Weather/light variability during the battle: CMBB & beyond

[John Kettler]

With military history being full of accounts of the impact a sudden change in the weather could have on

combat operations, I think it would be a great feature to have provisions for things like variable density fog, fog burning off, sudden cloudbursts, arrival of low overcast, flash floods and the like.

As things stand now, we are reduced to static environmental conditions throughout the game, and this results in such martial weirdness as players

either not buying on board mortars or sending them away if scenario specified, visibility's short and no TRPs are available. Similarly, you can have clear weather one minute, storm clouds a few minutes later, followed by torrential rain, then bright sunshine. Such a sequence is quite common in many parts of the world and could easily occur within the time limits of a typical CM scenario

I don't know how difficult this would be to code, but the European weather database is extensive and wouldn't require more than a distillation to provide the required flavor in the game. You could say that for the period of so many months, the weather in region such and such is typically clear, but showers occur X% of the time, with some distribution applied to their duration. You could say that under flash flood conditions fords become unusable and that pontoon bridges, rafts, and powered rafts (please, please) have so much chance of being damaged or swept away. You could start an attack in fog only to discover after you've committed that the sun has emerged and is burning away your protective shroud. You could build some sort of internal visibility table and even without dynamic lighting still be able to provide at least an approximation of the transition from night to dawn and so forth, adding a great deal of color to the game by simply increasing or decreasing LOS, basing it turn by turn on presumed ambient light. The moon could also be modeled the same way, with baseline illumination at night set by moon phase and modified by atmospheric conditions.

This is by no means a fleshed out concept. Rather, it is intended to be a way of launching a discussion on what could be done even without high end graphic effects. What say the rest of you?

Regards,

John Kettler

[xerxes]

I've thought it odd that in dawn/dusk games the LOS limit remains identical throughout the game. It's an odd world.

And yes, in game weather variability would be great, burning off fog, a sudden storm, etc.

-marc