height levels?

I'm the kind of person who always likes to give snipers high ground, been playing for a bit, and I never seem to see a map based on the idea where a character could get to the high ground... sure they have levels of zoom for different floors, but I've never seen the engine take advantage and let me onto a roof.

is the Map generator just messing with me, or does the game not have any maps with a height advantage, and if they do... does it mechanically mean anything?

I have read in another thread that the engine does not allow real height changes, that's why there are no hills or similar. The only exceptions are houses with stairs, roofs, some rocks that are quite high and the ufos.

When you develop buzzard armor you can get your soldiers to higher places otherwise unaccessible. The buzzard armor serves as a James-Bond-style jetpack, so no shooting while in air. I have used my sniper with that on high rooftops, works great. I have read there is also other armor that allows flying, but I haven't come across those.

And I have never see that the aliens take advantage of buildings with stairs. Sometimes thy hide in buildings, but they never use upper levels.

The AI has never liked buildings but I think that is something that is still being worked on.

I think more of the buildings could be designed with multiple floors and roof access.

Chris doesn't seem to like the idea of making too much floor space in the maps though.

Perhaps Chris doesn't like it because you can't see well when your soldiers are behind them. And the more storeys a building the more "shadow".

Yeah that is definitely part of it.

I've used height to good advantage with the Buzzard suit and energy sniper weapons. I've also had UFOs crash in front of multi-story buildings and been able to use the 2nd-story level as an overwatch position to great effect. But it is a bit harder to utilize in the beginning of the game. I don't think the game engine uses height maps for terrain so it probably can't support topology like the OG.

I agree that the AI needs to use elevation better; the original had aliens spawn within buildings' upper levels and this led to a lot of tactical diversity.

Sleet is right, the game engine cannot support partial levels at all.

That means you are either on the ground or you are on the next floor up, there is no slope to stand on, no staircase to walk up as those would place you somewhere between 0 and 1.

Hills don't work as all the sides would need to be vertical cliffs.

Stairs are replaced with a kind of teleporter that sends you from the bottom of the stairs to the top.

Next time a better game engine will likely be selected so whatever game they work on next will hopefully avoid this kind of limitation.