For a long time, we had a constraint on ourselves of, "What if we just avoided combat as much as possible? Will that make us come up with more creative mechanics?" Now, the more we spin our wheels, the more we're realizing that maybe combat does add a lot of stakes and activity and all that fun stuff, and maybe we can just have it. But it's not going to look the same as combat in, say, Rimworld. We have a different view, and I think we want things to be less chaotic and deadly. A lot of the time, you'll have 2-12 scrappy little steaders, and you're giving them orders in what's essentially a giant ant farm. What might actually happen in those circumstances?...
1. A wave of crablins is harassing your stead. You've got a few dudes, and you've got two muskets and a couple big pokey poles, like pitchforks or whatever. You'll want people on the muskets, and you'll want at least one person standing in front of the shooters, poking the crablins and keeping them at a distance. Any extra folks, you can decide if you want them on stick-duty, or aiding the muskets. If you have one person who's got way better aim than everyone else, you might even want to set up a system where Buddy is loading the second musket while Crackshot shoots the first, then they swap. Might be smarter.
2. Oh no, some crablins stole your hardware and cloth! Crablins are notorious for stealing stuff from you and taking it back to their nests in the haunted forests. They can run through the tangly roots blocking haunted tunnels, but you have to machete through. It's worth finding these nests and taking them out, though. You get your stuff back, and probably some sweet loot that they took from other people/settlements a long time ago too.
You can get in there with your fighters and get the stuff, but crablins will keep congregating in this spot. You could clear them out for good if you spray griffin scent around, they're terrified of griffins. But for that, you're either going to need to craft something out of some griffin monsterparts (ew), or you're going to need a tamed griffin to come sleep and pee in the place for a few days (ew but lol).
3. There's a big open cavern with a evil haunted tree in the middle of it. It's got nasty bats all flyin' around it. Maybe the bats are flyin' out of the tree! You've got to dispose of that tree to make the forest stop being haunted so you can live there. You could run in with your musket-teams I guess. That'd be hard and slow. Or you could do other things:
- You could build a smoke machine that grounds and slows the bats, so that they're easier to deal with while you're chopping that tree. And you could strap it to a wagon and wheel it in, or you could build it in a pocket of space underneath the tree and run some pipes up into the cavern. Your guys don't like the smoke either though, so they're gonna need some facial protection.
- You could build net-launchers that take bats out of the fight for a period of time before they gnaw themselves free.
- You could have somebody luring bats out of one tunnel by waving around meat or making certain noises, then you could have a trap where you collapse the entrance to the tunnel and cut the bats off from the main cavern. Gotta make sure your little bat-bait guy will be okay though.