Make terrain important - high ground vs low ground

Hi,
I hope you will make terrain very important, so its not only about fighting for resource spots but for highground and tactical advantages.

For example projectiles have a higher range when fired from a hill compared to lower ground.
Radar and vision of units should be blocked by hills/mountains, so you really want to fight for that mountain to put your radar or defense line there.

Movement speed of units should be affected by the steepness of the terrain (flat ->tanks faster, hilly ->kbots faster).
Tanks should not be able to climb hills like Kbots can.
So you really have to think about what type of units you want to build on each map for your special strategic purpose.

I really liked the idea of having all terrain spider units, that can climb over impassable terrain and make a surprise attack on your opponents base.

While I agree with the radar LOS thing, this wouldn't exactly work given the fairly small planets we're apparently going to be playing with. The horizon would dictate your LOS and you honestly wouldn't see a damn thing even from a mountainpeak due to the aggressive curve of the planets.

Also please make sure that a difference in height between your artillery and your target does not translate into missing every shot because it failed to calculate where to shoot properly. In TA and SupCom if you place your artillery awkwardly on a hill it was my experience that it tends to miss targets on at different heights more frequently.

Bugs aside, the option to chose direct or indirect firing angles could help alleviate that.

This was only a video demonstration on how the game could look like. The game is supposed to have maps as big as supcom/ta had and the possibility to have bigger maps.

According to the TotalBiscuit interview, they slapped an 8K SupCom map onto a sphere and the size we saw in the video was pretty much what they got... they were surprised at how small a big square map became when translated to a sphere. Keep in mind, it's a sphere, so you've effectively halved the distance between enemy bases since you can hit him from BOTH sides. Wrapping a square map around a sphere would have the player bases back-to-back.

Zero K has every single feature in OP. All of them work well for that game.

I agree that terrain should affect unit choice severely.

To borrow again from ZK, in that game you have the following movement types:

• 
  Bipedal robots (cloaky and shield facs) - all round decent movement
  
  Tanks (light veh and heavy veh facs) - Not good on gradients, slow to turn, accelerate to a good top speed on flat.
  
  Hovers - Cross water, terrible on gradients, otherwise tank-like.
  
  Spiders - Climb any gradient, generally either flimsy or slow to compensate, but great for hilly maps.
  
  Jumpers - Jetpack robots, can jump to any height terrain within a shortish radius. Jetpack has a cooldown time.
  
  Amphibs - Can move under water and on land, otherwise robot-like.
  
  Planes and gunships - Fly

High ground advantage can be quite important for both static turrets and mobile units in ZK due to range boost.

you could take out the spherical element for radar calculation and just use height above sea level

I think that the ability to fire a freaking badass cannon from a moon to its planet pretty much applies to the high ground rule

This request is effectively equivalent to mine, where I want any unit to be able to at least aim at any other unit. It was possible in TA because the engine tracked the physics of each shot, and it was not unheard-of to see weapons fire travel across the map to splash a random building because of it.

With every weapon projectile tracked, units on lower terrain would need a higher firing arc to aim at a unit on higher ground, which would effectively increase the distance the shot travels, reducing damage and accuracy.

Making sure defenses are level, however, would be tougher. That might require adjusting the terrain slightly on placement to remove bumps, so that the defenses are parallel to the world surface, and unless the engine supports morphable terrain from the start, it would be hard to add later.

For me it wasn't guardians aiming poorly due to incline, it was dragon teeth being ineffective due to hills and valleys letting units fire over them like they aren't there. I remember a friend laughing about an online enemy because he built some expensive, high-damage, close range units that could not destroy nor fire over dragons teeth... until they did.

Yeap, and depending on the frequency used, real life radar 'bends' around the Earth to varying degrees anyway.

This was something that was a severe disappointment to me in SupCom. I designed a map I called "Gold Rush" which was basically a reverse king of the hill map. Rather than a mountain, there was a giant pit with about two dozen mass deposits at the bottom. I laid everything out so that Tech 2 artillery could fire down into the pit, with the idea being that players could fire into it but not fire out. Since elevation did not matter at all, despite the bottom of the pit being much, much lower than everything else, the effect was lost.

Sounds more like you underestimated T2 Arty's ability to aim up........thing sis T2 Arty uses a low arc trajectory, so it's actually easier for it to shoot up instead of shooting down unless the arty was right on the edge of the crater.

Mike

Yep, I too would like terrain to be significant for game tactics and strategy if possible.

It was right on the edge of the crater. After lots of experimentation I finally made a thread about it at GPG and one of the mods (who had some involvement in the game, if I remember correctly) confirmed that elevation had zero effect on the range of artillery; it was just a set radius and that was it.

While we're here, hopefully we can avoid the problem we had in Supreme Commander when the T2 Cybran tanks and point defense could not shoot anything if there was a tiny hill because they use direct hit lasers.

I always felt that should have been an AI issue. If a unit is railing away at something and not registering any hits, it should either switch targets or move until it is hitting the intended target.

Ohhh you're talking about rannnnnge, you should have said so, yeah that'd been known since like day 1, was likely not implemented due to something like the processing power that would be require to constantly recalculate a unit's range for every potential target individually based on relative elevation in real time. There's a lot more to it than you might imagine.

Mike

Does Zero-K or TA-spring use dynamically calculated ranges?

I'm an engineer, so I get the idea, physics and such

Shame that it can't be done for stationary artillery though. Realistically it should only have to be done once when the artillery is built. It could just create the proper ranges and then fire on anything that comes within range.