Did A17 get harder, or did I just get bad at this?

Randy Extreme wiped me out pretty quickly, two raids after my only doctor died of infection. The other two colonists were incapable of medicine. That's fair; no complaints.

I just now lost my second A17 colony on Cassandra Extreme. We got beaten down hard by a herd of elks, and got raided a few times while recovering. The elks beat our dog to death and left all four of my colonists writhing on the ground, in a tidy pile of human suffering. When we finally got over the pain and ran inside, hastily converting our only good bedroom into a freezer, one of my crippled colonists went berserk.

We were able to fend off the next three raids, but not without two colonists being kidnapped, and two who would ultimately succumb to gunshot wounds.

I guess the lesson I learned here is don't mess with elks unless you can take down the whole herd. Yikes! I'd rather go after a bear.