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For the first time I actually was overrun by biters =) Thanks to the devs for the changes to pollution and difficulty! Definitely the most exciting game I've played yet. The pollution changes and available tweaks actually make it something to consider now =)
Here were the settings I used:

I may need a few repairpacks for this lol

Yep. Its honestly pretty awesome. My "New 0.17 Deathworld attempt" was surprisingly difficult. I think every minute or so I went into the megamap to watch the pollution bubble, at least until I got my defensive wall almost completed.
The attacks were harsh, but nothing I couldn't handle. Spitters were a concern, at least at base corners, but I did a bit of redesign work and resolved it. Had a gun-belt and everything, trying to mass produce piercing ammo.

Unfortunately this was before I found out you can remove the autosave limiter (1000 autosave cap yay) and I ended up playing in that one version that caused the 16x evolution factor. The point where the big spitters and biters tore through my gun turrets and ate everything with no warning was about where I called it quits. I don't think I even got to see medium spitters.

But yea. biters scale properly now, and pollution bubbles don't just hit a brick wall.

Marathon Deathworld has been a fun challenge. It's basically a race to get Flamethrowers because nothing else can really handle the sheer volume of armored targets, one of the fun things about Marathon Deathworld is keeping your pollution low is not really an option, research costs are about 10x higher than a normal game so you need a substantial factory just to research to Flamethrowers, and the biters get pissed (I also refuse to play on anything but deserts). In the early game I eat A LOT of fish: eating fish is basically free so I encourage attack parties to bite the engineer instead of machines, pickaxe does pretty good damage too and once grenades are available it only makes sense to try and get the biter attack parties to gather around the engineer for a nice grenading, the more biter attack groups can be personally eliminated the easier a time the defenses have. Especially once Small Spitters evolve the grenades become super valuable because small spitters with medium biters up front as bullet sponges can simply shred turrets.

So my Marathon games generally climax with the engineer personally fighting off waves of medium biters and small spitters while desperately trying to keep the defenses up, and at about that time Flamethrowers finally gets researched and the factory can be properly secured with a wall of fiery death.

My base was only half-desert, but you can still keep low-ish pollution : (Got my first oil just in time for 50% evo and Blue Biters !)

I'm really enjoying this new challenge on semi-default settings. It makes my paranoid defensive buildings necessary and actually insufficient sometimes.

I had a similar experience. Doing a modded run with several of the enemy mods (rampant/bob's enemies) on higher enemy settings, became bitter food as I expanded to quickly. The 17 changes has really made me take a look at my base as a whole with regards to pollution. Def need to stay small until you get defenses ready to go. Trying to build full belt smelters and overbuilding power is a fast way to become biter food.
2nd run at it has gone much much better, have a defensive perimeter and expanding as needed. Really enjoying the challenge.