Very addicting love the game honestly. The only thing that really gets me is the way the world map loads activities and settlements. It would be interesting to see more environmental storytelling through something like cold factions built for specific biomes. Unique trades and things like that which normally apply based on where a settlement is located. Also, I feel as if the whole entire planet immediatley knows of your existince as soon as you enter the map. If im on naked brutality and land on an isolated mountian blocked by impassible terrain wouldnt it make sense for certian factions to first discover you before any events like raids or traders show up?

I can't tell if I'm just very "unlucky" with my runs or if the game is just very dull and tedious.

For the 70 hours I have, I think there were only a couple events I remember really having fun with, one where I destroyed a raid by throwing a hundred boomrats at it (I hadn't figured out how to sterilize pets so I had too many) by changing their allowed zone, and one where I threw 90 foxes at a raid of 50+ tribal people at a choke point and the foxes absorbed all the hits while my colonists shot the tribals (they had tunneled through my base walls, thus making a perfect choke point to grind them down at).

Otherwise? It's just been lots of "mechanoid" (robot) raids ground to paste against turrets, traps, and IEDs. Lots of small raids gunned down with no losses on my end, random climate events that should have been challenging but weren't somehow. Like I had a fallout event that just lead to a few colonists having minor mental breaks as I tunneled and built more hydroponic farms only for those to not be needed as I had a couple years of food stored.

I kept going in and upping the difficulty but then it just kept throwing more dull mechanoid raids, defoliator, and psy ships. Like the higher I went on difficulty, the less interesting things the game threw at me, just more mechanoid raids that funneled into choke points where melee guys hit their sides, then turrets and ranged people gun them down. Like the combat isn't that hard to optimize your chances for, and fighting at the edge of what your raid group or base is capable of just turns it more into a sort of dice roll on attacks, but without much to watch or get out of it.

I can't tell if I just have the worst luck with colonists I got or if I'm missing something or what, but it was mostly just kind of babysitting them, making the base better (all marble, carpet, and limestone) and then they just take a bunch of time slowly grinding away at making or farming or building. You get some "crazy" or low stability one and all they do is break down over eating without a table despite there being dozens of tables surrounded by chairs, then go break some stuff and you rebuild it.

I kept hoping to try and roleplay something there but the game doesn't give you enough control of individuals for that. Conversely, the game never gave me enough of a story, so it was just things like "oh, this guy lost a leg, guess he gets a peg leg from the doctor... Oh, the surgery failed? Try again." which wasn't a lot. For contrast, I remember playing kenshi and wanting a cyborg, so I kept roleplaying that one crazy guy hated himself and kept jumping into acid pools until his limbs fell off (screaming the whole time) only to be rescued and healed by allies... All while craving the suffering... then he got the cheapest cybernetic limbs money could buy. Conversely, in Rimworld, I tried replacing a guys limbs with wood ones and he was just very slow and inefficient with no real interesting attributes or reaction, so I couldn't really give him a story, didn't get a story from him, and couldn't really do much with the guy.

The economy never got all that tricky or anything as it seems a bit easy to get a large overpopulation of animals to sell off, which carry their own weight and graze to get food so even sending them out to trade isn't a big deal. Most of the time, just setting up a caravan and finding all the junk in all the inventories became the biggest part of any trade, not the trip or anything, so I don't know there.

The missions I tried all seemed very cookie cutter or something, maybe that was just really bad luck? like, you get a small base with a couple turrets, batteries, and solar panels. So you have a sniper shoot out the batteries, pick off the straggler defenders, then arrange your guys in cover, flank with some melee and take out the rear, and you win uneven odds with no losses? That happened 3 or 4 times for me, with the only others being dealing with some rabid squirrels and similar things. I guess I got a couple travel events, but all but one was pretty bland, with that one just involving a single tribal guy with no weapons or clothes attacking a group of 3. I didn't like one of my party members so I had the others stand back and had the one guy of mine I hated fist fight the tribal... unfortunately my worthless guy won so nothing good came of it.

I looked at the DLC and got my hopes up when I heard about the royalty thing and titles, but then from what I could tell, they didn't add anything like peasant revolts or anything, so I can't really get the fun I want form those. I tried mods, but couldn't find anything that hooked me or anything like that. I mean, I couldn't find any complex social breakdown type mods or revolt mods, or ones that interested me.

Overall, the more I played the more depressed I got, I started to feel more like I was sitting at a slot machine, where instead of money going in it was just time. You build up and wait, hoping for a fun event or some attack that tests your defenses, but then you get another defoliator ship. You build up even more defenses, hoping to get a big attack or something, then more mechanoids show up, walk into an IED next to a wood pillar, and get crushed in a cave in while their allies on the other corner run into a bunch of traps next to a wall of turrets and their allies in the other corner go single file through your defensive gate into yet more traps and turrets. I kept hoping for something new, but as I grew my base, it just became more about trying to micromanage all the colonists and hear about how the 80 year old married the 20 year old and they want to share a bed now, and then the sniper guy kind of wants a fancier room but doesn't care enough to cause problems, etc. Then another mechanoid ship crashed and is trying to drive my colonists crazy, but they are all too happy from their lavish meals, carpeted bedrooms, and perfect rec room to break... then it repeats and repeats.

The game also seems to require too much of my attention to do something like watch a show or whatever while I play, but not enough interesting stuff happens for me to really enjoy the time there or feel like I'm doing much. It's more like it's trying to get me to be excited for the next event, but it then just gives me more of the same.

I don't know, I keep looking at all the positive reviews and feel like I'm loosing my mind or missing something or I'm broken or something...

Seems okay so far.