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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
34 
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Basics:
1) Avoid bringing colonists who are incapable of violence in your initial group. They can be fine to recruit later, but you need the firepower early on.
2) Try to maintain a ratio of 1 melee unit per 3 ranged units. Ranged units are useless without blockers, since they won't shoot at melee range. Melee is also just generally very good.
3) Always, always, always utilize cover for your colonists. Even 50% cover means you'll average out to taking half as many injuries from fights.
4) Always target units that are outside of cover first. You're just more likely to hit them and you'll bias the fight in your favor.
5) Focus on buying/crafting weapons and armor as quickly as possible. Again, reducing the damage you take in fights puts fights in your favor and reduces recovery time.
6) Send colonists out hunting animals to help them train their shooting skill.
The game BY DEFAULT wins that encounter without your input, so something you're doing is actively harming your chances.
If you don't believe me, do this next time the first animal raid appears ;
1) Have the starting knife, rifle, and pistol equipped. armor and helmet on the knife character.
2) Draft your three characters and put them in open field, packed together, with line of sight in all directions
3) Have the knife character closest to where the animal is coming from
4) Litterally don't interact with the game in any way. Don't order them to move, don't even order them to shoot.
I can guarantee you they'll win that fight easily, most likely with zero injury, maybe with a scratch if you're extremely unlucky. You have to actively prevent them from shooting or hitting back for them to lose. Even in a 1v1 your colonist would win as long as the player doesn't stop him from hitting back.
Obviously, building one or two traps would also win you the fight automatically.
No it's not, spike traps and trap corridors lose to any serious raid past the first month
If you face ranged enemies, again, melee is a great answer, just from around a corner this time, jumping them like a mugger to negate the range advantage surprise, enemies won't shoot if stuck in melee so you can just dunk on them without their gun helping while they struggle to fight back. Alternatively sit behind a wall and use it as cover, the colonist will lean around it to fire and be heavily protected from weapon fire.
Once you are a little estabilished turn your thoughts to a very happy crafter, pamper them real good and craft some gear (not out of steel, dear god steel is such crap as a material on anything with material options) Steel is such trash.
Do remember enemy raiders are just pawns for the most part, often with poor skills for what they are doing and crappy worthless (normal) quality gear and often steel weapons. Babies to the slaughter against anyone using anything half decent. Your goal once you survive the initial raids is to get better gear and stat boosts then the enemy so your pawns can kill multiple raider each with as much ease as you can manage.
It's not spikes traps, I haven't built a spike trap in years and my typical play is blood and dust or losing is fun. You can build a couple early game if you are a solo colonist run or something but that's about it. Can waste a lot of time and resources building traps constantly and get less done around the base because of it.
Learn from this and have 2 tiles of packed dirt (I believe its vanilla now ?) between your base, your farm and the surrounding forest.
And if you don't have defenses during initial raids, why not bring the fight outside the base ? Use chunks as cover, if you outnumber them spread out and surround them, if they outnumber you clump up and focus fire on the least covered enemies one by one.
Dont have the melee guy also be your doctor. Its also advice for them to not be your cook either. The first is obviouse, melee people tend to take more damage and thus you need a uninjured doctor to mend them. But you will be surprised how fast your stacks of meals go when your cook in laying in bed for a few days.
When dealing with manhunters, dont fight them in the open.
Go inside, click on the door and set it to hold open. Have your melee guy stand on the inside of the door. with your ranged people behind them. Make sure they are not standing in the door way as 3 animals can attack that 1 tiles. have them just on the inside so its your 3 people can melee attack that one tile. If you have 3 melee people that is. But one is enough to body block the door.
Ranged attacks cant friendly fire for the first few tiles so you shouldnt have to worry about shooting him in the back.
When your fighting raiders with guns you want your people behind walls. They will peek around corners to shoot and this gives them the most cover. MUCH more than sandbags give.
Sandbags are newb bait. They offer moderate cover, better than a rock or tree but not by much.
The pawns skill level for shooting is very important for accuracy and so is range. The closer the target the higher the accuracy. So often times is best to wait for the raider to get pretty close before you stop out and shoot. Some guns like the lee endfield rifle and the sniper rifle actually get less accuracy up close than at medium range.
So once they enemies are up close it might be a good idea for them to move into melee. Pawns engaged in melee cant shoot. So you can engage with melee to prevent the raider from shooting and have your other people move into better shooting positions.
I thought I struck jackpot with one of my colonists. Very diligent student, two flames in melee, medical, social, and intellectual, plus one flame in construction and mining. I was going to be setting up in a mountainous map, so that's a ton of boxes checked with one colonist!
