Which is exactly what the problem is. There should be a standard/default biome which incorporates all weather types and all seasons. If you want to play a desert map for dust storms, there are places which recieve snow and dust storms. Look up "dust storm in snow". I'd upload a picture, but I'm not sure what the forum's copyright rules with regards to uploading someone else's pictures. You have too much snow, and it makes no different to snowfall in SC1, you have too little snow, and it makes it no different to the non-snow maps in SC1, either way, eliminating the need for a full blown seasons DLC as tweaking snowfall DLC would do the job, and if you have just deserts, it takes the fun out of it, as deserts produce only dust storms. If someone's gonna pay good money for a seasons DLC, they may as well be able to take full advantage of it in every city. Realism might be a bit of an issue, but I'm sure there would be ways around it
Yes, I am aware there are plenty of deserts that get snow. The defining characteristic of a desert is not heat, but dryness. If I'm building a city inspired by Las Vegas or Phoenix though, it would be pretty immersion breaking to get snow in the winter.
What I imagine with this, and what I imagine most people imagine with regards to biomes, is something that is already present in CS1. You have each map given a 'theme' that determines the textures of the trees and landscapes, and yes, in CS1 the winter maps are just one of these themes.
For a potential CS2 seasons DLC, this is how I would imagine it working: There is a framework for the seasons that says when during the year it is which season (presumably based on the northern hemisphere, but likely with an option to invert it to represent a city in the southern hemisphere). Then, based on the biome of the map that's being played, it gives appropriate weather, with some biomes getting snow in winter and others not.
So let's look at the themes/biomes already present in CS1 and imagine how they would behave in a hypothetical CS2 with seasons:
Temperate - This would be your default, getting some snow in the winter but not a huge amount.
Boreal - This represents a colder climate and would thus receive significant snow in the winter, with snows probably extending from the fall into the spring.
Tropical - Warmer climate, would not receive any snowfall during the winter. The only desert map in CS1 is categorized here, largely I imagine because palm trees are part of the textures.
European - This one is weird, as it's less of a climate and more a way have the game default to the European style buildings and related. Europe has significant climactic variance, so for a CS2, this would probably go away.
Winter - The snowfall maps, in a CS2 with seasons, this would not be present.
So there are 3 themes/biomes in CS1 that map nicely onto climates. We can pretty easily add a few more on, separating the desert maps from the tropical theme/biome to properly represent that deserts lack precipitation, and possibly split that into 2 - hot desert (no snow) and cold desert (with snow). As map themes are something that can be modded in CS1, this set up would allow modders to create new themes/biomes with unique weather patterns to represent specific areas of the world that don't match up nicely with the default biomes.
Alternatively, if you really don't want to go that route, I can imagine a different modular system. Tropical, Temperate, and Boreal create a rough idea of a 'hot, warm, cold' spectrum. Each map could have a temperature rating, which would influence when and if snowfall occurs, and also a precipitation rating, which determines how often it rains/snows/etc. So, we would have a system where each map would be rated either hot, warm, or cool/cold, and also either wet, moderate, or dry. Under this system, a hot and dry map would be a desert city like Las Vegas or Phoenix, a hot and wet map would be a city in the tropics like Miami, a cold and dry map would be a desert with snow. This approach might be less moddable but still captures a variety of climate and season variations.
