The game is balanced around the default refugee start. Sheltered may be not worth it right now because monster evolution, food spoiling and winter should compensate for the LMOE shelter instead of leaving a 3P cost, but that’s an issue with the negative points, not the game mechanics.
I’m pretty sure the devs admitted somewhere that most of the challenge starts are lacking balance right now since a lot of recent changes interfered with them pretty hard.
On a side note, I don’t think changing the starting season on config should affect Z evolution at all, because it would be as the cataclysm itself happened on a different one. That would have some interactions with winter and sheltered starts tho, so maybe those should always be as if the cataclysm happened on a spring,
listen man, i dont think you understand. as someone else confirmed this also happens on spring start. so monster evolution doesn’t really have anything to do with it.
rather the monster spawns have been ridiculously buffed up since older versions and im not sure anyone mentioned that. i mean this thread is up for a while and nobody brought that up
I do understand, since I commented on this very thread that spawns are indeed buffed on latest versions. My initial comment was to say that evolution does scale on special starts, so the effect for sheltered/winter is not so far from expected, although still too high.
ah i see… well I updated my game and also started a spring start for testing and zombies do seem to be at their usual evolution.
so yes that concludes the special starts with a different season are very much broken sadly