Features questions - Relief Map, radar...

Hi,

I'm a casual but experimented RTS player, ks backer, and I think Uber is doing an awesome job till now and this bodes very well for the future. The game just looks super good and I hope it will run on my laptop (I know it won't, it's 5 years old ---)

- Relief map :
From the alpha videos on youtube, I can see that the map is perfectly spherical, aside
from layed out obstacles (mountains/plateaus).
-> Will there be a relief map that affects unit sight, unit speed, and range of fire ?
(hills and valleys, and maybe "ramps" to go on plateaus ?) etc.

*Radar suggestion:
-> Have radar blocked by LOS blocking obstacles (mountains) and/or radar signal obfuscated for smaller units (bots), especially when walking through forest or rock fields, and for stealthy T2 planes.

- Units & Weapons:
* I think the arc of fire of artillery is a bit to vertical, this looks weird
* Are the tech trees (bot,vehicle,air) and tiers planned to have very similar unit roles (e.g. T2 = bigger T1, bots are light, tanks are heavy, planes fly, but basically do the fit the same roles), or will each factory have units with very different roles (e.g. T1 bots are cannon fodder and AA, T2 bots are spy and arsonist, while T2 tanks are artillery and heavy assault tank etc.) ?

I would like to know about this aswell.

It's amazing the speed at which a thread gets buried.

And it's one of the few topics which have been completely avoided by (most of) the Uber team so far.

It appears like neutrino is still planing to stick with the SupCom version of vision / radar, despite all the issues with that.

I too would really like to see radar (and vision) be limited by line of sight and some more interesting, and navigable, height variations. These can give maps far more strategic depth than is provided by mere scatterings of transparent obstacles; a mountain can become an important strategic point to hold rather than just yet another thing to path around.

As for the radar, I don't think it's a feature that's hard to change, so if they have hesitations, I understand they don't issue a precise definition of what they are going for, especially this early in alpha, and knowing all the other potential issues: what about satellites, radars on the moon, and whatnot ?

However, things like relief map and handling of LOS/pathing obstacles like hills & forests are harder to change once a decision has been taken, because depending on architecture, things can be quite rigid.

I had an idea which would only work in a sphere based map like PA. The Antipodal Thumper.
No idea how to balance this in-game, but the idea is that a building can send a shockwave throught the core of the planet and cause earthquake damage on the opposite site of the planet (hence, antipodal).
Just throwing it out there.