It’s less about wanting raids to be casual and more about wanting them to feel more like a (sometimes very) challenging part of the game and its setting that I can beat. Not like it feeling that there’s someone (ironically this is one of the points of the storytellers) behind the game actively trying to “beat” me.
Eh. Honestly, the raids aren’t a big deal (and regardless are a design philosophy I fully respect) My real problem with Rimworld — although I easily love it — is wealth. Having game difficulty scale with how well you’re doing and how much stuff you have is very much a good thing, but the wealth system is annoying.
Makes a lot of upwards progression feel a bit like a punishment, and introduces the annoyingly gamey system of actively watching and having to manage your wealth if you want to live more.
I will say that I hate the change to mortars. It feels like a gamey hamfisted fix to a problem that wasn't really a problem, and now we have the weird situation where we can make spaceships and high tech armor and stuff but... not mortar barrels?
Right?? As… dubiously useful as mortars are in 1.2, they’re fun. Shelling it out with enemies. Nailing that perfect shot. And so on. Now they’ll just be another gamey powerup.
At least Tynan confirmed a setting to keep 1.2 mortars.
I agree with this, having difficulty scale with wealth is both good and bad. Having the player always have a relevant challenge is a good thing, but it can also lead to oddities. I recall one thread about some dude hoarding piles of herbal medicines, and then after they all got destroyed in a fire, raid difficulty dropped significantly. Wealth isn't always the best indication of preparedness-- marginal utility and all that. Medicine is good to have but after you have a stack of say, 100, quickly becomes redundant and doesn't actually increase your ability to resist a raid. So some other metric to determine how prepared you actually are (number of colonists, weapons, turrets, etc.) could enhance that aspect of the game.
As for the mortars I don't really know. I admit I only ever play CE so I'm not familiar with any vanilla mortar changes, and maybe my experience with CE also skews my interpretation of the difficulty of the base game.
The problem is that you can't build defenses that scale with the attackers in a way that's practical when tunneling enemies are a thing. You get damage sponge enemies that require a bunch of concentrated fire to kill, but they can and do attack where you don't have concentrated fire.
The solution to this is defense-in-depth, which is how I tend to build my colonies in mind with now. Instead of one defensive perimeter you concentrate all your fire with, the idea is to layer defenses so they support each other while forward troops can fall back into the further back positions. All of my colonies also have a central redoubt-- a bunker of last resort everyone can congregate in a worst-case raid, and I don't think it ever gets used.
YMMV and also I don't think you're supposed to have every raid go perfectly-- if that's your cup of tea I respect that, and losing some people you really like sucks some times, but in the end I think it makes Rimworld a better game that death can be so sudden and immediate.