistol bullet, then hot-foot it back into safety. Phew! She barely had time to get into cover before the spontaneous horde of at least a half-dozen each of scythers and caterpillars set sight on her, but escape into safety she did.
Extermination circuits at full charge, the mechanoids started heading toward the colony's main entrance to take revenge on the poor scrub who woke them up. Fortunately, though, my plan worked deliciously - I knew they might be easily distracted, for example by the overenthusiastic raiders taking potshots at them from just across the way... and so they were. The mechs decided raider blood was tastier than mine and a fairly one-sided firefight ensues between them and the siegers.
But things soon took a turn down silly avenue when a hitherto unnoticed group of visiting wanderers decided to pass through the exact middle of the ongoing battle...
The mechanoids wiped out both siegers and visitors in the resulting hilarity, but were badly weakened in the process, enough that my ragtag band of survivors could finish them off without casualties. Yes, a previously friendly neighbouring faction now hated my guts, but the colony endured a while longer, and that's all that mattered!
Bonus Incident the Third
(I'd have spoiler tagged this so it didn't take up room in the main thread but there doesn't seem to be the option here. Sorry for semi-offtopicness.)
It was in the early days of a colony struggling to fend off bandits and wildlife. All of my people were injured and barely able to get themselves fed, let alone fix the horrid ramshackle mess of the place they had to live in. Then another group of raiders arrive, seven of them to my four. Fearing the worst I drafted everyone for a last stand.
The battle was fierce but against all odds the raiders were driven off! One colonist lay dead and another two were incapacitated, but the fourth was fit enough to rescue them. Oh, and tackle the miniature blazing inferno that the mostly wooden colony had become at the hands of the raiders' molotovs.
Dilemma: Extinguish fires or rescue critically injured colonists? I pick rescuing, but both of the poor blighters were at death's door and too far from their (burning) bedrooms. My only option is to create a couple of new sleeping spots nearby in a section that's already been mostly burnt out.
The brave lone hero rescues one fallen comrade from the wreckage and heads toward the other, but alas, death claims them before he could get there. Saving his grief until later, the hero mustered what little energy he had left to fight the fires. He could only do so much. Eventually, with fires still raging, he succumbed to exhaustion and collapsed in his own bed.
He slept so deeply that he didn't hear the terrible crunching noise of the roof above the emergency sleeping spot collapsing on top of his injured friend...
Awakening to an eery silence, the hero left his bedroom and stared numbly at the scene. Already at his wit's end, he finally snapped and decided to leave the accursed place for good. Game over.
