Poll: What's about destroyable terrain?

What do you think about destroyable terrain?

More effort than it's worth.

I thought ramming moons into planets did leave a crater.

They are thinking about adding craters when a comm explodes but they are not sure about it.

I would like to see smaller craters (pathable or not) for large and expensive buildings such as adv energy plants, holkins, etc.

Artillery blowing through mountains would be cool - particularly in desert biomes; imagine blowing through natural walls over time, undermining the enemy's AA perched on the cliff, showering the enemy base in an avalanche of debris and sending the bots over the breach.
I don't see how that would harm gameplay - it's realistic; if a rock gets hit by a big explosive shell, something usually happens.

I don't think pewpew lasers should do anything substantial, and I'm not even going to talk about dredger/bulldozer type units.

Tree will be part of the sim soon.
We don't know how.

but...

This has been talked about in the Live Streams, primarily via Viewer Questions, Use the Live Stream Index to find where it's been Asked.

Mike

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/planetary-annihilation-engine.html

CSG isn't exactly great for destructible terrain. Each new CSG adds more detail and uses more memory and requires more calculation to do, which means you can only change the terrain so many times before something goes wrong. That is probably why terrain is likely only going to be affected by particularly rare events, such as planet smashing and Commander explosions.

This is never a good argument for anything.

Perhaps you'd like to address the rest of my argument then?
I was suggesting that it would make gameplay more dynamic if artillery and heavy weapons (perhaps battleships) did limited damage to terrain like mountains and plateaus - namely if they are thin enough, or bombarded enough, they reduce to a pile of surmountable rubble.

Why?

The deformable terrain in spring is a nice feature.

I've seen a team nuke a lake in the middle of a land map, build sea and won with a flagship... So if it's reasonably easy to implement in the engine I'm all for it...

Unless its impossible to do, we better have it. Depth is a good thing. The ability to siege terrain to access a base is a needed feature in an annihilation game.

With asteroids, it already works.

So you can jut apply it to other weapons.

The problem is not the Functional aspect of the mechanic, but it's effects on gameplay. Neutrino has talked about this a a couple of occasions in the Live Streams in response to questions.

Mike

If I remember correctly he was in support of the effect.

Not Really. The jist of it was that he doesn't see terrain deformation as a primary Game Mechanic, it is being used for Asteroids and maybe some other large scale weapons but now for EVERYTHING.

Mike

Very early on in development I had asked this question and was told that the plan was to have terrain deform when hit. I'll try to find the thread I posted in.

EDIT: Here we go. When I asked about it this was Neutrino's response:

Sounds like that was before they finally settled on CSG terrain.