No, it's not, the terrain has some bad shaders, that's why it is hard to read.
I am looking today into the shaders. I suppose that the team could use a good lighting artist and VFX coder, because the game itself is darn good
and the models are very okay for such a game.
A few hints so far:
- The shadows are black and very hard, like in a horror film (because this is how lighting works in horror films) or on the Moon, and if it is not a horror game with many dark rooms, but open areas such as terrain instead, this is rather a beginner problem. This is unrealistic for a planet with flora and fauna though, and makes the terrain hard to read. Earth shadows are always combined with the sky color. This is different on the Moon. Just go outside and watch the colors of shadows around you, you'll see that even in dark areas the shadow remains rather soft and not just "black" and never even "grey", but almost always a mix of sky color + grey. This is in particular interesting in desert and dry areas. As a good advice: Play Warhammer 2 Total War (which has many different terrain types) and watch their coloring and shadow configurations, especially when you change the biome type.
- Unused outposts are sometimes hard to spot, although they are so useful to the game. They are easier to read on the mini map (still complicated though) than on the real map. Maybe add a flag or icon to indicate unused outposts?
- The buildings on the maps make almost no difference. They all look almost the same, except for the cities, of course. This is completely different to Total War or, say, Civilization or any bigger strategy game. I assume that you get the point. When you just look at your terrain and map, you hardly can tell what is there and what not. So either add icons (that you can switch on/off easier) or improve the readability of the buildings, because those buildings may work good close enough, but not in a large map, and not in particular if they have all the same color! Think development of an RTS and how important building type distinction is (something that Frostpunk didn't get right, which got some negative reviews, although everything else is very good and well done).
- When I switch to brightness 75 % and gamma 75 % the map looks better, though of course it is overlit and looks weird sometimes. My point: Yes, it is a dark world, but check out Warhammer Total War. They are actually pretty good at lighting dark worlds and terrain, which means -- it is still at day what you are showing with a lot of flora and fauna. Make it a bit "lighter". Bear in mind that players on YouTube suggest to turn on brightness and gamma higher, because they find the terrain hard to read... which means you certainly can and should improve it asap.
- Make the forest shadow lighter, much lighter. Now it's black. When I changed it into something more realistic, like a real forest, it looks much better and not like a collection of green stones (ground and vegetation xml).
- Undiscovered hex tiles. After a while I got how to spot when and when not the map goes further, but the undiscovered shader is hard to understand if you need to know whether you can go there further or if it is the end of an island, or the end of the map. CIV6 is, for instance, much better at it and you may need to look at it.
As an advice: Ask an artist to recreate the terrain coloring and lighting (with very little effort for the coder team). Artists usually see such things instantly. Programmers are usually bad at lighting ideas, unless they gained experience in heavy 3D projects, and therefore some cheap artist guide will be a huge help, so you can follow the guide and try to match it.
