Terrain Type Indicator

[Slaughter]

This is prob more of a mod, but...

I think everyone and his mother uses new terrains these days... and really, why shouldn't you? They're great, go get them. NOW!

Anyway, what I mean is: The map simply isn't sophisticated enough to convey the needed info, especially in places that may be plain ground or forest either way. With the new terrains, terrain knowledge before deployment is necessary and useful.

I'm sure no military force worldwide deploys anywhere without knowing where they are fighting first. So what I was thinking is somesort of pre-mission interface symbol or such showing the terrain of the mission. Say, even something as simple as "Forest", "Plain", "Desert", "Warehouse", etc would be great.

[Meridian]

I could make something similar to DaylightIndicator: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,2408.msg58431.html#msg58431

The problem is the final terrain is randomly generated in many cases and is just unknown until it is too late... i.e. until the battlescape is generated.

For example in TFTD you have a 50% chance to get volcanic, 25% for seabed and 25% for coral terrain on one of the textures.

[Hobbes]

This is prob more of a mod, but...

I think everyone and his mother uses new terrains these days... and really, why shouldn't you? They're great, go get them. NOW!

Anyway, what I mean is: The map simply isn't sophisticated enough to convey the needed info, especially in places that may be plain ground or forest either way. With the new terrains, terrain knowledge before deployment is necessary and useful.

I'm sure no military force worldwide deploys anywhere without knowing where they are fighting first. So what I was thinking is somesort of pre-mission interface symbol or such showing the terrain of the mission. Say, even something as simple as "Forest", "Plain", "Desert", "Warehouse", etc would be great.

This is possible but way too complicated to work since it would require some massive redesign of the terrains and Geoscape. As it is, the terrains are defined either through the Geoscape (for UFO landings, where the engine checks the terrains assigned to each Geoscape texture). For texture #5, which in vanilla is Mountain terrain, you now have the following possible terrains in Area 51:

    - id: 5
      terrain:
        - name: MOUNT
          weight: 10
        - name: TAIGADESERTMOUNT
          weight: 10
          area: [0, 360, -90, 0]
        - name: TAIGAFORESTMOUNT
          weight: 10
          area: [0, 360, -90, 0]
        - name: TAIGAPOLAR
          weight: 10
        - name: TUNDRAMOUNT
          weight: 10
        - name: TUNDRADESERTMOUNT
          weight: 10
        - name: TUNDRAFORESTMOUNT
          weight: 10
        - name: TUNDRAPLANE
          weight: 10
        - name: TUNDRAPOLAR
          weight: 10

So there are 9 possible terrains for any UFO mission on that texture (and some textures have 20), and the game only randomly selects one of them when it launches the mission. Plus, Taiga Mountain only appears on the northern hemisphere, and several of those terrains are 'Mountain' variant, but they can be either 'Desert' (no trees) or Forest, and there's also the 'Polar' or swamp variants, and the Crashed Plane version. You could give all this info to the player but he/she still would have little idea of the actual terrain being randomly selected.

The only way for this idea to work would be to get only 1 terrain per texture/alienDeployment but then you'd need to split the existing Geoscape polygons into dozens of smaller ones since there are so many terrains for each texture. Which is just an insane amount of work for the expected result, specially when you consider that I designed the whole new terrain structure to keep the player uncertain about which terrain it will face.

[Meridian]

Or we could just move the selection of terrain to geoscape (at landing time), but I don't want to mess with that myself.
Not worth the effort for me.