With the devs working hard already on the texture overhaul, why not add some spice to the actual ground you are building your airport on?
The grassy terrain we have is fine but what if we had some obstacles that could be somewhat location based and could not be built on. Let’s take a lake or river on the side of the map or just a simple rock wall.
This could in my opinion be done so that it does not hinder the players ability to build but would give a more dynamic feel to the play area.
I agree with you. Everywhere we build, only the weather changes. Flat land is everywhere. However, I believe rugged terrain can cause performance spikes and increased lags. So, overall, I think variable terrain can take some time to roll out and polish bugs and gameplay stability.
One way to mitigate the performance issues could be to have a set of 20 or so map templates that could either be loaded randomly or chosen by the user.
I personally don’t like this idea unless the terrain boundary was bigger. we are already limited on how much space we have to build on I would NOT like to limit it more. but if they terrain space was unlimited, that would be a great idea.
I think larger maps and many other features take priority, but I don’t think custom maps and natural features should be a thing. In fact, many airports around the world massively terraform and drain ponds and crop into the sea, so it makes the features concept a bit useless.
What could perhaps work with the aim of the game is to have variable wind affect take-off and landing directions so users with multiple runways need to plan them appropriately for directions of runway to change dynamically.
Not about random terrain features, but I was thinking I’m missing the ground being all sand and not grass the last time I started an airport in the Middle East. The same size of map would work as for the grassy map.
