Your biome ideas

What about larva fields ?

 

I'd like to see a map where fecundity was an issue. Like when you start out it is a bonus because you can grow all this stuff pretty easily and your sheep and cabbages and what not breed like rabbits---see portions of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for issues with fecundity and plagues of plenty. But then mutations crop up and your citizens start freaking out over the concept of plenty. Not only do they have enough, they have too much, this drives them crazy. Maybe stuff starts to rot or you attract vermin. Gluttons, horders, spendthrifts, wastrels all sorts of stuff associate with excess and first world problems crop up. Humbolt poisons all of the sheep out of guilt.

Eventually they invent steampunk video games --see William Gibson otherwise turgid "The Difference Engine" for how to implement clockwork video games(or whack a mole)--and they all sit around not working or having babies until the colony just dies off.

or you could work out a happy ending on your own.

But yeah, fecundity, mutations, pyschosis

edit: so swamp, jungle, or forest could all work pretty well here

edit edit: or people get obsessed with some part of it. Like pumpkins. Humbolt works out that all he has to do is grow enough pumpkins and he'll be fine because they grow like crazy--enough food--and mutate, whatever else beside pumpkin some fancy man or woman needs (The Life and Times of Michael K., J.M. Coetzee) . So soon all his needs will be met by pumpkin patches. He convinces his friends and neighbors to grow pumpkins too. People start favoring mutant pumpkin patches because all those cute "noses" they have taste better, their thorns keep critters away, and they glow. What could go wrong with that? prefect plan

 

Swamp/boglands for sure - and not American south, but northern England - think more like The Hound of the Baskervilles.



Heh, if that doesn't inspire you, nothing will.

Taking a page from some of the classic sci-fi fantasy films/books set in relative to this period would be good,



and those other Vernian classics



and last and very certainly not least....




Now, I don't know how hard it would be to utilize underwater or underground areas, but let's face it, they lend themselves to this type of game beauitfully. Monsters, cults, the unknown, all there waiting to be revealed. At the very least the English bogs is a must. Fog and death await at every turn!

 

Biomes, eh? I'm possibly too late, but thinking my way around Lovecraft throws up a number of possible candidates that could be amusing.

Abandoned Graveyard / Indian Burial Ground. Very fertile, from all those lovely decomposing corpses. Several possible downsides, particularly if you plough over grave markers. Pet Semetary. The Statement of Randolph Carter. The Blair Witch Project. The Dead Poets Society (!). Dracula.

Strange Districts. Oddly good for !!Science!!. Ancient hills with unnerving monoliths. Narrow, unhealthy valleys. Whippoorwill flocks. Inbreeding. The Dunwich Horror, obviously, but also The Whisperer in Darkness. Return to the Forbidden Planet. Salem's Lot.

The Enchanted Wood. Wonderful for lumber (that barely glows at all, really, at least in the noon sun!) Quite a pain in the neck clearing space for other things, of course. Abominable fungus issues. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Don't Starve. Many, many fairy tales.

Blasted Heath. Beautiful and inspiring, in its own way. Corrupted crops. Plenty of light by night, thanks to the worrying foliage. Ineffable meteorites. The Color Out Of Space. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Moon-Bog. The Rats in the Walls.

Elder Cities. Packed full of wonders. Not so great for farming, construction or sanity. Art asset requirements probably prohibitive. Still, it'd be awesome! At The Mountains of Madness. The Shadow Out Of Time. The Call of Cthulhu.

 

This has probably been mentioned but I'd like to see something like the "Haunted" biome in Dwarf Fortress. The biome is something of a hardcore mode, where literally everything is hostile. Deadly predators are everywhere, the grass is eye-stalks, it usually rains blood from a variety of species or deadly acid. Sometimes sentient fog with various and possibly deadly effects roll across the map. If a creature dies and their bodies are not burned they will come back as a zombie, if you chop them up to kill them then each individual part will revive again.

 

DF Haunted is pretty darn insane. Which is always an awesome thing. I'm all for clouds of evil floating around the place and turning people into abominable ultra-husks.

 

I do enjoy attempting to play haunted biomes. Some of them are completely impossible, you die before you can even dig yourself into a 5x5 space, but it adds an interesting challenge! You never know in advance how tough they're gonna be, either.

