Three Biomes Only?

[Alexandicity]

Hello! I was thinking about the biomes on the Mun as I attempt to rescue the brave crew who got stuck after my 6th landing. It seems to me there are "too many". Arguments I know go back and forth over the merits of science grinding, but I think there are an awful lot of biomes on the Mun that don't provide too much additional gameplay value. Usually, when you've done one, it's a rinse-and-repeat to get the rest. In my mind, you could on each body get away with just three:

• Easy Biome - typically flat landscape, near equatorial and low in elevation when the body has an atmosphere. These would be the easiest to get to and the usual target of the first landing. This biome would be the majority of the body's surface most likely..
  
• Hard Biome - typically hilly landscape, much higher latitude and more elevated. This would provide more challenge and probably require an upgraded craft.
  
• Pinpoint Biome - could be anywhere, but very small - no more than 100m across. The motivation for these is to provide a reason to use a rover (which always seemed a little pointless to me?) to drive the last km from your landing point. Alternatively, if you hate rovers, you could use it to justify a hopper craft or a most excellent precision landing. These could be found marked by anomalies, which in turn would be found by a mapping mod or good old fashioned anomaly spotting.
  

To balance the reduced number of places to do science, the points for each would be increased accordingly. Three (or some other similarly small number) of missions would be enough to get all the science from a body, but would nonetheless provide increasing challenge and difficulty, rather than the fairly repeated missions we do now. With more bodies getting biomes, this would seem even more important.

What are your thoughts on reducing the number of biomes? Has it been discussed previously?

Is there perhaps a mod already that does such a thing that I may have missed?

[oggylt]

well I really like the high number of biomes not because it is grinding, but because if notice that i lack something like 60 points of science for my duna mission I can send my unmaned probe to mun and just get those points from an unexplored biome. I really like the way it is not easy to exhaust the points, and there are just no point in doing that. There are neither achievement neither victory for exploring all the biomes so my idea is not to get into grinding too much.

Different biomes also gives me some places to go and missions to do, like map(plant flag and note the explorer and mission) them all. I also like roving with the destination, I have my deepest crater mission down in my sig, back in version 0.18.

All in all I think it is better to have more than not enough

[Syphus]

Biomes are not the problem here, it is the experiments. Biomes on their own are a great idea, as it starts to give reason to go to various parts of the planet / moon. The game should be looking at more ways to make planets interesting as a whole, and not less.

[User Unrelated]

I think it will "balance out" a bit more once other planets and moons get the biome treatment...

[Doozler]

I would say it's not all grind. Three biomes is easily done with three mun-and-back missions, but when you have a large number you start thinking a bit differently, e.g. I need a Mobile Lab, so I need a munar station, so I need to learn docking...

Or, I make a mothership with many landers which means I need to build a big rocket...

Sure, you CAN grind it, but I think it does have an aspect of "more is different" to it.

[DarthJazno]

I like lots of biomes if I'm going to land. Seems any soil sample should have value. EVA in orbit, not so much.

For my first landing I try to be close enough to 2 biomes so I can get 2 samples by jet packing (or on Minmus just landing nearby) But some of them are challenging to get to canyon included. The poles are rewarding to me. So I like having those but I also like having specific craters their own biome.

Maybe we don't have to "collect 'em all" but you could with a science station, a base, rovers, etc, instead of another one shot mission. Personally I can't wait for more biomes, so I don't get stuck at Mun/Minmus so long because I know Duna doesn't have as much.

Edited April 16, 2014 by DarthJazno

[The Destroyer]

I persionally like biomes

[Xavven]

I think I'm okay with lots of biomes, even if it encourages some grinding. After all, if two or three were enough for NASA, we wouldn't have so many rovers on Mars doing science constantly. I'm no geologist, but I would guess different places can tell you different things about the history of the planet or moon. Lava flows, polar caps, dried up lakebeds, mountains, craters, flats, etc.

Plus, if you don't want to grind, impose your own personal restrictions and only land on each body once. I'll tell you that doing that in all stock career mode forces you to do some interplanetary probe flybys after you land on Minmus and Mun only once, as there's a technology gap that makes it hard to send manned missions to Duna, Ike, or Gilly. I had to send probes to fly by and transmit science from Kerbol, Moho (flyby, not orbit), Duna, AND Ike to build up enough science to do a manned mission outside Kerbin's SOI.

[Dingbat1967]

There's a custom biomes mod that adds biomes to all the planetary bodies ... I was thinking on trying it out just so I can have more objectives to go to ...

[katateochi]

*snip an awful lot of biomes on the Mun that don't provide too much additional gameplay value. snip*

I disagree about them not adding additional game play. I really like the many Mun Biomes and it opens up the possibilities for more complex missions within the Kerbin system. You can do separately launched missions to each biome with the same craft design, but you can also go for a much more complex design and try to get all the science with as few launches as possible which makes it much more challenging with lots of rendezvous and docking and launching very heaving craft. You could even take a rover and drive between some of the biomes (if you really wanted) and Mun is the only place you could do that.

KSP is about letting players approach the game in their own way and more biomes on Mun open up more possible options for different approaches.

[Highlad]

I would say it's not all grind. Three biomes is easily done with three mun-and-back missions, but when you have a large number you start thinking a bit differently, e.g. I need a Mobile Lab, so I need a munar station, so I need to learn docking...

Or, I make a mothership with many landers which means I need to build a big rocket...

Sure, you CAN grind it, but I think it does have an aspect of "more is different" to it.

I have to say that I agree with you. If you have only one biome then its too easy. If you have three it is a matter of sending three missions. At the moment we have many biomes and so to gain maximum science you have to think out your missions more carefully.

