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It appears that snow overrides part of the underlying terrain where according the the manual it should just be adding additional movement costs. An example is "plains sand" can become "plains snow" which changes a lot more than just the movement costs. The manual would seem to indicate that is should become "plains sand snow" and just add extra movement costs to that "plains sand" terrain.

This has a major impact then on tank/motorized combat modifiers as "plains sand" gives significant malus while "plains snow" does not.

I did observe in a recent game snow caused marshes to freeze over (ie, the marshes actually disappeared), making road/rail much cheaper to build. So I got in the habit of waiting for winter to do my rail building ... which I'm not sure is entirely unrealistic.

Yeah it causes weird impacts to road/rail building costs and to terrain combat modifiers.

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

I did observe in a recent game snow caused marshes to freeze over (ie, the marshes actually disappeared), making road/rail much cheaper to build. So I got in the habit of waiting for winter to do my rail building ... which I'm not sure is entirely unrealistic.

Also winter can cause rivers to freeze over, making them a non-issued (I think).

Except that when the snow melts again the rail would become useless when it loses its solid foundations, so logically the rails should collapse when the snow disappears.
Aside from that, while watching Dastactic playing we noticed that high sand dunes also get turned into snow plains, this doesn't seem right. Sure it is neat that you can build cheap rail and road, but snow shouldn't be that much of a great equalizer of terrain.

ORIGINAL: LeoMPanther

Except that when the snow melts again the rail would become useless when it loses its solid foundations, so logically the rails should collapse when the snow disappears.
Aside from that, while watching Dastactic playing we noticed that high sand dunes also get turned into snow plains, this doesn't seem right. Sure it is neat that you can build cheap rail and road, but snow shouldn't be that much of a great equalizer of terrain.

Clearly they have some way to make a stable rail-line through Swamps. No idea what it is, but they do.
And doing that is a lot easier when the swamp is frozen, rather then swampy!

When teh swamp is swampy, they have to reinforce the rail line itself and the places the building machines and material are parked. The area that needs reinforcement is a lot bigger then just the rail line.
When it is frozen, they only need to reinforce the tracks themself. Much cheaper to do

FYI, as a general rule warfare in history did not happen in Winter. It is too hard to forrage or march.

So when it does happen in winter, it is propably because the winter froze over some swamp, seperated the enemy or otherwise allowed the combat to happen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvh1H0HkhI8
https://youtu.be/T2571JUYAlI