I really would like to play tribal tunnelers with Idealogy, ideally ones that don't have to go outside in their day-to-day life (so no anima tree usage whatsoever) but I have one major problem:
Insectoids feel crazy overtuned to me, and since this isn't a widespread complaint, I'ma assume there's strategies I just don't know.
Ever since infestation got added as an event, I've had trouble building mountain bases because there's simply been no way to fight them. They have never felt balanced and always felt like an impossible-to-overcome deterrant to stop you building inside mountains. So I stopped building bases in mountains after a few failed tries to sustain mountain colonies.
Right now when I have an early colony with 5 tribals and I get an infestation, I get ~6 megaspiders. By comparison, if I get mechanoids, I get ~2 scythers. One megaspider is MUCH harder for me to fight than 1 scyther is, so this is very confusing for me.
My typical strategy for fighting insectoids is to give someone a blunt weapon and heavy armor, position them in a doorway, and have three people with guns behind them firing into them. This strategy causes extreme casualties and usually takes several reloads before it doesn't cause a total colony wipe.
I am aware of two major bug-fighting strategies. One is to use Vertigo Pulse, which is extremely effective, but relies on having a psycaster with vertigo pulse, something that is absolutely not guaranteed. The other is the whole "burn them out" strategy, but I've never had a colony where that strategy is viable without destroying too much of the colony for my colonists to survive and setting up such a colony seems like an extreme end-game scenario to me.
I don't want to turn insectoids off, and all the other raids seem appropriately scaled, but every time I fight insectoids there's just WAY too many of them for an enemy that always fights to the death of every unit. Games where I last longer the insectoids often outnumber my colonists 3 to 1 counting only the megaspiders. I really just don't know how I am supposed to deal with them.
So my question is this:
How do you guys consistently kill hives, before you've researched electricity, without usually losing any colonists?
Important note: I do not use mods, and won't be persuaded to use mods. I need only vanilla strategies.