However I do believe that some science equipment should be more effective in certain biomes so that we are encouraged to go to different biomes rather than sending a lander with all the science equipment to land several times.

Furthermore, if we look at the moon, Its not like it only has three basic types of ground, it has a wide variety.

[cooptimo]

The Mun and it's many biomes also makes for a *GREAT* way to enjoy some of the mods like KAS. My new project with a new game is to build a Munar base in a central location, then keep enough fuel, Kerbalnauts, and gear on hand to do suborbital hops that allow for a different way to explore the biomes. One could do the same thing on Duna and when there are enough biomes, Jool.

This could be awesome.

[Madrias]

I think we need more biomes everywhere. Mostly, we need more science modules. I've thrown in mods to add tons of extra science gear, none of it being overpowered, just odd at times, and it still takes an eternity for me to get anywhere. Half of that is my love of spaceplanes and as such, I have to decide between inefficient and rarely effective suborbital hops and pray for a new biome to grab from, or trying to get my wings and then explore with suborbital hops and gliding.

Then again, planes lead to my hilarity of trying to lug that Science Lab with me. Personally, I preferred 0.22's science-spam to 0.23's "bring arbitrary part to continue science-spam" strategy. Is it more realistic? Probably. There are still many experiments that shouldn't need the lab. I'd love to see (and have installed a mod that gives these) multi-sample science cans. You know, so that I can store multiple goo samples and materials lab studies. Sure, transmission is down the crapper, but I can collect three or four biomes worth of goodies, bring it back to Kerbin, and sail along the tech tree.

I think the biggest problem with Science right now is the lack of instruments. I mean, to an extent, I'd like to see more simplistic things added as well as highly profitable big experiments. For an example, I think it'd be cool to get 1 science point for having a ship where you've installed a solar panel and noticed power output rising the closer you are to the sun, and an additional point for watching it fall below Kerbin optimal numbers. Or a point for having a rover experience an eclipse and momentary power loss. Give the probe cores some method or another of making a bit of science, even if it's something as simple as "The probe's onboard camera records some low-resolution images of the landing site." and offers a 25% transmission rate.

As for transmission costs, I'd like to do something along the same line as the solar panels to the sun. The further you are from Kerbin (and, for the sake of giving comsats something useful) and your nearest relay satellite, the more electricity it will take to transmit data. So transmitting on Kerbin would cost almost nothing, but transmitting from Eeloo on the opposite side of the sun with no comsats would be rather, shall we say, energy inefficient. That, and make the antennas different other than just by saying this one transmits faster for more electricity.

My thought on the antennas? The default Communotron 16 should be a highly efficient close-range-antenna with moderate to high transmit speed, though low quality. That big dish thing, the Communotron 88-88, should be more efficient at greater distances and a good relay antenna with high transmission speed and quality, though a high energy cost as well. The Comms-DTS one should flip the scales, offering low energy consumption and low transmit speeds, with exceptionally high signal quality. The trade-off being whether you're willing to wait 5 minutes to get 100% of the quoted transmission rating, or you're willing to blow 500 electric charge a packet to get 90% and transmit in 20 seconds, or whether you're just starting out and you'll spend your usual 15 EC/Packet, get 60% of the rating, and transmit over 60 seconds. It'll give a reason to use more powerful, better antennas, as I've not seen much incentive to use anything other than massive Communotron 16 arrays. Maybe budgets will stomp that out, but there's not, currently, much reason to use the other antennae for me.

That, and adding more science gear in both the low and high ranges of the tree, should help out. Then you can make the tree bigger, add more parts, and just generally flesh out Career mode further.

[Vanamonde]

Moved to development discussions. Carry on.

[geb]

I don't feel that there's any significant difference between most of the biomes, so the game is encouraging you to run a vast number of near-identical landings on Minmus and the Mun. Reducing the number to cover only visibly different regions, or regions that add a new challenge, would be very welcome.

If it were for me to choose, I'd have Mun regolith, Mun crater and Mun poles (because entering into a polar orbit is different enough to be interesting). Minmus would have only two - flats and hills.

[Alexandicity]

Seems there's lots of love of the biomes

I agree that there should be lots of opportunities for trying different things and lots of biomes is the way to do that - I'm just proposing they get differentiated a little more. Even if you didn't actually reduce the number of biomes on a body, the other argument to make them substantially different I think is still interesting. Some really rocky, small or elevated ones would make you need to think more carefully about how you'd need to land at each one. It would provide a (slight) progression f difficulty to keep the challenge fresh. I think this is what you're thinking, Geb?

I also enjoy large complex mothership missions with docking and mobile labs, but I have always associated these with more distant destinations (Joolean system, usually!) where the trek back and forth really is a slog. Getting to the Kerbin moons is pretty quick and easy, so for me there's never been much temptation to go through the complexity of building a large "all in one" mission. That said, I could try it for the lolz...

[KerbMav]

I stopped doint the "Kerbin biome hopping", I also avoid doint the "suck the moons dry of science" approach, but take orbital readings/reports whenever possible and go the Mun as often as needed until I feel confident I can launch something to Duna/Eve.

It is only grindy if the player has to do something to advance at all, the science rich biomes of Mun and Minmus are an offer, an option, not an obligation.

[Ruinsage]

Id like it if there were less focus on biomes, and more focus on different objects on the surfaces, like different kinds of rocks. They would be impossible to spot from orbit, but easy to spot with rovers.

[Yarrula]

I like the lots of biomes option. I just want them to be visually distinct from each other so I don't have to guess from orbit.