Plateau's and formations

The terrain is very bland right now. All you see when you generate a planet is maybe some mountains and hills. In early Alpha the desert biomes had lots of plateaus that made it a real advantage for air fabers to put cannons up top. I would like to see those more often and maybe terrain formation like the one in the picture provided:

DO HOPE THEY DO ADD IT! because, everyone needs a little prettiness aye? however, the core mechanics should be worked on before the good looking stuff.

There have been a bunch of this exact topic, citing this image as well.

There are many improvements yet to be made to the biome generation.

Also, that preview is a biome concept. Concept being the important part.

Those biomes look pretty cool, but have a lot of shortcomes when it comes to gameplay. Primarily, those biome heights would really screw with gameplay and the game aesthetics. Again, there have been a bunch of threads on this topic.

True, but they had plateaus in the game before, along with huge cracks in the land. Not sure if a new code made it so they had to reprogram generation, or if they thought it wasn't necessary for the time being

But they had a gameplay test with the biomes looking like that in pre-alpha in one of their really early livestreams.
It seemed to work pretty well.

I agree with Brian that matching that concept art probably isn't a good thing at this point. The terrain is extremely narrow and the verticality of it isn't actually very useful beyond obstructing land units, because they're all isolated plateaus.

The kind of terrain variation I would like to see is closer to that of the lava concept's terrain. While the textures there don't really do it justice, a combination of long cliff faces and gradual slopes at various elevations is a great way to add strategically significant verticality. Here's a thread about cliff implementation that is marginally relevant.
I'm really hoping we get cliffs in the near future.

It would be fun if the pathing worked flawlessly. The things you could do with it would be amazing.
But there's always the 'but'.

The pathing isn't flawless, it would eat memory like nothing else, the planet generation algs would probably need to be reworked and refined for months. And then that would be the only biome of the half-dozen that would be so unique. Well, besides the metal biome.

Also, do you know anything about the swirly aesthetics? I really liked the look of them in the trailer. I saw them a bunch in the alpha and stuff, but now I've stopped seeing them.

Uber has talked about them.

Mainly, they wouldn't work well in actual gameplay.

They're in the game in a small subtle way.

But they won't be as prominent as in the trailers.

Easy example, imagine trying to get naval ships to navigate the swirls where water and ground meet. That'd be a nightmare.

I also remember Uber saying something about getting the biomes to meld like that being a coding challenge or something.

I just hope they'll put some priority on getting some verticality in game.

Right now a planet just looks like a painted sphere.

Yeah this would be nice. Plateaus of course are the highest form of flattery.

I don't remember this comment. I'm sure it's harder, but I can't imagine it being so difficult it's unfeasible. It would definitely add a lot to the game's visuals, so I hope they get around to it eventually.

Terrain height and features are something we're still very interested in fleshing out. Ideally, we want each biome to introduce really interesting strategic choices. For instance, with the desert planet, it'd be great if we could jack up the volume of the dips and plateaus. If we did that players would probably start setting up really cool ambushes and funnels and poop all over their foes. There's a couple of reasons why we haven't done this yet. It'd soak up some engineering time, of course, but it'd also present some art, pathfinding, and maybe even a few new wrinkles in balance. I'm pretty sure Mavor is working on tuning for biomes, so you might see some more differentiated landscapes down the line.

As for the swirls, those were fantastic in concept, but the reality is that it just didn't work out. I think we found a pretty cool middle ground, though, that gives our planets an iconic look without sacrificing gameplay practicality.

For shore lines, that's totally understandable. I don't think that a more swirly biome transition would have a negative effect on gameplay though, since it's mostly just visual. It'd just look really cool

If you want swirls, go play Monkey Island 3 & 4.. I think the cartoony swirly look doesn't really work anywhere, aesthetically or otherwise. Just looks like a doodle.

You know, swirls usually mess up more than they look cool, they tried it even very small on shoreline and lava shore and it looked sort of bad.

However, for biome transition, it might not be so bad. if only the ground color were to change. It would add a lot of interesting visual to the planet, instead of patches of whatever here or there. Swirls of one biome color swirling into another biome's color might look cool. Failing that, any sort of blending pattern if not color gradient, would add visual variety and variation.

Maybe do it like Australia. Flat murderous desert everywhere and then one great big giant stonking rock smack in the middle.

Actually that's exactly how it was in at least Alpha, swirls were the traditions between biome and they looked quite beautiful. I can't imagine with all these pretty shades and what not it'd look fantastic! Oh and on the subject of th OP, I think that the plateaus back in Alpha/Beta were great; I always loved to build AA or artillery; maybe storage and air factories up their if they were large enough. It made bases look great because of the height variations and nothing was broken back then. I can't wait for an overhaul on the Biomes brushes and what not.

I'm not talking about swirls like in that image. I'm talking about swirls as more organic biome transitions on a large scale.

Right now biome transitions up close look fine. At a distance, they're still rather ugly, because the shapes of the biomes are either straight-edged or generic and blobby.

Here's what I'm talking about:


Left is currently in-game. Right was from alpha I believe (taken from august '13 livestream). Middle was a concept paintover (taken from august '13 livestream).

The one on the right does not have organic transitions at any scale. The middle one has organic transitions at a large scale. The current in-game biomes (left) may transition well up close, but their shapes do not transitions organically into oneanother.