[A18] Wetlands - Swamp biomes

[mndfreeze]

I do think a cheaper land fill option would be nice.  Something that could be balanced out by not allowing anything to grow on it like sand basically.  It could be very labor intensive, ugly as all hell but low tech.   Or moving the moisture pump a little earlier in the tech tree considering we have water pumps now and can drain swamp land just fine and have been able too for a long time IRL.  You don't need space tech to dry out a patch of ground.  The moisture pump also needs to be sped up a little bit IMO.  It takes FORREEVVEERR to dry out even the tiniest patch of land.  I suppose if the benefit of growing on a specific mud patch was the balance concern I could see, but growing in general just isn't that powerful or advanced these days in the game. 

Something else that could be looked at is allowing wood floors to be put over swampy tiles, but not stone walls / tiles of any sort.  Since in the real swamps people definitely have been building out of wood and do a sort of raised up beam system, etc  This would allow early game usage of swamp areas but not really allow anything really special, grand or fire resistant until later when you get the moisture pumps.

This also would work with dealing with rivers.  I'd definitely like to see some sort of bridge building for them and then perhaps larger, wider rivers in general.  Most of the time when I embark on a river tile it seems its mostly shallow anyway and doesn't do much for being able to use as a defensive point. 

[Scrabbling]

Something else that could be looked at is allowing wood floors to be put over swampy tiles, but not stone walls / tiles of any sort.  Since in the real swamps people definitely have been building out of wood and do a sort of raised up beam system, etc  This would allow early game usage of swamp areas but not really allow anything really special, grand or fire resistant until later when you get the moisture pumps.

That was more or less an unintended exploit in the unstable A18 build. You could build floors (any kind) on marshy soil and then build heavy structures like walls on top of those. I wasn't sure if that was a feature or a bug at first because it sort of made sense especially with concrete like in a building foundation. In any case it showcased the current implementation: Generally all buildings are either light or heavy. Marshy soil only supports light buildings (AFAIK moisture pumps, sandbags etc). Floors support heavy buildings. So the easy solution was to disable the ability to build floors on marshy soil.

Maybe the moisture pump could dry out some ground types faster than others and expand with a dynamic speed depending on that. Ranking from fastest to slowest (= current speed): Marshy soil < Mud < Shallow water. Whenever a tile is dried out the radius expands to the orthogonally adjacent tiles around that tile. If it encounter a tile that does not need drying (soil, gravel etc.), it expands instantly (or after a small delay). That would of course step up the complexity but I don't think it's an unreasonable effort now that we have marsh biomes that incentivize the use of moisture pumps.

[Bolgfred]

I'd love to see dry tiles getting wegnimmt the rain, turning a dry area into mud and swamp. By this the fight against nature is not completed after walls are build. This would make moisture pumps a permanently used thing, and in a blackout swamp comes back and walls might start bearskins.

[Scrabbling]

I'd love to see dry tiles getting wegnimmt the rain, turning a dry area into mud and swamp. By this the fight against nature is not completed after walls are build. This would make moisture pumps a permanently used thing, and in a blackout swamp comes back and walls might start bearskins.

Autocorrect really makes this difficult. I am guessing "wegnimmt" = "wet in" and "bearskins" = "to sink in"? But I am not completely sure.

[Bolgfred]

I beg you pardon. It's meant to be "tiles getting wet in the rain" and "walls might start breaking"

My phone has weird suggestions :-)

[Hans Lemurson]

I think that walls should definitely start bearskins.

[mndfreeze]

Something else that could be looked at is allowing wood floors to be put over swampy tiles, but not stone walls / tiles of any sort.  Since in the real swamps people definitely have been building out of wood and do a sort of raised up beam system, etc  This would allow early game usage of swamp areas but not really allow anything really special, grand or fire resistant until later when you get the moisture pumps.