Except... she could only do one of those jobs at a time. Construction took up so much time she couldn't mine, and my "mountain base" was more "huts along a cliff" for a year until I got someone I could dedicate to only mining. Likewise with intellectual, she never had time until I picked up someone I could make a dedicated researcher. She's my best melee and only doctor. (I've been trying to train others with no passion by having them sterilize excess livestock, and the results have been a series of decapitations and disembowelments...) It's basically a meme at my base that in every raid, she's the only one who ever gets injured, and she's at 19 medical almost exclusively from self-tending.
That's still VE - Architect only. For vanilla, you use concrete, which is not much different.
Roof the wall two tiles on either side and remove nearby vegetation for a cheap way of preventing wildfires from threatening your base. Upgrade to stone walls when possible for greater durability and fire immunity.
Then I would suggest roof ! Concrete floors makes for a costy project if you have a somewhat large base. But with a plain roof, its free (safe for some pillars or 1x1 walls for support). Roof prevents plants from growing under them, making sure fire don't spread through a line of roofed patch around your base. It does take some time for existing foliage to die out, but you could order your pawns to cut them.
Edit : I see its been suggested. Sorry @Vermillion_Cardinal, I didnt read your bottom comment hehe.
What are your starting colonists like? I presume you're not doing the naked and alone scenario, since you're using plural to describe your colonists...
You can reroll your colonists. Some people like to challenge themselves by limiting how much they reroll, but if you're having trouble, make liberal use of rerolls until you get colonists with a good range of skills. You can click-drag colonists up and down, and any colonists not in the top slots will not come along, so just use those for colonists who are all right but you still want to try rolling some more to see if you can get something better.
Reroll any colonist that has crippling conditions that make them unsuited for survival, like being 80 years old, having severe dementia, frailty, asthma, and cancer. Likewise, do not take anyone with dangerous traits like pyromaniac or gourmand. Don't take anyone who is incapable of violence in your starting colonists.
Passions are more important than skill ranks. If you have passions, you'll get skill ranks later. Just count flames.
EVERY pawn should be trained in either melee or shooting. For crashlanded, you start with two guns and one knife, so you want two shooting-passion pawns and one melee-passion pawn. When you land, make sure the melee-passion pawn puts on all the armor. (Flak vest, flak helmet, flak pants.) Obviously, they get the knife, too. When you get further in the game and start having options to recruit prisoners or such, turn away anyone who doesn't have a passion in either melee or shooting unless you have a really dire need for something. (I have a pacifist pawn in my current game who's a dedicated research pawn. She hasn't seen the sun in years, she's just chained to the research desk.)
Your other crucial early-game skills are construction, crafting (to make more weapons and armor), cooking, plants, and social (to recruit new colonists). You can technically get by without plants if you can do lots of hunting and go carnivore, although meat is annoying early-game when you don't have a freezer.
It's not a bad idea to hunt often, even if you're just shooting rats, because it provides food, leather, and trains your shooting skill. Just remember that you shouldn't hunt any animals that have revenge chance until you're confident you could handle it if they went manhunter.
Make some dusters out of your leather. Wear the good ones, and then form a caravan and go trade with nearby settlements, selling the other dusters you made. Buy guns, armor, special melee weapons like monoswords, items like psychic shock lances, and some components, uranium, and steel with the money you get selling dusters. Don't horde money, it exists to be spent on weapons and armor. Trade in that garbage revolver ASAP and buy something useful, like a chain shotgun or assault rifle. In my current game, I managed to buy a masterwork chain shotgun in the first year, gave it to my best shooter, and she deletes threats. She can solo smaller melee tribal raids, they just die before they get to her so long as she stands behind a chokepoint.
Research smithing early, and make a uranium mace for your melee. Uranium maces are great to end game. I have a masterwork uranium mace on one of my melee pawns, and it does 44 damage per hit with 60% armor penetration. It takes 40 damage to destroy a human torso in one hit, and the best armor in the game has 50% blunt armor on normal quality, so this is a one-hit-kill weapon. Crafting skill and research is key to making high-quality equipment of your own, I didn't get a masterwork until I had a 19 skill crafter. Train crafting by making dusters - tailoring and smithing are both "crafting." (Note that making stone blocks uses the crafting skill but gives no experience.)
