RTS_7 "New Terrain Feature & Weather"

Well well well, I said that I would work on military units or roads, but...

First of all, in my quest to continue to make the game more detailed and polished, I've added a new terrain feature: Hills.

Hills are just land ridges. I had actually intended for them to be in the ridges update but the visuals weren't rendering correctly so I had to hold it off until later.

But that's not the real meat of this update. No by far that would be the feature that no one (not even me) expected: Weather!

For balancing weather doesn't appear until turn 9 so that players have the opportunity to settle cities & start work before being affected by it. Then every 4 turns it moves so one person's storm could very well move and hit another player.

This feature will add a *TON* of new gameplay opportunity. It helps to add that bit of randomness to the game that I think will help keep players on edge. Because of the moving weather system, it also means that players (if they have sight) will have the opportunity to see weather coming in-advance and brace for it. This will help make it a bit better to know that it's coming.

Sadly, however, the weather system so far has been a bust. I'm including it in this update because I may eventually bring it back, but for now, it's too expensive on CPU & GPU to be worth adding. When the weather is generated players see generally a 50% frame decrease which is far too steep for me to be comfortable making it a core feature. So until I can solve this, it may or may not be in the final game.

That's all for this one, I'm hoping to get something bigger to you guys soon, I promise!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman