I don’t think as you level up your gear the game gets less risky. I mean, it could: by year 5 or 6 you eat level 1 lions for breakfast, but they don’t give you enough resources for a successful kill to keep up settlement wise with the nemesis progression checks, so you move up to lvl 2 antílopes and lions and are still at risk of a couple of consecutive bad rolls.
You do get some of tools to mitigate single bad events, though, and way more tactical options. But the risk is pretty much still there.
Also, get some weapons. The lvl 1 lion has 2 more toughness than the prologue one and you do need that extra strength.
We had a campaign of Champions for a year and a bit - set in the Twin Cities with a combination of Champions and Marvel characters, plus the PCs of course. Combat typically took around six hours each time, and the campaign eventually folded as we added too many people for it to really work at all. Honestly, character creation was the most fun the system had to offer anyway.
You always had the kid trying to cheese the system by saying every single one of his powers was an I.I.F (inobvious inaccessible focus) for a 25% point discount.
Or the kid who put all his points into a single >20d6 energy blast or killing attack power and nothing else.
One drew up a character with a ton of points by taking a boatload of disadvantages that essentially made his character a vegetable, but with the (uncontrollable) power to set off a miniature nuke explosion. So his character was a coma patient that would occasionally explode to wipe out a 10 block radius.
Anyone remember Rollmaster? Now that RPG had tables! Entire books full of tables. Tables for everything. Tables you rolled on to find out which table you had to roll on.
One of the things I liked about X-wing in the beginning was its damage deck and the way it handles critical hits. You never know if that card you flip over will make turning more difficult, fry your instruments, or just hit a fuel cell and end it all. Before the game got super meta, it was a neat asymmetry that Tie Fighters didn’t have shields so EVERY hit was a draw from the critical hit deck. Granted the writing left everything to the imagination so you never knew if an academy pilot bleed out from arterial spray in the cockpit.