Slitherine

It seems that the weather report (Calm, Rain and Snow) has no effect on anything ?

weather it is only decoration...

But it would be really nice if bad weather would affect recon by air and sightings at sea.
Air attacks could be suspended similar to the way PzC handles this.

Erik wrote:But it would be really nice if bad weather would affect recon by air and sightings at sea.
Air attacks could be suspended similar to the way PzC handles this.

Agree, but this would add a whole new layer to old DLCs to balance and complicate mission design in future ones.
And even though I really, really dont want to be that negative guy around here, mission design and balancing has not been the devs strongest suit recently. With the pace of DLCs probably even picking up, this might even get worse. Would be nice to have this as an option for your campaigns, though.

Andy2012 wrote:

Erik wrote:But it would be really nice if bad weather would affect recon by air and sightings at sea.
Air attacks could be suspended similar to the way PzC handles this.

Agree, but this would add a whole new layer to old DLCs to balance and complicate mission design in future ones.
And even though I really, really dont want to be that negative guy around here, mission design and balancing has not been the devs strongest suit recently. With the pace of DLCs probably even picking up, this might even get worse. Would be nice to have this as an option for your campaigns, though.

Adding the functionality to the game would mean nothing to most existing scenarios. I think only a few of the official uses weather anyway.
But providing this tool to the scenario designer can only make scenarios more interesting.
BTW, the devs would need to add some weather forecast a la PzC as well. The forecast should not be 100% accurate of course, a bit more FOW is always welcome.

The current weather system in OOB has also the effect to reduce fps, increasing the heat-output of the gfx-card thus accelerating global warming. Maybe we should better neglect weather in the game. Just saying...

Seriously, weather affecting terrain is a must in a war game. Snow and sand storms reducing the line-of-sight is a pretty good feature of PC. Together with a supply drop to reduce the overall effectiveness of units, this could become interesting.

I am actually split on this issue. One of the reasons why I like OOB more than PzC is of reduced randomness (in combat) and increased predictability (lower damage per area - units can't move after attack, steady income per turn). Random weather effects in PzC can completely ruin you strategy. It feels like doing a coinflip each turn if you fail the mission. On the other hand I really liked some predictable weather use in PzC campaigns. For example one scenario would tell you, you need to do this objective before the weather changes or you need to hold the frozen rivers until the ice melts. This lets you use weather as a part of your strategy which is good for the game.

You can set the weather with the Editor :
It is possible through the editor to make something in a way limited with the weather report.

Randomized weather can indeed make a scenario impossible to win if unlucky. It's already possible to script such weather effects in OOB for planes if you drop their air-supply during rain/snow and let the supply increase again when clear. The drop in efficiency is somewhat slow though that the bad weather should take a couple of turns. It's easier to implement bad weather without air support at scenario start. Only the drop in sight-ranges is still missing to make this work fine enough in OOB.