Q - Will we see hills & cliffs (height variation)

Right now, in the live streams, the demo's show a lot of props and cuts into the terrain which in itself is really cool.

But the rest of the planet is basically a blank sphere.

My question is then, will we see more terrain height variation around the globe like hills and/or cliffs that can be scaled from one side but not from the other?

what big cliffs you have, all the better to spiderbot you

+1

The map you provided might be a bad example, since the cliffs themselves function only as choke points.

If you look at the map from a strictly functional perspective, the cliffs just form a wall that units must path around; if you look at the livestreams, PA already has plenty of terrain features that block pathing and create choke points (cliffs, craters, bodies of water, etc). The change in altitude in the screenshot you provided doesn't influence the game in any other way (except that flying units must climb to maintain their typical altitude relative to the ground). T3 mobile arty aside, most combat units in SupCom had such short range that they couldn't hit targets standing on cliffs from the ground, and I'm not sure turrets on top of the cliff could depress sufficiently to fire at units on the ground. So the cliffs have minimal effect on combat, as well.

The way I see it, cliffs could potentially influence PA in two ways:
1). A base that is built on a cliff that has no land-based entrances would be effectively invulnerable to land units; you would need artillery, missiles, asteroids, air units, or air transports to destroy it
2). A cliff could, potentially, influence the range of artillery projectiles fired from an elevated position, but I don't know how PA is going to handle artillery physics.

If you're asking whether or not there will be topographic variation in the planets (slopes, hills, etc.), there already appears to be some: ocean/lake shores slope down, I believe. But hills have little functional effect on the game except they sometimes block shots, and units are generally too dumb to move when their shots hit intervening hills.

Given Mavor's goal of minimizing micro, it occurs to me that the presence of random hills (and units too dumb to know their shots are being blocked) would increase micro, so random topographic variation in terrain might not be desirable from a micromanagement-reduction perspective.