Your best and worst scenarios (game setups)

[Syrchalis]

Hey everyone,
I'm interested in what turned out to be your personal favorites and hates when it comes to scenarios. This means what kind of start (colonists, tribe, explorer - or maybe even a custom scenario like "start with nothing") - what kind of biome, what kind of map (flat/mountain/sea shore) etc.

For example: I recently played a tribal start in boreal forest and I hated it. Turns out I just really like growing things outside all year and boreal forest makes it impossible. And being a tribe meant researching sunlamps and even just electronics took ages. I also did the mistake and went with a non-mountain map. While I usually avoid mountain maps, in this case it would have given me a nice crutch to lean on, and I would have something to do during the three quadrums of non-growing season (mining the crap out of the mountain).

I stopped playing this save simply because I just keep pressing 3 even during the day, because there just seems like nothing to do. Growing anything is a pain, animals can't graze, nothing to hunt, nothing to build (because I lack things like cloth ... again because growing is a pain) - everything seems slow and tedious. I mean even moving around is horrible due to the 50% walk speed on thick snow. Rimworld feels rather slow to me anyway, so one might imagine why for me personally this isn't exactly a fun scenario.

On the other end I really enjoyed some flat arid shrubland colonist action. I dislike the lack of animals, but the terrain is fun, wood is challenging at start and you have lots of free room later to expand. It's like desert just with a lot more soil.

[sick puppy]

i assume unmodded game play is asked, so here i go:

fave: surprisingly, the sea ice challenge with rich explorer. the first few tries were annoying, but once you got it going it is great fun. you mostly play it on speed 3 though, because nothing much happens. at least you get all the space and time in the world to plan and build your base. it is plain and simple, nothing too hard to think about, except on how to kill all the mechanoids that keep attacking. in the beginning i used to do a lot of calculations, but once the ball is rolling, it is not that hard anymore and nice and combat focussed.

hate: tundra. boreal forest at least has lotsa wood to do stuff with. tundra is just plain boring and at the same time it isnt a "challenge", so mastering it wont give you the same satisfaction. also, few animals to hunt.
but generally, anything tribal is just more boring than crashlanded or rich explorer by default.
also, phoebe chillax is an abysmal storyteller. sure, i got used to her because i was a noob once aswell and thiught playing with her was a good idea, but no. she just likes to send natural disasters and crap like that at you. cassandra and randy at least have the guts to attack you properly.

and to finish it off, what i am meh about: mountaineous maps and large maps. both just give you more opportunities to kind of just check off certain things off your list. i WANNA have to look out for components, plasteel and uranium. i wanna feel a bit forced to trade well. i wanna have good incentives to do caravans, go on missions and kill some pirates. anything hat slows my caravans down are out of question whenever i start a game. i want at least two outlander camps closeby for trade. i want good connections with streets. i want other camps nearby to be well connected aswell so that i can reach them in time if they wanna have a special deal with me. i want to have as short winters as possible. not even for all year growing itself, but so that my caravans can move at max speed all the time.

[Syrchalis]

It's fine if it's modded. I use A LOT of mods, but I don't use any big overhauls. Mostly convenience mods or mods that give me more control over things (map reroll, prepare carefully, EPOE).

I learned to like boreal forest over the last few days. As colonist at least. It's really hard getting your sunlamp indoor farms going for the first winter, especially if you have other things to do as well (e.g. mining out a base as I went with a mountain map this time...) - but once you do, you're pretty much golden, as expanding them is rather easy.

Basically you have to find a balance between huge farms in spring/summer and having less time and workforce to expand the base and get indoor growing up and research ready and smaller farms but getting winter crops going. As for tribal... no idea how you would do that, but I guess you have to hard-rush research - you don't have a fridge, but in fall/winter it won't rot anyway and most crops don't rot fast either way. But you can't really have meat really - only for pemican, then again the only reason to get meat really is to have better meals and pemican is rather pointless in that regard. Also I used Cassandra intense this time instead of Randy, but it didn't feel better or worse. I got like four ship parts drop though which was REALLY annoying. Three poison one psychic. Fortunately for 3/4 I had mortars up and running.

Next I will probably try this: A tribal couple (married), highly skilled, but with low supplies in the tropical rainforest. It could be okay if I get some early colonists to join and diseases don't murder me. Passive coolers should take care of any heat waves.