Two creative ideas to limit rampant growing

[b0rsuk]

1. Plants lose HP when someone walks over them. Just a little, but if you place your fields inside colony walls your crops will be often walked upon, and may eventually be destroyed.

2. Localized rains.

Rains currently affect the whole map. Whenever there's a big fire, invariably a big rain occurs and extinguishes it all. I'm not sure why this is done, but I suspect two reasons:
a) to prevent maps from becoming completely barren too often
b) there are performance issues

Well if those emergency rains were localized, you could write some insidious code that prioritizes extinguishing remote parts of the map first, and leave the walls of fire approaching your colony untouched. Fun for everyone !

Plantations should be natural fire hazards. Currently I never really feel threatened by fire unless all my buildings are wooden. I only need to build a small firebreak, not to completely stop fire but to delay it enough that an emergency rain occurs. This includes flashstorms.

[Aerial]

1. Plants lose HP when someone walks over them. Just a little, but if you place your fields inside colony walls your crops will be often walked upon, and may eventually be destroyed.

2. Localized rains.

Rains currently affect the whole map. Whenever there's a big fire, invariably a big rain occurs and extinguishes it all. I'm not sure why this is done, but I suspect two reasons:
a) to prevent maps from becoming completely barren too often
b) there are performance issues

Well if those emergency rains were localized, you could write some insidious code that prioritizes extinguishing remote parts of the map first, and leave the walls of fire approaching your colony untouched. Fun for everyone !

Plantations should be natural fire hazards. Currently I never really feel threatened by fire unless all my buildings are wooden. I only need to build a small firebreak, not to completely stop fire but to delay it enough that an emergency rain occurs. This includes flashstorms.

I think performance is the main issue.  The work around might be, as the fire spreads, to only show the fire animation on 1 in 3 or 1 in 10 or whatever of the actual things that are burning.  The others could be represented with a blackened version of itself or some other static art.  If pawns are nearby, all the flame animations within some reasonable radius of the pawn would be shown to allow for proper immersion, but the rest of the map doesn't really need *every* plant's fire animation to run.  Then the fires could run amok without needing an emergency rain to keep dps from dropping.

[Greep]

"1" kind of makes sense, but is it even necessary? I generally place concrete on high walkable areas, not plants.  It also sounds like more micromanagement hell if you mean they'd lose enough hp to be flimsy outside of corridors.