Factorio Forums

Fort the moment, the terrain is super flat... Just some water and that is all. It would be so much fun to have some mountains, valleys, rivers, hills. This terrain could have specificities (mountain would have more ore, hills increase the range of towers, river have current that could be used for water mill or transporting ressources, and so on...).

I do not know if you plan to add it, but, this would significantly increase the strategy part of the game...

It's not easy to show terrain on a top-down map.

My understanding is that the "rocky texture" that can't be mined are supposed to be hills.

An isometric view would work to show depth, but that might be outside the scope of the game.

the first GTAs showed elevations just fine, and they were top-down. I'm not saying it's easy, but it seems feasible.
And DMA Design was the equivalent of modern-day indie devellopers.

There must be some possibilities to implement some relief. On a map that is just 2D, you can see details about the relief.

Bump.

I'd like some developer reaction to this suggestion. I don't know how it should be done or whether it is possible. But things like mountains and rivers would give us a lot of new possibilities. For one I'd love to have hydroelectric power plants.

Staxxy wrote:the first GTAs showed elevations just fine, and they were top-down. I'm not saying it's easy, but it seems feasible.
And DMA Design was the equivalent of modern-day indie devellopers.

First GTA is faking 3D view by streching certain sprites and then aplying certain shader to itto fake different sun exposure.
Implementing this requires quite some work and would reduce the overal rendering performance.
It could also lead to problems of corect positioning of other sprites (units, structures, etc.

So if developers decide at any time to change the way the game is rendered now I would recomend using 2D Isometric view becouse by using it you can easily add more levels and therefore alow things like underground constructions, miltilevel constructions etc.

There are much more problems than just terrain that would have to be solved, mainly Rails + trains Transport belts pipes etc.
Our priorities are now on different tasks ...