That was more or less an unintended exploit in the unstable A18 build. You could build floors (any kind) on marshy soil and then build heavy structures like walls on top of those. I wasn't sure if that was a feature or a bug at first because it sort of made sense especially with concrete like in a building foundation. In any case it showcased the current implementation: Generally all buildings are either light or heavy. Marshy soil only supports light buildings (AFAIK moisture pumps, sandbags etc). Floors support heavy buildings. So the easy solution was to disable the ability to build floors on marshy soil.

Maybe the moisture pump could dry out some ground types faster than others and expand with a dynamic speed depending on that. Ranking from fastest to slowest (= current speed): Marshy soil < Mud < Shallow water. Whenever a tile is dried out the radius expands to the orthogonally adjacent tiles around that tile. If it encounter a tile that does not need drying (soil, gravel etc.), it expands instantly (or after a small delay). That would of course step up the complexity but I don't think it's an unreasonable effort now that we have marsh biomes that incentivize the use of moisture pumps.

Yeah that could work too.  Really I just feel like we are missing something somewhere before we get to moisture pumps and they take to long.  I'd be fine with either adjusting wooden floors or some other cheapy form of flooring so it DOESNT allowed heavy stuff on it like you said was exploitive in the alpha build, or making the current one move faster, or moving it to earlier in the tech tree. 

Or like I said, just add in some other cheap crappy form of terraforming like piling in sand and stick it early in the tech tree, like something around tribal level since humand have been redirecting swamps and rivers since before the pharohs.  lol.

[TryB4Buy]

I like how the swamp biomes present unique challenges.

Bingo. Biomes aren't meant to be balanced. This is an okay game design move as long as you hang a sign on the front door that says "THIS WAY IS HARDER." See ice sheets.

I can't play on temperate biomes anymore. Only the extreme, desolate ones are any challenge anymore. Swamps are just too easy: average temperature, rich farmland everywhere for devilstrand, consistently incoming animals, and hilarious amounts of map resources. If it weren't for the fact that pumps are needed, it would be easy mode.

[ZebioLizard2]

Something else that could be looked at is allowing wood floors to be put over swampy tiles, but not stone walls / tiles of any sort.  Since in the real swamps people definitely have been building out of wood and do a sort of raised up beam system, etc  This would allow early game usage of swamp areas but not really allow anything really special, grand or fire resistant until later when you get the moisture pumps.

That was more or less an unintended exploit in the unstable A18 build. You could build floors (any kind) on marshy soil and then build heavy structures like walls on top of those. I wasn't sure if that was a feature or a bug at first because it sort of made sense especially with concrete like in a building foundation. In any case it showcased the current implementation: Generally all buildings are either light or heavy. Marshy soil only supports light buildings (AFAIK moisture pumps, sandbags etc). Floors support heavy buildings. So the easy solution was to disable the ability to build floors on marshy soil.

Maybe the moisture pump could dry out some ground types faster than others and expand with a dynamic speed depending on that. Ranking from fastest to slowest (= current speed): Marshy soil < Mud < Shallow water. Whenever a tile is dried out the radius expands to the orthogonally adjacent tiles around that tile. If it encounter a tile that does not need drying (soil, gravel etc.), it expands instantly (or after a small delay). That would of course step up the complexity but I don't think it's an unreasonable effort now that we have marsh biomes that incentivize the use of moisture pumps.

Yeah that could work too.  Really I just feel like we are missing something somewhere before we get to moisture pumps and they take to long.  I'd be fine with either adjusting wooden floors or some other cheapy form of flooring so it DOESNT allowed heavy stuff on it like you said was exploitive in the alpha build, or making the current one move faster, or moving it to earlier in the tech tree. 

Or like I said, just add in some other cheap crappy form of terraforming like piling in sand and stick it early in the tech tree, like something around tribal level since humand have been redirecting swamps and rivers since before the pharohs.  lol.

Or just having buildings on stilts. Makes me wish we had Z-Levels but dealing with marshy wetlands tends to invoke alot in human engineering.