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Okay, today in university i had an idea.
As you can guess, it's about a buildable weatherstation in the game.

So here some ideas about the mechanics.

The weatherstation has three researchable levels so far:

• The Station makes very vague predictions for the weather (which may be wrong, sometimes. maybe there's a possibility-value in this mechanic?)
  I imagine expressions like this: "Weatherstation reports a sandstorm 124 miles west. It will reach us in 2 days. (49%)"
  Maybe even a little more vague, but i think this kind of information creates a good "fear" of the event. Will the player make preperations for the storm or does he risk having damage from the sandstorm so he can focus on building defense against raiders?
• The weatherstation initiates a countdown to the next weather-event (which has a failure-possibility of -2 to +2 hours but the event WILL happen sometime in between.
  Expression: "Heavy Sandstorm in 3:49h"
  The player is able to prepare more or less (he knows it will eventually come in the next 1:49 to 5:49 hours).
  I believe it's satisfying to have relatively good reports after building, researching and upgrading an object, the cost/time to build/research is a balancing-thing
• The weatherstation creates a report for 3 to 7 days.
  This is a complex level, i imagine
  
  
  • a) a report you can let the station create/"produce" in a certain time for the next x days
  • or b) you have a permanent, self-updating report (maybe extra-research/upgrade needed?)
  So why would that be tricky? I don't know how far the Storyteller-AI "plans" it's events. I believe it's deciding very situational what do throw at the player. So a x-days-report would limit the story-teller in it's possibility to adapt to the players actions.
  
  I think one possible way to do it anyway would be to create a report with varying weather-possibilities.
  In real life weatherreports are very safe for the next two or three days, but after these it's failures grow for each day predicted.
  
  So maybe the ingame report is structured like this:
  
  
  
  • st day: Clear Sky (100%)
  • nd day: Rain (100%)
  • rd day: Rain (87%)
  • th day: Sandstorm (53%)
  
  
  • etc.
  That's just ONE way to give the storyteller more freedom to change the weather if it wants to. I'm sure there is a good balance possible for this system.
  Also it's possible to give exact times to those information, maybe with another upgrade?
  

I like my idea because it embraces to things I like about the game:
- It gives the player more information to plan with. ("I should really harvest the plants before the next rain, so the water of the rain won't be wasted.")
- It creates tension. ("Sandstorm in 1h and Ford is far away from the base, RUN FORD!!!")
- And it gives alternate solutions to critical moments ("50 Raiders in front of my base, hold them 30 minutes longer outside, from then the Sandstorm will get them MUHAHA *evil laughter*")

Opinions?

PS: please excuse my english, not my native tounge ^_^