Witnessed some shit:
Wandering around the Cannibal lands, I come across one of their villages. On one side, they're fighting Screaming Bandits, on the other, there's two spider bots just absolutely going to town, flinging corpses into the air. The town looked like a kicked anthill - giant waves of both the skinny little cannibals and the larger, better armed cannibals just going nuts fighting both threats. I stayed long enough to fill our backpacks with the cleavers that both the bandits and cannibals use, then nope'd out of there.
Further south, we saw a giant red stain on the terrain. Went to check it out - it appears that a large group of Cannibals had run into Beak Things, and not done well. Torn limbs everywhere. The beak things that had done it were still nibbling on the corpses, but my party was able to handle them well enough.
So yeah, turns out armor is good. Bodypaint will not save you against the cold iron embrace of the machines, nor the ripping claws of animals.
Edit: Since triple-posting would be crass, I'll just add on here.
Had an epic fight where about two dozen or so Starving Bandits ran into a camp of about a dozen Dust Bandits, and I was able to goad a Holy Nation High Paladin patrol into joining in the fun. Near the end, a group of wild buffalos charged in and started goring random fighters - I'm not even sure how that happened. My group mostly stayed in the outskirts, firing crossbows into the fray, taking down anyone that leaked from the main melee. Not surprisingly, it ended with my team against the High Paladin and three normal Paladins, but they were at least slowed down by the previous fighting, and we managed to put them down without too much trouble.... well, except for poor Cat.
We rescued Cat out of a holding cell in the Dust Bandit's Tower. An old man with fairly cruddy stats, he'd been slowly training up and getting stronger... until our fight against a giant raptor we found guarding a nest of valuables on Raptor Island, when one of his arms was bitten off. Cat was a trooper and continued on, using one-handed weapons, as we looped around back towards our base, where it just so happened that we had an Ancient Empire tech arm that we could fit him with.
Anyway, long story short, one of the Paladins' giant longswords cleaved off one of Cat's legs; poor guy just can't catch a break. We carried him back to base and fitted him with the arm, but he's currently useless without a leg. He's been left at base, and a new expedition has been planned - to travel over to the North East portion of the map - where I've never been - but I hear that there are high quality robotic limbs avilable (no Hiver junk for my man Cat!)