Make terrain important - high ground vs low ground

No there really isn't. Its a parabola.

Yes plasma weapons on a higher elevation get a range bonus. However stuff like lasers actualy gets less range because their range is spherical.

Is it a universally applied bonus? Or is the range calculated individually for each spot on the ground surrounding the weapon's current location?

What do you mean by a universally applied bonus? I'll just explain all the whole weapon range changing system.

'universally applied' might mean "is the range related to difference in height, not height above sea level.?". Range is dependant on the height difference between the unit and the target, it is not dependant on some sort of height above sea level. So a unit's firing area can be non-circular if it is on quite bumpy terrain.

ZK has basically 3 types of range:

• Parabolic. Plasma cannons and artillery. There is a magic unknown range bonus for shooting at lower units and a penalty for shooting at high units. This results in things such as low range plasma cannon assault tanks being naturally unable to shoot at mid or high flying aircraft.
• Cylindrical. This isn't realistic but for gameplay reasons missiles and rockets have no range modification based on terrain. It's nice to mix things up and makes things able to hit high cliffs
• Spherical. Lasers, flamethrowers, lightning and heatrays. Spherical range projects a sphere around the weapon to define how far the weapon can shoot. So it has a penalty up and down hills but it is also truely spherical so acts logically when dealing with units in the air.

Spring has a lot more functionality than we're using, I think an arbitrary ellipse can be defined for range bonus of missiles and lasers but all we're using is a cylinder and a sphere. Ballistic cannons can be done entirely realistically in Spring but there are configurable artificial limitations which can be applied and as far as I know everybody uses them because pure physics can make less interesting gameplay. This leads me back to things specifically relevant to this thread.

We two artificial limiters for ballistic weapons, Range and HeightBoostFactor. Range is how far the unit can shoot on flat ground. I'm unsure about the exact mechanics but I think HeightBoostFactor*HeightDiff is added to the range when firing at targets of a different height.

So why not just let weapons shoot what physics says they can? With Spring we can control weapon velocity and can even give each projectile different gravity. While this would be realistic I don't think it would be that interesting. Every unit would fire at 45 degrees to hit max range. We could restrict weapon arc but then there are problems with shooting tall units and up hills. We would lose diversity in projectile speed and trajectory shape which would be boring.

Picture the Big Bertha or Pitbull from TA. If those units didn't have an arbitrarily restricted range they would not be allowed have the firing characteristics that they do.

So in short I would like range bonus for weapons firing at different elevations but a realistic bonus is probably bad.

Ah, that clears it up. I'd like that to have in PA as well .

And I concur. But do not overdo it to the level where the defense is either high or useless.

There is another type of height advantage which becomes present when terrain blocks projectiles and Line of Fire. In Spring(opensource engine that Zero-K use) projectiles can't freely go through the terrain, features and in most games(Zero-K included) not even friendly units.

Units on the highground can stay on the top and pop up to fire at the enemy on the lowground while the units on the lowground can't take cover and when the units on the lowground tries to go slowly up the steep hill the units on the highground have time to retreat. So units on the high ground can choose choose when to fight or retreat.
This applies particulary to units with direct Line of Fire weapons such as lasers and weapons with small or no ballistic trajectory.

This is takes alot of micro and attention to micro as you would want the units to just go close enough to the edge of the highground so that they can fire on the enemy below.
In Spring units on Fight(like attack-move) that are on holdposition will do this. Then you can order the units to Fight move to the edge or beyond the edge of the highground and they will stop when they have an enemy in Line of Fire.

If this should be an important height advantage in PA I think that there needs to be good automization and useful tools for visualizing Line of Fire otherwise it will propably be very time consuming and micro-heavy to perform.

The usefulness of this type of height advantage depends on alot of things:
Range and speed: If units die fast and don't have time to move away when enemy units popup on hill above them this advantage is stronger.
Alpha damage:Units with that does high damage and have long reload can popup, shoot and take cover again.
Ease of conduct:How difficult it is to perform and how much attention and micro it takes.
Map elevation:There must be height differences to make use of this advantage.

I think it's safe to assume, that this will be the case in PA as well. TA had a simplified simulation of projectiles already, SupCom, FA and SupCom2 had fully simulated projectiles as well. (And full simulation is already confirmed.) The only thing up for debate is, through which of your own units some shots can pass.

In zero k defense is usefull even with no range bonus. Actualy if you can teraform a high enough mountain a doomsday which normally cant hit artilery will get enough range to hit artilery. But you have to go pretty high for that.

Reposted from here.

In addition to the above, I want to stress how much bots and vehicles should be different. In Supcom there is no difference at all between bots and vehicles except for how they look, but in TA it made a real difference to their ability to travel across different terrain. The smaller bots were also much more agile than the vehicles - this makes a difference if wreckage blocks travel, and it also "feels" better to have units that move in identifiably different ways. Much as Forged Alliance is my favourite game ever, it does kind of feel like all the units are on ice skates.

The problem with SupComm's terrain was that it was hilly everywhere. TA's maps worked by having flat planes, and then 3D terrain 'elements' (hills and such) were glued to it. So anywhere that wasn't a terrain element was perfectly flat.

Even a gradual rise in the terrain in SupComm would render a Cybran army useless... with a spherical planetoid, everywhere will have some curvature to it, which will have to be addressed...

There exists a spherical planet which is completely flat as far as slope tolerance is concerned. Just use a perfect sphere then at all points gravity is parallel to the normal to the ground.