Terrain Doodads need more role than being 'just' obstacles.

That's probably why I find the flamethrower tank ridiculous.

You can burn a robot, but they can survive the vacuum of space and the intense heat of moons, or just go through a forest fire without trouble.

I don't think weapons melting tanks and building are anything like a conventional flamethrower. They are probably more closer to something like W40k's Melta.

A mod that could do just that wouldn't be too hard, except for bots, and commanders, again due to the horrifying rotated bones problem! D:

In that case trees shouldn't be set on fire but vaporized

Yeah, metal doesn't burn anyway.

Well, you're not aiming at the trees, so it's only the secondary heat scorching them, not the burning stuff inferno's are shooting.

It's a better question if Vanguards are vaporizing tree's, they actually do AOE. If not, then that would lead me to question the physical consistency of the game.

Well not exactly : with current biomes variations, they would still remain only obstacles. The very first additional biome variation shoud be sloaps in order to reach higher terrains. They do not exist. In addition, the most interesting stuff in the desert biome has been removed, and this should be mentionned clearly : while Uber claims biomes concept are not mean to exactly represent the final stuff, it's clear that apart from textures, desert biome concept is absolutly not refectled anymore in the final stuff.

How to explain flamethrower tanks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon#Blooming

Yeah some cliffs like that, would do wonders to help break up the round perfectly curved planets. Not to mention it just looks freaking awesome.

I think part of the problem is planet size. Most planets are very small and as it is a circular map things like valleys and large mountains and hilly terrain can look a little odd. Also one of the bigger problems due to the round maps is being able to see the slope or dip in the ground. Earlier when this was still in the game it was not clear what kind of terrain you were on so your tank or point defense might shoot at something and never get close to reaching it as it hits a bump in the ground that was not obvious at all unless you panned around the map a bit and saw the side profile. I think Mavor talked about this problem some time back.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that some improvements would be great and should be possible (and yeah the lava looks painted on) and perhaps sharp valleys and steep mountains can be added more, but things like rolling hills may never come. If they did you would have to have lots of visual cues as to what the landscape is doing, perhaps a little like the hills in the desert maps of TA where it was all lined so you could see where it started and how the shape turned etc.

Sorry Uber, but I have to agree with a lot of this. One of the things that has been bugging me the most is that the terrain is basically flat and boring. While playing on a 'spherical' world does add some new play options, I feel terrain/maps are huge step back when compared to most other rts games and provides little strategy depth. It's hard if not impossible to create choke points, build on top of a ridge or to create kill zones. In my opinion the terrain/maps are as important as the units that you play with, they go hand and hand and help to enhance the game experience.

I'm not saying Uber likes it this way and I know they we're having some path finding issues previously. But, the fact that we won't see things like height variations, cliffs or other real improvements by 1.0 release really disappoints me.

If you want that, firstly uber need to put the pelican T1 to drop units on cliffs mountains. The problem is: uber isn't going to do that ? Why T1 pelican means that at 6 min the game is ending : vanguard drop close to the com. So definitely uber isn't going to change the map procedural.

I have no idea what you're talking about, and a vanguard drop at 6 minutes is absolutely not going to happen in non-team games.

Looooool in 1v1 i can rush t2 in 5 min.

Back in alpha I asked neutrino in those video things if terrain will affect gameplay he said yes there will be terrain height variation etc....guess let's wait and see if word is kept.

I would love to see bigger terrain features in PA.

TA had huge variation which interacted with combat range and line of sight.

Hopefully Uber will work on this post-release, or it'll get modded in. I worry that building on platforms like those desert mesas could be too much for modders to handle if Uber can't do it, however.

The community would like to see this stuff in-game too:
Environmental Effects Poll (Part One/Part Two).

I think Uber bit off more than they can chew when deciding to make this game. The game concept is awesome but to actually develop it within the time and money constraints they have...

yeah uh, you have no idea of how code works. if the engine isn't beefy enough for such high contrasts in sizes to exist in the game or if the game engine simply has no means of/has not been planned for rendering a unit much smaller than the boom with the same amount of trigs as a commander then tough titty, no mod.

for us to be able to mod it we need for the engine to be able to handle it in the first place.

that's why I fought for over a year to have the developers at least make sure this was possible at all at a grand scale and fully playtested in the PA engine.

otherwise we're just heading for a massive brick wall.

the developers are the only ones who can work engine-level. Modders? they can skin, model, change stats, write some java

Erm.. I do know what I'd have to do, I'd simply scale the model in blender or something, move around the bones to their correct places, and export. Really, it's not difficult.

I may give it a try, just to see if it's possible, with tanks, planes, and etc...

You're missing the point.

What size does PA accept and how would the performance be affected?

ideally you'd want the performance to reduce linearly and proportionately as your model scale decreases. It won't if the game is optimised for models of a certain size.