POLL: Environmental Effects - Engaging or Disruptive?

I'm creating this thread as I'm curious about what the general consensus is on Environmental Effects.
I'm going to define the various tiers I see of Environmental Effect, and Poll to see which Tier is the most popular.

1. Teir One: Obstructive Terrain - Valleys, mountains, mesas, forests, seas. This is where we are now.
   • Within this is the issue of whether forests should act as obstructive terrain, particularly for smaller units like bots. I'll add this as an option in the poll as Teir 1.5.
2. Teir Two: Behaviour Modifiers - Atmospheric conditions such as fog and cloud affecting line of sight. Thick jungle slowing down units. Open plains being quicker for tanks to traverse whilst rocky red mesa terrain is quicker for bots to run around in.
   
3. Teir Three: Economic Modifiers - Bonuses for certain biomes or planets - e.g. a metal boost in metal/lava/mountainous biomes.
   
4. Teir Four: Natural Disasters - Volcanoes, Tornadoes, Acid Rain, Lava/Sea Flooding. Arguably the most disruptive to game-play and sure to be modded whatever happens.

Higher Tiers include previous Tiers.

To those that might claim that the environment playing a role in game-play is bad for competitive gaming, as someone might get lucky in a particular zone, you are not wrong. But in having procedurally generated terrain, luck will always play a role in PA; do you get a bottleneck, or a mountain range, or a wide open space to build? This variety is awesome.
New environments and an element of randomness create fresh experiences and force players to adapt strategies accordingly, move their bases or move to another planet. We are no longer in meticulously mirrored maps like SupCom and Starcraft, where terrain and environments must be identical on both sides of the map in the interests of fair-play. If you don't like your spawn in PA, you can hop in a rocket and get another planet, or expand quickly into another area in the opposite direction to your opponent.

__________________________________________________________________________

Personally, I am for Teir Two - units interacting with their environment already happens, it just has not been fully implemented. You build your base in a mountain range or against a valley for cover and bottlenecks. A bot does not run through a mountain. Why should it run through a jungle? Why should units only take into account obvious obstacles like mountains, and not the fact that they are attempting to drive a tracked vehicle over scree? The environment could even change as war went on - cratered, muddy land might be more difficult to traverse.
Tanks and Bots adapting differently to different environment helps define their roles, and take into account their physical forms.
If units react like they're in an environment, we become more involved with that environment - it becomes more than an irrelevant, if pretty, backdrop.

I am not for economic modifiers as I feel this would be a nightmare to balance, and mean that some resource spots would be effectively worthless in comparison to others.
Also, as cool as volcanoes and acid rain might be, these are rare occurrences in reality and I would feel irritated if I lost a game because of a natural disaster.

Edit:

I'm iffy on any gameplay effects from the environment beyond 1.5 but would be really cool to have some purely aesthetic ones.

Tier 4 is a confirmed no go, PA won't have random events.

aside from all the bickering between me and wheels12 my thread is about these type situations. I guess most of the ideas depicted there would go in tear 2-> 2.5 ->3 type area. Granted some of them being in tear 4, but seeing that they are not random I think they would get bumped down to tear 2/3.

Tear 3 would not be that bad because it would introduce a risk/reword situation for choosing your starting planet and for going out to space later in the game. do you want to go for the best eco planet(a planet favoring energy or metal) or do you want to go for a planet not favoring any of that and hope that everyone else is going for the eco favoring planets so you avoid confect early game. etc..

Personally I am for tear 2, as depicted here with the removal of fog/clouds/mist and with the addition of predictable events. Like the rising and lowering of lava from a volcano reviling paths, or a consent vortex in water planets that you have to avoid (speeds up units on one side slows down them on the other) etc...

Also uber has said on occasions that gas planets will be good for energy. so I guess that falls into tear 3?

Might as well just add support for all of them and put in a robust options menu when you host a game. That way everyone's happy.

Shameless plug for details on deterministic - non-random - visibility modifiers: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/natural-stealth.56091/
Apart from that I am all for only adding bare-bones engine functionality that would allow to mod those features in because let us be honest: That stuff would mean a lot of extra work to get working, get right and finally get balanced for things that many (competitive) people are not too enthused about.

Currently the Poll is pretty divided, but it's clear despite that that a sizeable majority (over 75% Edit: 81% voted Teir 2 or up) would like to see the environment play a greater role in gameplay.
Behaviour stat modifiers for different biomes would probably not be as difficult as creating full on natural disasters into procedurally generated situations.

