I'm not against difficulty, I'm against unmitigatable difficulty.
The whole point of infestations was to give mountain fortresses an actual weakpoint, since sappers didn't quite work out.
Right, but there's no way to mitigate them. That's the problem.
Colonists can still reach higher levels of skill, you just have to prioritize their time better.
No, there are certain professions where it is (mathematically) impossible to gain higher levels of skill due to the way skill decay works.
If people are dying hunting animals, it's because you paid no attention to them.
Yes, the game sends you a warning. It's usually too late by the time this warning happens, as there's usually no way to escape at this point (melee attacks slow you running, and even if you rush all your colonists over to save them, they're dead before you can get there.) Again, the problem here is that it's unmitigatable.
The component bench needs components.
Right then. Let's change the tailor bench to require 5 parkas to build. Sculptor's table should require 10 finished pieces of artwork. Stonecutter's table should only be built with stone blocks...
No obviously these are terrible ideas.
Batteries and conduits short circuiting is meant to make you think about base management and how/where you place things
I'm pretty sure raids already do that effectively. I'm not against batteries exploding, but it's entirely random and there's no way to mitigate against it.
Berserk is meant to punish you. if you've gotten berserk it means you've pushed them past soft mental breaks like binging
Berserk typically happens when other bad things happen. You get hit in a raid, someone's sick, and you're in triage mode trying to deal with those problems. It's not interesting or fun when suddenly your (bed ridden) colonist with a missing arm gets up and starts attacking people. He's hurt! He's missing an arm! How does that make any sense in the game OR from a perspective of punishing the player? It's nonsense.
Jailbreaks are just that.
Name a single jailbreak in the history of mankind where the prisoners magically just walked out of a prison. Nonsense. Prisoners need to fight their way out, dig their way out, or helicopter out.
The social skill impacts the chance to recruit prisoners.
It increases the chances a meager amount, from something like 1% to 3% in most cases. This is silly.
There are a variety of attacks on the colony. have you not had a colony long enough to experience the others?
I've put hundreds of hours into the game and I don't think there's enough variety. Sue me.
animals blah blah
Animals don't make economic sense right now. That's my opinion. Thanks for making fun of me for it without giving a proper logical retort? I know how to set up a restricted zone. This isn't the problem. Llamas are maybe the most useful animal (for fur), but otherwise animals are pretty freaking useless. Once you have a decent farm it's much easier to farm cloth than to shave Llamas. Bonding is always a liability that will eventually cause Berserk to happen when animals die.
there is nothing wrong with starting on an easier difficulty
I play on the hardest difficulty and haven't had much problem with the game. I have a great colony and avoid the scenarios I outlined above because they're pretty much bullshit random difficulty that isn't mitigatable.
So for example, I don't build inside mountains. But this is dumb -- I should be able to build inside mountains SOMEHOW without stupid nonsense. There's no way to remove the mountains, so that area of land on the map is just a no build zone. That's pretty lame.