Weather and time | Steel Tide Wiki

Two things sit over every battlefield, and they are independent of each other: the weather, chosen before the match and fixed for its length, and the hour, which turns on its own for as long as the match lasts. It rains at night. Neither is scenery — both change what your army can see and how fast it can move, and both are simulated by whoever owns the match, so what you are looking at is what everyone is playing under.

An armoured column advancing under rain, rocket trails arcing into a burning target — An armoured push in the rain. Every tank and rocket launcher here is moving 15% slower than it would on a clear day, and both sides are seeing a quarter less of each other.

The weather

Weather	Sight	Speed on ground and water	What it is for
Clear	—	—	The sky every match had before this existed.
Rain	0.75×	0.85×	The two-handed one: less warning, and slower to answer it.
Snow	—	0.75×	You see it coming as clearly as ever. That is the problem.
Random	—	—	The match writes its own forecast. See below.

The day

A full cycle is 24 minutes of match time and a match starts at dawn — noon six minutes in, dusk at twelve, midnight at eighteen, dawn again at twenty-four. The light does not creep: a day is long flat middles with a fast turn between them, so most of a match is plainly day or plainly night and the twilights are short and amber.

At the bottom of the night every unit sees 0.6× what it sees at noon.

Day and night is on by default and can be switched off in the game config, in the lobby or the skirmish setup. Turning it off stops the sun rather than abolishing the hour: the match is played in unending noon.

The same advance at midnight: headlight cones ahead of each tank, red and green lights on the helicopters, and two blasts lighting the ground — The same advance eighteen minutes in, at midnight. Headlights ahead of every hull, red to port and green to starboard on the gunships, and the blasts lighting the ground they land on — after dark, what gives off light is what you can read.

What the numbers actually mean

Sight is what you know, not what your guns reach. A tank in a downpour at midnight still shoots exactly as far as it always did. It just finds less to shoot at, and is found later itself. Nothing here touches weapon range.
The Radar Station is exempt from both. It sees by radio, and neither the weather nor the hour has an opinion about that. On a dark or a wet map it is the one circle on the map that has not shrunk — which is most of what the investment buys.
Aircraft keep their speed. The slowdown is a ground condition; anything flying is above it. That is what makes air the answer to a slow map.
Weather arrives, it does not appear. A change takes about 25 seconds to cross the map, and the dials slide with the picture — you watch your vision close in as the rain comes in.

A random sky

Pick Random and the match decides its own weather as it goes.

It opens clear, and turns every few minutes from there: a calm spell runs 4–9 minutes, a wet one 2–5, so the storms stay events rather than a map condition. Every change is announced in the activity feed, for everyone, the moment the front starts moving.

A match has one wet weather and alternates it with clear — it never rains and then snows on the same battlefield. Which one it gets is read off the ground itself: if there is snow underfoot, snow falls. Frostline is two thirds snow and a taiga about a third; every other map in the game is under a twentieth, so a random match there is a rainy one.

Fighting in it

Scout more, or build radar. The first thing bad weather costs you is warning. A base that could see an attack forming at noon meets it at the wall at midnight.
Snow is the one that punishes distance. You will see the attack coming from as far away as ever and your relief column will be a quarter slower getting there. Garrison forward, or hold air.
Night favours the attacker. Shorter sight means a push is discovered later, and a defence that relies on reacting to what it sees has less time to react. Air raids and Wraith Stealth Bomber runs are worth more after dark.
Rain is the raid window. Sight and speed against the defender, and your own air arm untouched by either.
On a random sky, read the feed. The announcement is your warning that the ground is about to get slower — a column that sets off in the clear can arrive in the snow.

Setting it

Both are rows in the game config pane, in the skirmish setup and in the multiplayer lobby, where the host owns them. In a match, the admin console moves both: weather clear|rain|snow and time dawn|noon|dusk|midnight (or a number of minutes into the cycle). Either with no argument reads the sky back instead of changing it.

time works whether or not the day/night cycle is switched on — with the sun stopped it pins the sky wherever you put it, so time midnight on a match with the cycle off is a permanent night, sight penalty and all.

See Terrain for the other half of what the ground does to an army, and Sandbox and Bot for the rest of the game config.