When it comes to fighting early-game battles, make sure you have a good killzone. Have an open area where the animals or early-game raiders will have to charge across the field to get to your pawns, and put sandbags between you and the enemy for cover. Having a few 1-tile "column" walls and then two tiles of sandbags before telling ranged pawns to stand behind the walls gives them better cover, they peek around the wall to fire, and then enemies take accuracy penalties for the pawn hiding behind a wall (75% cover) and having to shoot over sandbags (55% cover). That's reducing your odds of being hit to about 1/9th what it would be if you weren't behind cover!
Anyway, you should also have a means to fall back, especially if someone is hit. I like to have a few other 2-tile-wide walls behind the first line so that my pawns can retreat back and break line of sight with the enemy if they're getting badly injured so they don't take critical injuries (enemies will target someone else if they lose sight of your pawn, meaning you avoid that pawn taking further hits), but even early on, you need to have a few different places you can make a stand. It's fine if it's just a couple sandbags at both ends of your farm, just don't stand your ground.
When a melee enemy comes at your ranged pawns, don't be stupid and let them get sucked into melee. Guns are worthless in melee. Your melee pawn has the armor for a reason - have them run in front of your ranged pawns and draw the enemy's attacks. Your ranged pawns can stand right behind the melee and shoot at the enemy. If they're within 3 tiles of your allies, they won't have friendly fire.
You can also just kite the enemy if you have no available melee. Have your two shooters split up a bit, and see which one the enemy is attacking. Move that pawn away, and just run away in a circle around the guy that isn't being chased, letting the shooter that isn't being chased take free potshots at the manhunter. If the enemy changes targets, just switch who runs and who shoots. Remember that after firing, pawns can't do anything for a second or two (depending on weapon), so don't think you can get one last shot off before you run. Run now. Don't let your shooters fall into melee, and they'll rarely ever be injured.
Injuries generally don't matter in this game so long as they survive long enough for your doctor to treat them. Spinal column at 1 HP left? Both lungs punctured? Arm nearly torn off? They'll be fiiiiine. The game says they need treatment for injuries, but you really only need to treat bleeding wounds. I don't think there are any consequences at all for leaving bruises untreated, so ignore those entirely unless you want the medical skill training for treating some wounds. You can click on a pawn's medical tab and set what kind of medicine will be used to treat them. You can stop bleeding with no medicine at all, and that's most of what matters. If they're not bleeding, they'll recover from almost any injury in a day or two. There's a default "work" tab setting that says pawns prefer bedrest, but don't have them rest unless they had a lot of bleeding wounds, it's not worth taking them off working. Treatment quality of wounds doesn't seem to matter except in how likely they are to get infections, so feel free to set them to only get medicinal herbs for wounds, and only go for proper industrial medicine if they get an infection. How likely they are to get an infection is much more dependent upon how clean the room they are staying in is. You're not having your wounded colonists stay outside, or in a room with a dirt floor covered in blood are you? Just having a wood floor you tell your doctor to sweep after the treatment is over to get the room to "clean" is going to do a LOT more for keeping infection down than using medicine or having high medical score.
Also, get your doctor(s) to carry medicinal herbs around. It's in the "assign" tab, carry 3 medicinal herbs. This way, if someone is injured, they don't have to run back to your storage bins to find the medicine. Treat injured pawns where they're injured, and you'll save time.
Drafting pawns is player input. By default pawns are set to flee, so... They'd lose the encounter.
For doctoring I'd recommend capturing prisoners and failing surgery on them a lot. Queue them up for adding/removing peg legs and cycle who's doing doctoring at the time so everyone can get up to lv8 medicine relatively quickly. Better doctors means less time in recovery, means more productivity.
A lot of the game is just about minimizing the quantity, severity, and recovery time of injuries you'll take from encounters. Good armor, good weapons, good doctors, and sufficient cover will solve so many problems.
1. Devmode. If you'll notice, most of those kinds of videos has their UI cut out from the video unless they plan to show injuries or something like that for the added dramatic effect. I mean, it's possible in a normal gameplay, but unless they're on the easiest difficulty, I've rarely seen bases that look like theirs survive a "Strive to survive" difficulty. Minor turrets, rarely see more than 10 spike traps? Colonists not losing their sh*t because they ate without a table? HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS.
2. Video editing and reloading saves to get the best outcome. There's a reason they rarely do this videos live.
3. They're playing for fun to make this videos and for entertainment, not to suffer by doing full length campaigns manually. I've see uploaders do new campaign uploads at least twice a week I think? And unless you're doing a bit of devmode here and there or doing a no sleep run for themselves, they shouldn't be getting that amount of progress without any setbacks.