I'm all for certain terrain affecting bots/tanks differently, although I think your example for Teir one is backwards. Bots would weave between the trees easily, but tanks would be slowed down because bowling over trees takes time and reduces their momentum. You mention similar situations in Teir two, but I'm kind of against any kind of atmospheric conditions. I think any kind of fog or clouds would obstruct view of the field for the player and make seeing things from a zoomed out view difficult. (Although on second thought, seeing explosions light up the fog like internal lightning in a cloud would look pretty badass.)

This might be a case of Jungles Vs Forests. Bots could weave between pine trees but might not
be able to quickly traverse knotted up jungles, perhaps depending upon how thick/deep the jungles are. Even tanks might not pass the densest unless they were T2 and able to plough through, meaning you would need to clear dense jungle to pass (possibly with flamethrowers, as I suggest in the aesthetics thread).

Atmospherics would likely fade if you zoomed in, and you would still be able to see your unit icons through cloud regardless. You're right that it would be a matter of having clouds fade at the right height.
Ideally, you'd have very high swirly atmospheric clouds which only became visible when you viewed from an orbital height (making it easier to distinguish orbital units), mid level transparent wispy clouds which reacted to air flying through them, and very low lying fog which structures and units easily rose above.

I read a comment from Garat just today where he voiced the exact same concern and I think you have a misconception there: Clouds and fog are nothing purely cosmetic - they shouldn't obstruct your vision but the vision of your units instead. That is a very important distinction to make. Clouds as visibility modifiers create gameplay, clouds as graphical obstructions create tedium.
I would even go as far as saying that if there is anything beneath a cloud that your units can see, e.g. your units themselves, that portion of the cloud should be rendered highly transparent as to not obstruct your vision.

I like the idea of having clouds to show the separation of layers between air and orbital. Currently it is very hard to get a sense of depth when viewing orbital units, and I think clouds might help show where the atmosphere ends and space begins. If done right, this could aid in showing that orbital units are outside of the atmosphere instead of just really high off the ground like it appears currently.

Edit: In response to clouds/fog affecting gameplay or line-of-sight, I think it would feel weird, but it could give radar a more pronounced role if air units were unable to see through the fog to spot ground units.

I'm all for some interesting terrain modifiers, but I do agree clouds are a pain to get right. I'm tempted to point to Starcraft 2's usage of line-of-sight blockers as an example for how these features might work; however, I don't know whether or not the checks that are made for that in the code are too consumptive to perform at PA's scale.

At the very least, having different terrain types affect different vehicles wouldn't be a bad idea; as a caveat, however, there should be the option to reclaim your way through these, turning a pathfinding nuisance into a resource boon, in addition to the perk of using these features defensively. The more benefit these environmental assets have, the less likely players will be upset by them - at least, no more so than the terrain generation does already.

Natural disasters are right out, though.

While I see your logic here, this isn't SupCom - we have Metal, not Mass so reclaiming might only work for debris fields. I suggested in the Aesthetics thread that Commanders and Combat Engineers might clear Jungle and Forest with flamethrowers. That'd bring back one of the awesome things from TA - burning down swathes of forest ^^

A minor semantics point. In either event, the ability to clear trees (and maybe small rocks) should be present.

I considered including infrastructure stat modifiers such as roads in this thread, but really that's another kettle of fish lol. I agree!

I'd love to have tier 4 without tier 3 and without the effects actually being more than visual.

That'd be something for the aesthetics thread I made

I feel like the terrain must be interactive in some way, otherwise it could just as well be perfectly flat for all you care. I really enjoyed forests and wreckage fields blocking movement in TA. As well as the line of sight being blocked by prominent terrain features. StarCraft 2 even features terrain elements that allow units to hide. While blizzards might be too disruptive they were interesting in company of heroes 2. On a less disruptive level snow would slow you down, while ice could break when shot and send your units to the bottom of a lake.

While the macro is certainly important I think that battles still need to involve more than just death blobs being spammed at each other. A big part of that is how the terrain affects your immediate tactical situation. Even Chris Taylor admits that one of the inspirations for the 3D terrain in TA was how using tactics like having the high ground could win you a battle in command and conquer.

I like the idea of some terrains make some unit's more effective in some way in few locations to make player abit more selective in where they choose their battles.
But... Have to be very subtle and not over powering that it decides the battle.
Environments that kill unit's is an absolutely NO for it would mean I have to babysit the army or lose most of them from lava flow miss timing etc.

Don't forget that one of the things bots originally had going for them over vehicles as well was the ability to climb obstacles and maneuver tight spaces that vehicles could not. It would be interesting if bots could actually walk over wrecks or something like that too.