Effects of "smaller explosions" on the landscape

This is my question. Does it collapse or just fade away? If it fades away it's fine when you can't see it through the haze of a nuclear explosion, but if you blast away the bottom of a pillar with a Big Bertha that's a different story, and it would look funky to be sure.

I guess you could work around it by making all terrain-deforming weapons produce massive dust clouds to obscure the effect for a moment. But that might feel cheap and be too obstructive to gameplay.

Well, the only way it would 'collapse' would be if the engine did the following: (Assuming I understand the post on terrain)

1. Remove the entire block from the terrain
2. Convert the chunk that didn't explode into a physics capable object
3. Simulate making the chunk fall into the ground
4. Create a static brush out of the result
5. Add the brush back to the terrain.

But it brings up more questions, like what to do if your overhang couldn't possibly be supported by the thin bit of ground remaining (do you try calculate the weight vs support? how do you figure out what sections to calculate and which ones to ignore?) etc.

Perhaps use a health bar so features like arches would suffer a certain amount of damage and then collapse? As to falling I think your idea would make sense assuming they'll make it possible for them to fall by giving it the same properties as an asteroid or similar object and letting it fall to the ground only to turn back into a static piece after it stops moving.

I just imagine Players ordering there units to randomly shoot the ground.
Screaming:
'Die ground! Die!'