It bothers me that units can see straight through mountains and other bits of terrain. For all their visual variation, it makes them nothing more than generic pathing obstacles with no personality or strategic significance beyond an indestructible wall. Having terrain block unit LoS and radar scanning would make the lay of the land much more important, and provide motivation for territory control even beyond metal points. For example, a high mountain peak might be invaluable as a radar station, and battles inside cluttered areas like mountain ranges would be made much more interesting by the inability to detect enemies on the other side without carefully hidden or extensively spammed scouts. Now, I know we're just in alpha and these are complex features to implement, but I'd like to be sure that the idea's discussed now and not swept under the rug when there's no more time left to make changes that impact gameplay significantly. I'd love to hear what any Uber dev has to say on the matter (perhaps this is all already planned?), and it's also useful to get a sense for how the other backers feel about it.
Re: Line of sight and radar should require actual line of si There is another aspect to consider and that's cost in terms of CPU time. With a small number of units I'm sure it's fine but as the unit count goes up so does the strain on the CPU - there's currently no upper limit (or rather it's so high no one's hit yet) - the Devs have said they're aiming high in terms of how many units, like 1 million - though that's total silly, more of a engineering goal, but still at those numbers, even 3 lines extra code makes a difference.
Re: Line of sight and radar should require actual line of si There is some discussion about this with other peoples ideas and a Uber response in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=64&t=47859 The short answer is that as it's a first pass intended to just add it as a feature. There is some concern that some alternate methods could be too computationally intensive to be practical, especially on a sphere, but at this stage anything is possible. My personal view is that it should be a hybrid of different systems so that the game has a variable aspect. This could be justified by saying there is a minimal standard of satellite coverage for every planet which has your army (satellites would be placed in orbit at the same time, and by the same mechanism, as your arriving forces). If the planet is well lit enough its day side has full visibility but its night side remains hidden, but once the enemy is seen (either by passing through day light or by being spotted by your units at night) they can be tracked by the satellite system. If line of sight is lost (done by passing under something) tracking is lost. Only the near side of planets and moons which haven't been visited should be seen, meaning tidally locked moons provide a good place for totally hidden bases. Better satellites could have night vision but with narrow fields of view, probes could be sent to explore neighbouring worlds, and there should also be anti-satellite weapons to blind visibility.
