Improved Weather Penalties

It’s been brought up over the years, but wanted an update on how the current weather penalties are working, as well to add in some suggestions. After getting hit by a snowstorm in new england last night, here’s some some thoughts/suggestions that hit me.

+Driving+

  • Driving should gain a negative penalty scaled by the harshness of weather. Light rain = slight debuff, whereas heavy snowstorm adds a major penalty. Driving in weather should not be easy without the right vehicle. If mechanics aren’t in place, then for now why not just a negative modifier to driving skill scaled by weather type & day/night?

  • Ideally, the greater speeds you drive while in various weathers should grant higher chance to lose complete control for a few seconds, and various snow weather types can hinder driving speed all the way up to smaller vehicles possibly getting stuck in snow.

+Terrain+

  • Various weather types should not only affect morale, but incur movement penalties or rather increase movement costs for All entities as well affect visibility. Again this would scale up as weather grows harsher, and day becomes night.

    • If possible, why not have all basic ground walking paths turn into weather version tiles, provided they been hit by a weather type for realistic amount of time. For example, heavy rain can cause floods, and snowstorms turn tiles into snowed in tiles. This would affect basic ground tiles like dirt, grass, roads, etc. Especially in snow weather cases, the player could have the option to use shovels/plows to turn snowed tiles back to normal versions.
      Basic example of above: dirt > snowed dirt or dirt > wet dirt or dirt > puddles
  • Besides increased movement costs for everything, weather should also impart possible trip hazards. Metal/road/grass surfaces slick from rain should add chance for things to slip, increased if running. Cold snowy nights could create icy/black ice affects, so the chance to slip be increased and random. Slipping causes one to get knocked down. And heavy flooding/snows heavily affect movement speeds.

+Perception+
-Again, not only should weather types have scaling sight penalties for all entities, but should also affect smelling & hearing distance. A light rain might not do much, but a thunderstorm should mask just about all sounds as well as drastically increase visibility during flashes. Trying to walk in a blizzard during night could just about make one undetectable, but not only are you freezing while moving really slow, who knows what horrors the snow is hiding?

+Weather-ed Zeds+
-Why not weather-ed zeds while we are at it? Perhaps some zeds that only come out in the rain or some dangerous ivory skinned zeds that can move just fine in the snow to ambush use trying to so snow angels?

+Traits+

  • There should be more traits then just outdoorsman to counter weather. Traits for example that represent peoples love for the rain, or sheer terror of thunderstorms. Just having a immunity to silly morale penalty for being wet isn’t enough.

That’s it for now, those were my thoughts during my snow shoveling ‘fun’ this morning. Any thoughts or anything else weather should do? Thank you for your time!

cool i got ideas to add if it snows really heavily and the tiles turn to snow characters who are light and have paws should make no sound when walking eg wolf mutation and get a movement buff also if it rains really heavily the ground should get covered in water and the z level would increase by 1 and you could use a raft to get around

Watch this space for more snow mechanics in the near future.

btw, weather types already affect :- ranged penalty, sight penalty, light modifier, and sound attenuation,