Different heights in the terrain?

Exactly, and because of that reason, they are annoying because they arent spotted at a glance, but can cause problems or delays in an early game rush (i.e.)

Theres no chance of seeing it before release. Uber have said its something they want to do, but it would take a lot of time to get it working (mostly the pathing) on a procedurally generated sphere.

I imagine we will see it at some point, but I bet they will finish off all of the stretch goals first.

My thread got revived!!!

On a more serious note, I really want to see some more hight difference besides hills. I don't care if it isn't in on release, I just want it in eventualy. The scale should be tweaked a bit. The props don't match the unit sizes and I would imagin that a cliff would also be scaled wierd.

It would be nice if high ground gave a range boost.

It's not really the visual aspect, but the fact some vehicles can't get there by driving, sailing or flying straight to it. That's what makes strategic placing of buildings interesting, now it's just build a think layer of defenses around your base, the terrain isn't going to help you with it.

Although I agree they should focus on promised features, this one seems to be one that wasn't even on the radar because it was to obvious in the first place. Which RTS doesn't have these type of height differences which hinders some type of vehicle to get to the other side?

As the technical aspect of it being procedurally generated, if that gets to an impossible task, they could create more props having these plateaus, scale and place them at random on the planet, perhaps even on top of each other to create large and diverse height differences for players to build upon. That would start to make some interesting maps. Like too tall mountains / plateaus to fly over with a planes!

You're welcome, after being invited to test the game as backer I immediately encountered some stuff worth being discussed, this was one of them!

Well, the way it's being used right now is mostly cosmetic and doesn't hinder anything moving (besides the water), the perlin noise scaled in different layers on top of itself is a good (pseudo) random base to build upon, the props could be used as well, scaling and placing them randomly on top of the perlin based terrain. After that adding some random patches of elevated (practically flat perlin based) terrain in perhaps 10 different height levels while creating random ramps to get on them from the ground surrounding it would be awesome.
It could even generated natural bridges this way as the thickness of the patches could be random as well, but this would have to bring a way of being able to control units being under a patch of ground.

As I understand it, its not an issue with procedural generation, but an issue with parthing on a procedurally generated planet.

I'm not technically involved enough in this matter to make the correct assumptions, but what issue are we talking about?
Does a height map not offer enough information for any path finding to be done?
As I look at it the only distinction having to be made is the height differences between 2 points and the type of vehicle having to go over them. Is the difference too large, than this vehicle can't cross, nothing more to it i guess.
Depending on the performance these maps can be generated after the planet has been generated, assuming no changes to the landscape will occur.

I would simply be happy if Neutrino could elaborate a little bit further about experimentations done with this feature we are requesting.

Can't n the camera just be angled as default?

Yes, but that would be a terrible idea because now you're playing at a sub optimal angle for controlling your army, you've allowed for terrain to block the view, etc.

We're close to 90 right now?
I'm not saying go right down to a 45 degree view.
If we dropped down to 70 or 80, the terrain is easier to read, and it still really wouldn't hide your units.

TA didn't have the issue to this extent and that was even more overhead than this. They just need to make terrain more readable through colouring, shading, etc.

If you listen in at 33:24 of the livestream John answers a bunch of the questions we have here about the height & desert biome concept look. Also, at 43:18 I asked the direct question about the height of planets ect. Basically they are shooting for the Desert Biome Concept in a nutshell, Good news!

The height differences already affect gameplay a bit. Here is a humorously failed turret placement - all the bullets hit the cliff in front of it, so none reached the enemy base on the other side.

i.imgur.com/YIlNbL3.jpg
i.imgur.com/fnXAh5N.jpg

Played some bumpy planets lately. I think it goes alright. Need to place turrets etc carefully, and sometimes factories are having problem with spitting out the bots though but fun.

Look at the bots climbing up the mouintain:


and look at this 1200 sized planet:

Thought I'd give this thread a bump, since I feel this is a pretty big issue/feature I personally would like to see discussed more (maybe in the vanguard newsletter at some point). Getting orbital/planetary play up and running is definitely priority number one at the moment, but have to give some love for map features too.

Also, in the recent patch, the game actually made some progress on this front, the desert biome does have some cliffs now, while we seem to have lost all the mesas:


I am just curious what is the current status of implementing cliffs/plateaus.. I know they have stated that the concept art is what they are aiming for, but the concept art really doesn't have any of this stuff, if you don't count the single buildings atop some plateaus. (Well the lava biome concept art does have some.)

Also I noticed that you can't build on lava on lava planets.. which is pretty cool, reminds me of Dune 2 where you had to build on bedrock. Sandworms.. oh yes.. sandworms in PA, please. Dune 2 feels are always good..that game was mind blowing in its day.

I don't know.. mesas were cool.

I'm not enjoying giving planets cancer. I think that height should influence terrain in a different way, rather than give the planet cancer in a way that you can't really recognise unless you zoom right in.

Having said that, I had 4 ants win against 4 levellers because the planet had cancer. Superstoked.

Yea mesas are cool.. I think/hope they are just temporarily broken.

I dont really care for lumpy cancer look either.. I specifically mean the cliffs and different accessible plateaus as seen in OP. Basically the desert biome concept art look with the addition of having ramps between the different ground levels, pretty much standard RTS stuff like in starcraft or what have you.

This is a good point too, there is definitely something nice about the freeform gameplay on the current relatively open maps, especially as the maps are spherical.. might end up boring if battles are forced too often into chokes etc. I guess that's where different planet types come in.

I think the issue with lumpy hills is that the planet is too small compared to the hill. Which is mainly because the units are too large compared to the planet.