Natural Stealth

I have also a idea for "stealth". We will get new terrain features and they also said that forests / trees will have some nice functionalities, like burning down a forest for example. So my idea would be that the fog of war is closer in a forest, this would be a new great way of tactical play. Sneaking around in the forest.
This feature is in many strategie games and I really like it, this offers more tactics.

I have never understood how plants are supposed to hide tanks in a modern setting.

You just can't hide something like that.

But it's harder to see trough a forest right? Harder to see something that is on a field right? So this is logic I think. Of course radar will see the units in the forest without decreased vision, but your vision from your units should be decreased and the units in the forest.

I was thinking more infer red, because the heat emissions of a tank will make it stick out like a sore thumb amongst all of those cold trees.

As for a game mechanic of having trees hide units from radar or something....won't most units just run them down? And if there is a battle....it will just disappear.

Weather would be a nice addition.

I always loved war games where the player has to adapt to unforeseeable events. It just makes the game richer. After all planets the way the are generated right now are all but symmetrical. So please don't come saying that weather would add unbalanced factors.

Beside, weather would be very simple to disable as an option at the start of the match, if that would be appropriate.

Trees should get destroyed by tanks passing over them. Or burned down by explosions. For regenerating slowly. That would add a nice touch.

And if we could use those elements to enrich our strategy and tactics, the better.

I won't disagree.

Stealth is not cloaked. Cloaked hides from radar and vision. Stealth only hides from radar.

Nice idea, would complement mine quite organically since foliage could be tied to biomes, too. The weather I am not to keen on, though - even more dynamic and thus bordering on being too much for PA I guess.

You are arguing semantics here... and you are wrong in the context of PA's predecessors - cloak hides from vision only! - but we are talking about visibility modifiers in general - no need to introduce new keywords for things that are the same in principle. Additionally I am against radar stealth, what I want is rather "radar shadows". That, and visual stealth - which you call cloak.

I'm torn on randomizing; I love adaptation like that, but there's a certain level where you're fighting the randomization and not the other player. If there are too many perks in the opponent's favor and/or too many disadvantages in your own then the game's over before it's begun.

I think there should be no randomization apart from the generation of the planets themselves - especially no random or dynamic events after the game has started. When the game has begun the only source of uncertainty should be your opponent.

Let's just get these vision definitions out of the way:

Stealth - invisible to radar. Defeated by standard vision and broken by "Detection" in Supcom.

Supcom/Starcraft Cloak - invisible to vision. Defeated by omni/detectors. Usually combined with stealth for complete invisibility.

TA cloak - invisible to vision. Superbly fragile and broken by any of a dozen circumstances. Wasn't combined with stealth, but radar was far weaker in TA than its successors so it didn't matter much.