tropical biome is actually pretty cool. most interesting pros/cons of biomes?

[forumaccount]

pun intended.

hit random got a tropical location, thought it'd be easymode due to year round growing season.

MOVEMENT SPEED. That is the big risk with a tropical map. You're STRONGLY encouraged to stay near your base because distant trips take a long, long time. You can throw down concrete sometimes to make sort of "highways" especially to your favorite mining spot, but some ground just won't support floors or conduits or anything.

Plus sleeping sickness can lay up one of your colonists so long that you'll WISH she'd died and been replaced by a wanderer. Disease in general is more prevalent.

Previously I assumed that coldest - hottest biomes were basically difficulty levels from hardest - easiest. Clearly I was wrong. In your experience, what are the most interesting pros & cons of the various biomes? Do mountains always make things easier in every biome or sometimes do you prefer wide open terrain?

[mumblemumble]

Mountains / hills are almost always better for advantage. This is true in real life as well.

I personally think temperate forest is best. ALMOST year round growing, plenty of wood, mild weather (not extremely hot, tolerable winters)  ect. Of course, any forest is difficult to build in due to the mass of plant life you need to clear.

But every biome has its pros and cons yes.

Tropical is very easy to grow, plenty of food / resources, but many other risks right with it.

Even the dreaded ice sheet has the pros that food left out NEVER spoils, and raiders often freeze to death before attacking.

Still, temperate forest is my favorite, I don't like huge challenges.

[Devon_v]

I like Boreal Forest. With mountains you have a very packed map that you have to carve a spot out of. Building defenses is as much about clearing trees and opening sight lines as it is building your walls and placing your guns. You get a growing season, but it's about two and a half harvests long, so you can't play around with it. You get some big, meaty animals, but they don't appear consistently.

It might be the coldest biome that can be played in Hardcore SK because hydroponics and the sun lamp are gated behind so much stuff. Randy thought it would be funny if there were a cold snap during a volcanic winter with an icicat on the loose. -115C is a hell of a thing.

[Tynan]

I'm really glad the tropical biome downsides actually popped out. Super-slow movement and constant diseases are, from my reading, the major unique challenges of rainforest-y biomes. They call them "false paradises" because they look nice but are very hostile to human life.

[TheGentlmen]

Ice sheet for the win baby!

-80C in summer is GREAT.

[forumaccount]

I'm really glad the tropical biome downsides actually popped out. Super-slow movement and constant diseases are, from my reading, the major unique challenges of rainforest-y biomes. They call them "false paradises" because they look nice but are very hostile to human life.

Maybe someday we'll be able to recruit locals who can teach us / research tree growing & shaping so as to span the marshiest parts with nice living wood bridges

That is a real solution used in some part of the amazon somewhere!

Ice sheet for the win baby!

-80C in summer is GREAT.

Yes yes, very impressive. Hardcore. Wowzers. Anyway, what are the most interesting pros and cons?

I like Boreal Forest. With mountains you have a very packed map that you have to carve a spot out of. Building defenses is as much about clearing trees and opening sight lines as it is building your walls and placing your guns. You get a growing season, but it's about two and a half harvests long, so you can't play around with it. You get some big, meaty animals, but they don't appear consistently.

I've never been able to decide whether I want more cover or less cover. I end up chopping trees as needed and never really coming to a decision on how I want my area to be shaped I guess theoretically, a few trees close to the base and a wide clearcut swath around that which enemies must cross would be best? But also waste the maximum amount of loggers' time.

[Khall]

I imagine hostile wildlife will be another big challenge in the rainforest, when they get added. The biggest threats there should be the jungle itself, rather than raiders or mechanoids.

[TheGentlmen]

Pros:
-Siegers will freeze to death
-Sappers will freeze to death
-Un-agroed mechs from ship will freeze to death with few coolers
-Ill equipped raiders will freeze to death
-If you keep your raiders in a dragging firefight, they will freeze do death
-Visitors freeze to death
-Free meat from all the freezing
-No cooling needed, just put a roof so nothing degrades and done.
-Toxic fallout kills all invaders quicker!
-Toxic fallout has no effect on you.

Cons:
-Visitors go mad from the cold and berserk your people
-You freeze to death
-GL farming, you will now only have a human meat based diet.
-No wood.
-Randy likes throwing Volcanic Winters, bringing it down to somewhere between -120 to -150

[RoboticManiac]

I play a lot of ice sheets. All the bad guys freeze to death. The only cons are that all the good guys freeze to death. Or starve to death. Or are beaten to death by other good guys who lost their minds wandering past all the dead bad guys who have been laying in the snow for the past five years.

Also like deserts and boreal forests though, since you can get a lot of temperature variation. I'd also really like rainforests and arid biomes if over heating wasn't such a pain to deal with.

[Headshotkill]

Give these raiders some winter-clothes god damnit! 

[Devon_v]

Give these raiders some winter-clothes god damnit! 

Raiders spawn with temperature appropriate clothing. That's why they die on their way to your base, not as soon as they spawn.

[Mikhail Reign]

Or are beaten to death by other good guys who lost their minds wandering past all the dead bad guys who have been laying in the snow for the past five years.

Off topic - This has always kinda bugged me - Mt Everest is littered with bodies, but people don't kill each other over it on the way up. I don't really feel that frozen snow covered bodies would have the same effect as a normal rotting corpse. They sorta look like porcilean, obviously wouldn't really have an oder and it would be so hard to tell how old it was.

On topic -other then the standard Ice sheet (everything dies for the win) I like forests.

The mass of building material available from wood is awesome. By marking for trees to be cut appropriately, you can have some colonists clearing areas for building AND making the resources to build at the same time. I can generally have a barracks, walls and a few out buildings up by the 3rd or 4rd day. From then on I can just keep adding walls everywhere to strengthen my defences. So what if it all burns to the ground - just means my builder builds it back twice as good.

[Mihsan]

Tropical biome (sea shore, no mountains) gave me one of the best of my games that I ever had.

I remember that at some point there was 6 colonists with malaria and sleeping sickness. Had to build large new hospital because of that.

And yeah: building roads is good thing to do in this biome.

[TheGentlmen]

Tropical biome (sea shore, no mountains) gave me one of the best of my games that I ever had.

I remember that at some point there was 6 colonists with malaria and sleeping sickness. Had to build large new hospital because of that.

And yeah: building roads is good thing to do in this biome.

If they leave to build roads in the ice sheet they freeze to death.
You don't build roads in the ice, the ice builds roads in you.

[Limdood]

Easy:
Boreal Forest (short growing season, but otherwise simple)
Temperate Forest (hot and cold extremes can make heating/cooling a segmented base a pain)

Medium:
Arid (low arable land, temperature can be tough, rarer wood)
Tundra (short days, somewhat colder than boreal, rarer wood)
Rainforest (movement issues, unusable land, rampant disease)

Hard:
Desert (all the issues of arid, but a bit more extreme)

Very Hard:
Ice sheet (yeah...)