Until buzzsaw and my new terrain came out, the problems with realistic tree placements from the clutter tile pallet were not understood by the players performing the AH2-->Ah3 terrain conversions. The automated conversion function did it's best to apply AH3 tile sets to match the parent AH2 terrain tile sets, so you got very dense tree tile selections becasue in AH2 many spawns were placed in wilderness type terrain. I've watched over the last few months as "someone" has been retouching the terrains in rotation to thin out the tree density and ability of GV's to move around towns and bases.
Part of the 6 months it took me in creating my terrain was testing the problems GVs have with the new trees. You may notice on my terrain all GV spawns enable the GV to move through a realistic pastoral country side that is not dominated by solid tree tiles. In the closed alpha we tested the tree density for Hitech and he reduced that. I suspect more for FPS purposes than kindness to GV's. Everyone testing GV's in the trees were enthralled with how well their GV disappeared from fighters and other GVs. Sadly for the most part we were testing GV's at the TT object in the center of ndisles which Waffle designed to be GV friendly. It was a shock how densely normal GV spawns were covered in trees when AH3 first went live after that.
It's been a learning process concerning how well GV's function with the tile sets Waffle created for AH3. Waffle did create a 2x2 mile super set tile with four villages on it with open land and vistas connecting the four villages. I've only recently seen any effort to use those as GV spawn destinations like I dominated my terrain with. And when they are used, for some reason the person touching up with them seems hesitant to use even a full village to give GV's a leg up with elbow room to transit rapidly.
It's a learning process and not many players are building new terrains like I did. As I'm writing this, I am prototyping a terrain I'm going to use the pacific tile set on to see if the same rationale for GVs exists in that tile set as it does in the Euro tile set I built my current terrain with.
Hitech is doing nothing to anyone when it comes to the terrains, it's players not understanding the new tile sets or, not liking GV's running loose in the game when they do the conversion touch up. When I designed and then tested my terrain, I did so with the purpose of giving the GVers and the aircraft lovers the same opportunities to have fun. Both groups pay the same amount for their subscriptions and we need both to keep this game alive.
