Totemic boards

Totemic boards are a type of floor added by the Ideology DLC. While extremely work intensive and moderately resource expensive, they have a very high beauty rating and, for users of the Royalty DLC, are considered a fine floor as needed to meet the room requirements of high-ranking nobility.
They are most statistically similar to hex tiles and spikecore plates, but differ in associated style, crafting material, and flammability.
They have a cleaning time of 100%.
== Acquisition ==
== Analysis ==
There are two primary use cases for totemic boards, namely fine flooring for meeting the room requirements of nobles , and general flooring.
=== Fine flooring ===
Totemic boards require more work to construct than fine carpets, and have beauty of 3 rather than 4. However, they are slightly less flammable and add almost half as much wealth to the colony. Besides these considerations, they are largely interchangeable.
They are somewhat similar to fine stone tiles, with the same beauty and work to make. However, totemic boards have their own advantages and disadvantages over the tiles - advantages include lacking a research requirement, requiring 20 wood instead of 20 stone, and having a slightly higher market value because of it. The primary disadvantage is the boards flammability. This lack of research requirement can give the totemic boards an edge if trying to rush titles, and the availability of wood vs cut stone means that significant pawn labor can often be saved by avoiding the need to cut stone blocks. However, wood is not a viable construction material in all biomes or for all ideoligions, and the fire is considerable when considering the value of large thronerooms. Thus, they balance their ease of acquisition by being inferior once constructed.
The comparison to spikecore plates and hex tile is even closer, offering the same rush opportunities but exchanging flammable wood for nonflammable steel. While wood is somewhat easier to gather than steel, being impervious to fire means that these options keep one of the key advantages of totemic boards while negating its primary disadvantage. Additionally, steel is more readily available in extreme biomes.
In comparison to the other fine floors, namely gold and silver tile there is more interplay. Gold tiles are exceptionally expensive and their effect on colony wealth bears this out, but they also provide a phenomenal beauty rating of +. They are also relatively quick to lay. The practicality of gold tile is limited however, due to their cost and the comparative ease of using sculptures to improve room beauty.
Silver tiles are surprisingly competitive with hex tiles - with higher beauty, a cleanliness bonus, the high availability of silver and only requiring a construction skill of 3. This means they're easier to make impressive rooms out of, and to keep them impressive when they inevitably get filthy. Silver tiles are almost twice as expensive, but the work saved in build time required for hex tiles partially pays for the difference in pawn-hours spent by using the time saved on other profitable tasks. The effect on colony wealth may be relevant to some players however. Thus, silver tile is a strong competitor to hex tiles for many colonies.
=== General flooring ===
Compared to other floors, they are quite beautiful, but work and resource intensive. While its a good way to train construction skill as, besides failure, there is no penalty for low skill constructors, their use as actual flooring is limited outside of player preference. It requires significantly less work to construct sculptures to improve room beauty.
== Version history ==
* Ideology DLC Release - Added.
* 1.3.3101 - Flammability increased from 0 to 22%.
* 1.4.3523 - Cleaning time factor added.
Category:Floor
Category:Fine floor