Terrain Deformation? Interesting Weather?

Having been reading up on Mavor's Rants about the terrain generation system. It occurs to me that I'd love to see the terrain get seriously distorted and such.
If I smack an asteroid into the terrain I don't want to have a nuclear-scale scorch-mark that fades away after five minutes, I want to see a lasting impression on the map.
I want units at the edge of the blast crater to have a height advantage on foes at the center.
I want artillery to shred terrain until it's nigh impossible to build on and dramatically slows units down as they negotiate the craters.


I want a lot, maybe it's not possible with Mavor's terrain generation system...maybe it is..but please please put it in?


As a secondary thing, something I thought of as I wrote the above...
I'd love to see planets which have interesting weather. Rain, snow, sunny fields of daisies...Lightning storms, powerful EM Fields, ash from a giant volcano that dominates part of the equator...
I want them to affect units in play, Ash damages aircraft engines and scatters radar, EM fields disable radar at longer ranges. maybe EM storms which wander the planet like a hurricane, disabling radar and even shutting down units in their AoE temporarily. something that players will need to be wary of, especially if one heads into their base and shuts down -everything- for a few minutes as it passes over...

Maybe the volcano is spitting out rocks which rain down across that hemisphere causing indiscriminate damage to any units or bases unfortunate enough to be there. I'd imagine that any forces there are travellers from other planets in the star-system, not actually built under the shadow of a rock-spewing volcano.

Pretty terrain is great, but unless it affects the way I fight, I could be fighting on a Tron-style Grid for all I care.

Permanently destroying terrain is not just in the game's title, it's a key feature of the known endgame.

Currently, we only know of a few weapons that explicitly damage or destroy worlds. More apocalyptic scale weapons will be revealed as they happen. The smallest planet wounding weapon is unknown at this point(maybe the Commander has/is one?), and will likely change from play testing.

AoE damage scales up QUICK. Ever seen the bomb bouncer in action? A good blast of AoE causes things to drop like flies, which can easily end up overkill. Lowering an aircraft's speed will do wonders to make it them easier to hit and generally have a lousy day.

Check the stickies. There's tons of discussion on all sorts of things, including the various kinds of roles that terrain can play.

Ironicly the bomb bouncer was the only answer to enemy aircraft deathballs :lol:

It was the only anti air splash damage, wasn't it? I don't remember there being any others, not even on the other experimentals.

All other mobile AA was far to terrible to deal with it.

It's all about theat AOE boom from the bomb bouncer.

Everything that you suggested is a brilliant idea

I think that verticality may really come into play on such places as the metal planets where there are big openings digging deep down like canyons, bridges, planes that are above, planes that are below.

And I obviously get tired of seeing no effect in supcom to nukes or arty on the terrain whereas building a factory moves the terrain around to create a flat surface a huge deal. :'( so unfair
That terrain movement could definitely have been used on the bombs and such

As for weather heck yea! I want the waves in a sea to rocket sky high when there's a really big storm have the naval battles be just as much a vertical thing as a 360° thing.

so epiiiiiiiiiiiiic

please put this in the game

I hadn't even considered the idea of waves on water terrain....
I like the idea that the waves would be slow enough to confer meaningful effects on High-ground and such, not in terms of bonuses, but simply the advantage of it being easier to shoot down at someone than accurately hit something silhouetted against the sky.

On that note, if navy is gonna be a big thing, I humbly request a water-world. no terrain, just water. all resources are underwater. All battles are fought either in the air, on the surface, or via submarine.


Come to that, I have to ask, what kind of space-presence are we going to get? If I can deploy my forces to an asteroid in enough force to actually build giant engines on it, surely I can field a starship....