 

I'd love a haunted biome, but I'd also settle for the "Dungeon-Forest" from "D&DD".

http://www.trilulilu.ro/video-animatie/dexter-s-laboratory-d-dd

 

Steampunk Desert
Very few trees and minerals, but at the boteme of the map a large black mounton that is chock full of resorses, but causes madness in the miners!

 

I would like to see a cold wasteland, with something frozen in the deeps of the earth. Could be Hard to get food, but full of resources maintened by the ice.

 

How about a Tropical island... along with an active volcano and lava fields (think Hawaii, but even more volcanically active).
The Voilcano God would require regular virgin sacrifices to keep from erupting.

 

To expand on the idea of the Blasted Heath, some sort of crater field might be interesting tactically: meteors containing various eldritch materials deform (or have deformed) the terrain, decreasing vegetable/animal spawn rates while increasing the concentration of mineral ores -- and, over time, various unhealthy weirdness of the "Color out of Space" variety.

Assuming continuous processes count as biomes, eventually the meteors would convert the entire area into an infertile, toxic, metal-rich hellscape full of increasingly diseased lunatics -- even faster than the player could.

 

If this game is about colonies, then the most logical thing would be to include some african-like and indian-like biomes, with maybe even an atoll biome or a mediterranean one with ancient times treasures. An indian-like biome in fact would be specially cool with ancient civilization ruins in the middle of the jungle and all that. I've just been thinking about places where the british empire has been since the game is about a british-like empire.

 

There was a point in the past where walrus blubber and hide were very useful for building industrial machinery (the hide provides a tough belt for mechanical transfer and the blubber acted as a good lubricant).

I would love it if CE touched on some historically important if now obscure resources, whales being the obvious go to.

 

For a game about colonies and unknowable horrors from out of time clearly the most obvious thing is to try and colonize the unspeakable horrors. The Empire has long been plagued by things not of this world but Her Majesty's most ingenious unnatural philosophers have stumbled upon the unspeakable geometry that unlocks the way for her servants to venture to never imagined realms. Even now Her brave soldiers, loyal subjects, and mostly degenerate criminals condemned to transportation for various crimes plant the Clockworkian flag proudly on that beach of unblinking eyes! Now the light of civilization and the Minim Gun are the unspeakable horrors blighting the hapless squishy pink locals! The wealth of uncountable worlds will flow to the Cog Throne and those brave enough to take the first step will have fortune and glory everlasting!

Your landing craft is sent through the breach between worlds and you have to carve out the niche of civilization in the home realm of whatever horror you managed to find. At the breach normal terrestrial flora and fauna have encroached as well with as disastrous results for the other realm as when horrors leak into ours. The influx of tigers, bears, swarms of ravenous rats have provided the locals with such an abundance of easy meals that they have thrown the normal ecosystem out of balance leaving a somewhat habitable space for you to establish a toehold. But the further you go the more it retains its native charm and the more likely explorers are to attract the notice of those who rule here. But the path back to our world is unstable and supplies are sporadic at best. Suck the unlife from the local unnature and build defenses as well as some way to stabilize the rent so you can send your plunder home and allow the empire to send plenty of doomed reinforcements.

Do you have to shoot the trees to keep them from eating your lumberjacks? Can you convince the local fishmen to start cults dedicated to the holy cog? What sort of physics hold sway away from the landing site? What strange resources can you plunder? Is it rich in copper and iron or will you have to figure out a way to make a steam knight out of rippling, screaming, eye watering local metals that weight more upside down than right-side up? How boundless will your wealth be once you send a freighter full of the local spices so delicious that men will kill to get more back to the home market? Why can you see everyone's skeletons after night falls and why does Mr Cogsworth look like he has beetles instead of bones?

 

Haven't seen it in a reply , but my thoughts on this are islands with historical history (pass civilizations) I always seen clockwork type theming to be British/colonial times as it is represented currently and during that time what was one of the biggest movements? travel in the Caribbean and trade.

So for me at least, this is where I would picture most of my gameplay. Maybe once and awhile some unique island locations that might have swamps , but mostly sandy shores, deep jungles or barren islands. Other times I see myself on the British isles and the like. basically stuff like that.

Within those type of bios, you can have typhoons and more.

My 2 cents on it anyways.