Handmade Maps Please

This unfortunately will not come soon. I've been quiet about many concerns i and many other have expressed since the beginning of alpha, hopping Uber could manage to implement these features.
Obviously this requires lots of additional stuff and Uber does not have the required time before 1.0.
I'm not going to complain, but I find it very unfortunate that the biomes have nearly not changed since the very first implementation. I thought alpha stage was just the beginning of terrain features. It was not. Now there are probably good reasons, one of them being pathfinding which probably much more tough to implement on spheres. And having very basic sphere surfaces might have helped a lot to implement the pathfinding. Hopefully the last pathfinding rework will help. Finger crossed, because as stated in another thread, terrain variations just being obstacles does not bring a lot from a strategy perspective.

I find this to be an easy problem to fix.

What if planets could be set to add nothing to the planets like mountains, trees, rocks etc. So a blank standard planet.

Then we could open a static mesh library with pre made mountains, cliffs, rocks, trees and so on to add to the planet anywhere we want, also could add elements from one biome to another to make the map unique. A good texture painter would be nice too.

Couldn't have said it better myself really. I too thought alpha was just the beginning, its such a shame that the biomes haven't been touched since alpha considering alpha seems such a long time ago now. I "hope" this isn't the final implementation of it as to what we have not but I too think its going to be quite a long time before we see any dramatic changes if any at all...

Uber has said what we have now is pretty much the 1.0 release of the game.

However, they do have a big surprise in store for us.

We'll see what that ends up being.

This is not good news..so much promising things are missing from the game currently...

I wouldn't want everyone to spawn on seperate planets though, that takes almost all of the fun out of the game. It would just be an eco competition for the first 10 minutes and then the leading player would smash through everyone else.

I'd like to see the terrain be a bit more like a maze with many paths and dead end sections as well as big open areas.

I really like the development that happened early on with the planets, it seems like a lot was done in a short time, and now we've had nothing much aside from fire for a long time. I'm sure much more could be done, maybe there are performance concerns?

Speaking of which, isn't it odd that the maps on Total Annihilation were much much bigger than those on PA 15 years later.