Feedback after long playthrough

[Discandied]

Some feedback from my recent Royalty play-through (https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/l2szhr/turnipwood_strive_to_survive_after_nine_years_we/) and a couple of other brief colonies. Not sure if this is the right place for this - if somewhere else is better please let me know. It was a very lightly modded laythrough so I think this all applies to vanilla and Royalty. The mods were progress renderer, interaction bubbles, more floors and prepare carefully. I played on Cassandra strive to survive, which is below my competence level really, but I like to not have to limit how much wealth I build up. There are lots of things I love about the game and the changes in 1.2, but I will just talk about things I think could possibly be improved here!

Low shield packs are OP, especially given how common they are. With how long they last it is generally possible to take out any threat, except large numbers of centipedes, before they wear off, making most threats trivial. Despite using them extensively I was usually able to have several available at any one time. This is compounded by the AI not understanding them and often running out of their protection or uselessly fire into them when it does no good. I suggest they need to be some combination of less common, much more expensive or shorter-lasting.

My main play-through was as a rebel colony fighting against the empire. This path would benefit from a bit more flavour – it worked well enough but compared to taking the nobility route it felt a but plain.

A lot of our wealth still came from raids and other threats. It would encourage the player to build more of an economy if the rewards from threats was lower still – surviving is a good enough reward by itself! In particular we seemed to get large quantities of jade being dropped.

I twice came across a bug with naming animals. It first happened to fennec foxes and then timber wolves. It became impossible to rename new-born animals – when trying to rename them the words timber wolf puppy 1 (or whatever) would not be deletable and it was impossible to write in a new name. The cursor would still move back and forth but would only move when pressing backspace, not delete. This bug only started part-way through the game – it had previously been possible to rename these types of animals – and only affected one species rather than all animals. There was no obvious trigger for it and I don't know how it could be recreated. I think this was the only bug I came across in about 200 hours of playing, however, which is impressive.

Animals should be able to find food from further away. I had about 40 horses and they would often start starving if they happened to be in the wrong part of the base, despite there being plenty for them to eat on the map. I guess there are performance reasons for it being this way?

Mechs would be much more dangerous if they did not get spread out into different groups based on their respective speeds. It is relatively easy to deal with them when you can take out the scythers, lancers, pikemen then centipedes in separate groups as they enter the kill box whereas if they stuck together their different abilities and great numbers would make them much more dangerous.

I'm a bit reluctant to say this, because it is fun, but beserk pulse is OP – it is quite east for a high level psycaster to take out an entire high strength raid by using invisibility on themselves then beserk pulse two or three times.

We had an imperial raid led by the Stellarch themselves, but no notification that the Stellarch had arrived – it felt like I should have been made aware of the significance of that colonist. I only realised because I noticed that they did not have a death acidifier when they died. (I was able to resurrect and recruit them as a new powerful psycaster, which was a highlight of the playthrough).

Drill arms are a bit OP. I was able to replace all the walls in the colony with plasteel because two colonist with drill arms and mining skill of about 15 could mine out a plasteel lump of 400-500, found with a long-range mineral scanner, in two or three hours. Field hands are similarly effective, but it feels less broken as they are needed to keep on top of the growing in large colony, whereas such increased capacity for mining is not really needed. Deep drills on the other hand feel underpowered, but possibly only compared to the long-range mineral scanner.

Threats at mineral lumps seemed to nearly always be two man-hunting guinea pigs, which rarely threatened my two colonists with assault rifles and powearms and my 40 horses. Some of the other threats on the road were more dangerous – caravan ambushes were more proportionate.

I doubled my perimeter walls and it is frustrating when raiders detroy a segmant of wall at a diagnonal that cannot then be rebuilt without deconstructing an adjacent bit of wall. Either it should be possible to rebuild (or rather deliver the resource to rebuild – if the resources are already delivered wall can be built at a diagonal) the wall at a diagonal or raiders should not be able to destroy them at a diagonal. To explain what I mean, the 'O' below can be destroyed by a raider but not rebuilt without an X being deconstructed.
                  
                                  XX
                   XOX
                      XX

Plasmaswords are usually a liability and end up causing more trouble than they are worth as they cause the surrounding area to set alight.

Caribou should be able to haul because they are used as draft animals by the Sami people in real life (and so I can do a rich explorer Santa Claus colony at the North Pole next Christmas).

Tame predators will attack wild prey animals which are too strong for them – in a brief temperate swamp fort I ran my timber wolves kept on getting wrecked attacking tortoises and ibexes, especially.

Sieges become nothing but an easier sort of raid once you have your own mortars. Could they have high shields to make it harder of the player to hit them as soon as they set-up?

There is a perverse incentive to wall in the animatree on wood scarce maps at the moment, because otherwise it will inevitably be eaten by alphabeavers, causing a de-buff to everyone on the map.