Methinks we're going to balance them down a little bit. The key difference between a deathwurm and, say, fishpeople is that deathwurms have no concept of morale and thus will never flee from a fight. So they always fight to the death. I think I'll make a note for next month to thoroughly update animal's stats & rebalance their sets of behaviours.
I think the jungle is 'hard mode' right now. Literally everything there wants to kill you, and your only hope is to conscript everyone right off the bat and cross your fingers. I wouldn't be surprised if they snuck in something that made the coconuts give the colonists dysentery unless cooked properly On the bright side, the wurms seem indiscriminate in thier hunger. While I was surrounded by them last time I played, I never had any bandit issues. I don't know if they ate them, or if it was just a happy coincidence, but i'll take it.
The problem isn't so much that Deathwurms are unstoppable; two soldiers working together can usually kill a DW without getting hurt themselves. The problem is if a colony's two NCOs get apart from each other and one has to fight a DW on their own. That soldier is going to get hurt and soon will have such poor morale that they won't fight. Is this "Seven Dwarf" thing set in stone? Giving each NCO a solider or two under them at the start would prevent New Sogwood colonies from becoming unplayable 15 minutes in through no fault of the player. Right now the early game involves a lot of luck.
David and I had a conversation about what to do to balance them for version 40; we'll be trying a few more things to make them difficult but not impossible.
There's a balance change in for the next experimental, 39E, that should help out a lot with Deathwurms. You should be able to make laudanum, it just requires distilled alcohol + opium. Rum instead of whisky should work. And uh, if it doesn't, then we've got a problem.
At some point there will be giant Dune-style Deathwurms capable of swallowing a man whole, yes? It would be a shame if that never happened.
Allowing hunting for all military and civilian workcrews and then setting active hunting jobs on the hostile animal makes these situations alot more manageable. Doing this way you don't even disrupt the existing workshop assignments.
