Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.

Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.

Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...