I think it is possible to win, actually. So far my best is season 9. It takes a lot of patience, and you have to force yourself not to get lazy.
It also takes a lot of practice, because knowing the behaviors and properties of the enemies is not obvious.
My thoughts so far:
* enemy monsters should have some way of indicating their properties. Perhaps give them items visible to the player, that show traits?
* some monsters are way too strong. none of them should have chaos attack type.
* wildkin/birdlasher's AI behaviour is really annoying - they seek you out and you cannot hide. you also cannot fight back against mature ones.
* mammoth's design is a little binary. I get that they're high-risk/high-reward, but I found them frustrating on a couple occasions that they could kill a group of 9+ on their own.
* the AI chases you too aggressively, and creatures never fight each other. This makes running away really risky.
* Endotherm trait is too hard to play with juveniles. Perhaps better would be "1% of current health is lost per second"?
* Disease-attack trait is impossible to use without really, really special circumstances. I suggest removing it in favor of a couple different traits that have more mild negative effects, like "Underdeveloped Nervous System: stunning and slowing effects persist for double duration", or "Soft Tissue: Attacks while under 25 health are mortal wounds"
* The "50% health" to persist between seasons is a little bit frustrating to maintain because tracking what is and isn't half is not that easy. Better, perhaps would be to either use a value like 25/33%, that feels more "fair", or use a more continuous system, so 50% health units grow with reduced capacity than a more healthy individual.
* After enough plays I feel much less interested in passive abilities/feed level, because managing traits and food is much more important. Perhaps those behavior abilities could be considered again at some point. Or maybe they're good the way they are - I'm undecided.
RL is mostly fine, not really doing any mapping nowadays.