I think swamps are a challenging biome and should be valorized, so I came up with some toughts:
Implementing “Swampified” cities. Little cities that have been claimed back by the surrounding swamps, this will create a difficult terrain to cross, with very damaged roads and buldings, as for you it’s the same for zeds & co. making it a decent place to hole up for some time (as long as you like mosquitoes and frogs). Obviously implementing all the bulding (swampy road, swampy house, swampy gun store ecc…) except for special ones as Labs, Hospitals, military Bunkers and so on…
2)Swampification. I heard people talking about a 4 years old character and I tought: “Well it may be a little boring passing by a place visited 2 years ago and noticing that nothing at all changed” so I came up with the “swampification” idea, meaning that swamp areas will slowly claim adjacent tiles, obviously there should be a limit to the expansion of the swamps, unless you want to feel like in Florida.
3)Floods. We hear about them nearly everyday. Maybe in-game after some long rainy days the river could break up the banks and temporarily flood adjacent tiles(The dream of every zombie swimmer).
4)Swampified zombies. Along with swampified cities there should be swampified zombiefied humans, once a happy zombie now a moving tangle of ivy and moss, nothing different from classical zombies except for a reduced walking speed, weakness to flames but increased blunt resistance thanks to the mass of vegetation covering his body.
Maybe some of my ideas are not very original, but I think they could add some very nice aspects to the swamp biome.
I used to live in a suburb in a swamp in New England. Super fun, since the required New England house basement had to have a permanent pump installed to get rid of the water that was constantly finding its way in. New England has plenty of swamps, they are just very different types than the sort you find in a place like Florida.
It would be hard to argue any of these areas aren’t swamps:
Edit: Actually, looking it up, I guess a large portion of New England “swamps” would be characterized as “Marshland” rather than “Swampland”, but really the term swamp locally (and in game) is used to refer to wetlands in general.
Oh. Yeah, Northern swamps/marshlands are wwwaaaaayyyyy different than ones down south. I live in Florida and… yeah. Swamps would look nice is there weren’t rednecks in camo jackets shooting at alligators.
If you look at DDA “swamps”, they’re more marshy, with puddles and such scattered all over, and theoreticaly squishy ground, but not extensive submerged areas, which is what really characterizes swamps. So really it’s just a naming issue.
Actually, the only difference between a marsh and a swamp (apparently) is the number of trees found in. A swamp doesn’t have to be extensively submerged to count as a swamp.
Since this is the first google result, probably where you got your definition (that’s not a dig, that’s my level of understanding).
"Also, marshes are typically not as deep as swamps."
Which is basically what I said
Swamps tend to have deeper water and channels from what I understand, formed around the trees, water-covered land with no trees and no channels is… a lake.
I’m most certainly oversimplifying, I was just noting the differences I’ve observed between the marshes I’ve seen in Wisconsin and the swamps I was more familliar with down south. shrug
Definitionally, DDA swamps have trees, and are therefore swamps I guess, but as for how you navigate, they’re more like marshes, so it’s kind of a wash. Maybe ditch the trees?
I’d like to see the marshes given a little bit of love. They’re kinda… boring right now. Just homogeneous land/water tiles with no structure. Would it be possible to make the water tiles take some shape rather than being randomly dotted around? Marshes tend to follow the shape of the land since they don’t ‘run’ enough to wear the land down. So you see strips of land and strips of water, places where the water forms into reedy ponds, etc.
I like the idea of flooded areas, although I personally don’t care much for swamps. Still, I think swampy cities could be interesting. Maybe ramshackle shanty towns consisting mostly of wrecked cabins in swamps? I think the spawn rate in swamps should be toned down, though.
