The biomes will have some sort of climate like rain or snowing??? or cloudy climate??, in the same planet or at least in climate specific planets??
Clouds or climate changes will obstruct visibility, devs discarded this idea quite early. So far only night and day cycle are making the cut.
I'm not trying to make any kind of ad here...or promote a game...but company of heroes 2 has some pretty snow effects all over the screen and its awesome, even if it has less visibility...and some other rts games have climates too
I don't think FPS game mechanics will translate very well to an RTS. Climates are fine. But you can't just arbitrary obstruct the player's view. That would just be annoying.
If climatic effects were to exist in game, they should effect the units not the magical floating camera in the sky. If you're going to allow deliberate obstructions to the player, they need to come from player actions, not environmental actions.
I'd love to see weather affect air units/gameplay. Or maybe storms as a planet feature. I dont think any of that is likely though.
Perhaps storms would be of paramount importance on gas giants? Maybe arial skirmishes on big gas giants treating large storms the way that bots on ground treat hills? Seems simple enough to implement if they allow anything other than orbitals on gas giants. It would, however be a lot more difficult on terrestrial planets, simply because storms move a lot more on terrestrial planets than they do on gas giants. (Or at least, no one would complain if they ran into stationary storms on gas giants, because that is close enough to reality, but people would really scratch their heads over stationary storms on terrestrial Planets)
I have seen weather/ clouds in other RTS; there was an option to turn them on/ off, and sometimes the option to reduce/ increase the intensity of the weather.
As apocatequil alluded to making it random will detract from strategy. I want to win or lose a match based on my decisions and the decisions of my opponent, not the decisions of a random number generator. I guess you could make the weather effects an always on global thing but then you are just talking about the differences between biome types.
I've seen in many games the options to disable or enable the climates on the lobby of the game...maybe it can be that option here as well. With the decision of enabling them made by voting or just the host
You can include basically anything in the game as long as it's totally optional. The real question is whether or not its worth spending the dev time and resources needed to put said options into the game on said options instead of something else.
