Terrain Elevation

[Scondoro]

I'm having a lot of trouble recognizing terrain elevations before getting caught looking at the broad side of a hill. Some of the cliff edges are a little more clear, but if the cliff face is facing north, it can be pretty tough to see. On top of that, hills will block line-of-sight, and I neeever notice hills until I'm already finding that my units can't shoot over it.

And in general I'm still trying to figure out when and the how line-of-sight mechanics apply. A lot of times I'm expecting to be able to target an enemy unit around some trees and ruins, but I won't be able to. Might be cases related to the same issue with not recognizing elevations (especially if hidden by/cluttered with city architecture/ruins/forest).

[Slitherine_Iain]

This has been an ongoing discussion during development. Some of the team like the way it is and some want to remove hills as they're unclear. We'll keep reviewing this.

[Scondoro]

Thanks for the lightning quick reply. To toss in my personal input:

I'm actually a fan of the elevation variety (hills, cliffs). It really can break up what would otherwise be a flat and monotonous landscape. Once I discovered where hills or cliffs lay on the particular map I was playing on, I could then take advantage of them--or at least be prepared for them. They are just really hard for me to see right now if I don't already know they're there. The terrain isn't even identified as being a hill or high-ground when hovering over it with the mouse. A more outstanding visual cue or indicator would solve all the problems I've got.

[Slitherine_Iain]

We've been struggling to make them clear visually and so far nothing has quite worked.

[ByrnesVictim]

Also +1 to having problems seeing them, but also like the feature.

Maybe in Grid View on at least the border could be a different or bold colour for those of us who struggle a bit, or an option could be turned on in menu to draw a hard line against the cliff edge only, once we have played more I'm sure we won't need it

[Desolator]

you could easily make the hills more visible by increasing the overal height difference between low and high ground (the places without cliffs). Adding a *hill* tag to them would also make things a lot easier, like in Civ V, where you can see at a glance what's a hill and what isn't just by mousing over.

[Michaelus]

I like variety

My proposal is simple, make the border of such hex different color, e.g. non-crossable - red, ramp - yellow. And toggle, so people have choice to use it or not.
Simplicity realy works.

[Naughty Mouse]

I love that there are ridges, but yes, they are hard to see. I would recommend you use the Hex Color overlay to give a display. For instance, if a hex borders a ridge then you would have the movable sides green, and the non traverse side red. This way by using the hex overlay you can identify this terrain feature better. But please dont take it out all together, there is allot of tactics trying to find a good ridge to place your squishy snipers and protect the on ramps with melee units.

[eddieballgame]

Keep the hills/terrain elevations,

[Slitherine_Iain]

The hex border colouring is an interesting idea.

[UK Mikeyboy]

I like the elevation, keep it in. It makes the map look a lot more... mappy.

Also, it is a bit of a bother seeing terrain and where it is half the time when it comes to cliffs. Would it be possible to set a hot-key or a tick box in the options, so we can see a number for when elevation goes up and down? So base level would be 1, and high ground would be 2.

[Scondoro]

I'm a big fan of the toggle-able coloring-schemes and elevation indicators. I'm imagining a mini-menu of overlays where you can choose to toggle on/off elevation values, hex borders, colored hex borders that indicate crossability.

You could also add being able to toggle all resource values on for all the tiles too, so that you can see at a glance all the tile resources without hovering. Sometimes I'm looking around for a particular bonus and have to mouse over every single tile around me searching for it.

[arthritisfan]

I was running into the same problem as you with the north facing cliffs. A good work around to this is to pan your camera ahead of the tiles you are planning to move to because it is difficult to see the hill while looking directly above it but fairly easy once your camera is panned past the tile.

The color of the cliff face does help you to identify hills but they blend in too much when there are lots of ruins or other similar colored terrain. If the color of the rocks were a bit different it would make them stand out alot more imo.

[EpimeTheAus]

I've run into an area where thee cliff didn't pop as much either, hard to find where I could make my way past the terrain. Most other games would have a second basic map overlay or a zoomable mini map that would help show them since we can't 360* rotate the map to see the cliffs. Maybe you need to add an elevation reading and cliff indicator to terrain tiles information, say an advanced option to activate it?

[luckz]

I learned to mouseover tiles to see their height (first two digits are X, Y coordinates; third is height). It's a bit clearer if you zoom the camera down to minimum height level, but of course it's impractical to play like that.

A hold-hotkey overlay would be neat.

[Scondoro]

Originally posted by luckz:

I learned to mouseover tiles to see their height (first two digits are X, Y coordinates; third is height). It's a bit clearer if you zoom the camera down to minimum height level, but of course it's impractical to play like that.

A hold-hotkey overlay would be neat.

Oh whoa I did not know that, but that makes sense! I've noticed that third coordinate value but didn't know what it was referring to.