I believe I’m done with Rimworld for now, having ‘beaten’ the game by constructing a ship and sending some people off into space. Some final thoughts below.
Overall, it’s still a game I would highly recommend, as I had close to 100hrs of fun with it even in its current EA/alpha state. It’s very very solid at the beginning and during the initial learning phase, and its mid-game (half into the tech tree, 6-8 people) is also a lot of fun without being overly complex or micro-intensive. The late game needs perhaps some more work, and I’m guessing that’s going to happen with future development.
Some highlights: I enjoyed the combat a lot more than I initially thought I would. First it seemed that melee was too strong, then there was a time when ranged weapons seem the way to go, and towards the end I found that melee with shield belts and good positioning really got the job done. Defending against raids was always fun, as were the random combat events.
The economy around food and production also seems to be in a good place. At the very end with 12+ people gathering meat for food production got a bit silly, but before that it was all fun and enjoyable. Balance was good too, as different resources become the short-straw, depending on what my focus was or a recent event.
I never got too much into the overworld part of the game, as creating a caravan and sending people off seemed too great an effort vs the reward, but the one time I went kamikaze, sending all my people to attack an enemy base, the ensuing firefight was awesome. Mind you, I had to reload because the casualties and injuries sustained would have crippled me, but it was still a fun fight. I’m not sure if there is ever a time in the game where that’s a smart, viable choice, but as a ‘save and try it’ thing, its good.
As mentioned earlier, the end of the game is the weak point. In my game, once I reached 12+ people and had 75% of the tech tree done, I hit a point where I could defend fairly easily, had enough money to buy basically anything, could produce most resources, and it was just a matter of time until I build the spaceship. As the spaceship takes a massive amount of resources, the wait is long, but not very interesting.
Granted, I could have tried other things, like raiding enemy villages or such, but that seemed very slow and somewhat pointless besides the one-time fun aspect of the fight, as enemy bases didn’t contain enough loot or captives to justify the cost. Even with pods allowing me to fly one-way to the base, it still didn’t really seems that worthwhile.
I’m going to keep my eye on Rimworld however, as I think I’ll have a lot of fun with it again once its had more content added. Great game right now, and I’m sure it will continue to improve in the future.
Hardcore Casual 
I’ve picked up Rimworld myself, although haven’t gotten properly into it yet.
I could forgive that kind of slightly-boring endgame – playing out the clock until the inevitable victory – if it includes a lot of random events that don’t really affect the outcome, but make for some interesting emergent stories. That’s partly why Crusader Kings 2 has so much replayability value for me – I basically know how to win it, in the sense of gobbling up the map and hitting the highest dynastic score – but the human drama along the way keeps it alive. Bit like The Sims for thinking people, I suppose.
I assume you played your game under the Cassandra Classic storyteller. Perhaps the Randy Random would have given you a better challenge?
Yea Cassandra on a middle difficulty level, so certainly plenty of room to mix things up.
The events certainly mix things up, and who you have in your colony, which is maybe the most important thing, is also very very random in the game. I think replayability would be high, perhaps not to play each game to the end, but to try different things from the beginning to just before ‘end-game’, which is a solid 15-20hrs per game at least.