Salem

Bringing the meta-biomes idea from the alpha-forums:

How about creating sub biomes (flora&fauna) to every biome to make them more interesting?

Like special biomes around rivers/seas, because they have direct water access.
Or Mountain sub-biomes for obvious reasons.

if its not too much work you could make it even more complex by creating meta-regions for the soil. (sandy, loamy, rocky, stony etc).
To prevent confusion, I don't mean the upper layer of biomes, we already have that. I mean the soil below. Sure, dry regions are more likely to be sandy below and lush are more likely to be loamy, but there's still much room for variations.
For example at my place in Bavaria, Germany we have very sandy soil which is very good for certain crops.

This way you can't just plant everything in one place behind your walls, so trading would play a much bigger role. Imagine huge caravans(or big ships) traveling to tradeposts importing spices from far away. I'd like to create another thread about this one later.

Also, meta-biomes don't need to be everywhere. They can be huge (invisible) areas below the currend biomes, but don't need to be connected to others. Between them, there's just the regular biome where you can grow/find the stuff, you grow and find everywhere. Lke potatoes, you can plant those in lava and they'll grow I believe.

Thing is, I'm pretty sure spawning works directly based on the tile the item is on. Sand = biome. It spawns rock quarry spawns and high amounts of salt and is only found around lakes or in the special "badlands" regions I believe? So your idea is already implemented roughly. But noting as it's /tile based, I'm not sure the biomes can work as currently implemented in the way you're suggesting.

Hmm yea maybe a little. But I mean on a larger scale. So if you want to grow/buy a certain spice for example, you'd need to travel one or two supergrids. This would make the whole trading thing much more lively.

This would mean a lot of work but I really love the idea. It makes for a lot of exploring and trading.

I have always wanted to see trade as a long over-land process, not just a travel to and from boston with the click of a button. +1 (not to mention the activity it will bring from the people along the trade route)

Yes and this way (together with the Caravan&Trading thing) its also not that easy to get to the potentially really good stuff.
Because as I see it, one of the major problems of Salem is, that right now people get bored playing it even sooner than in H&H. There needs to be attractive stuff thats not easily achieved by just raiding or turtle-style-playing with lots of people. This way, people are forced to do a little diplomacy and hit risky decisions. And no matter how many they are, they still need time to progress. Raiding will also get much more adventurous of course.

Really like this idea, right now the diffrence between diffrent places are too small and with the removal of purity nodes we really need something like this to make geografic placement intresting again