The Case for Removing Radar

I think we should keep radar in, however i have these ideas:

1. make radar update only once ever 2-5 seconds,
like real life radar the intel provided should not be real time, moving targets are harder to hit but buildings are easy to detect. (possibly have a swipe effect if this is easy to implement, also interpolation is a possibility to slightly increase efficiency for the T2 radar)

2. have radar jammers,
this way the enemy can do stealth attacts that can only be detected with actual vision.

3. maybe units that can detect being pinged by radar and give away the location of the radar,
this way the enemy can detect your radars and effectively fight agains giving away intel

You want your enemys long rangeweapons to be less effective?
Build stationary or mobile radarjammers once they are in.
People seem to forget that the unitrooster and balancing is still to be done and come up with premature suggestions...
You want to weaken radarplay for longerangestuff fine but removing it enterly? What? Hell no !
And again this is not TA anymore this is a spiritual successor that wants to do things differently and just be a clone .. if you have a problem with that you are wrong here

Once the unit roster is filled out, only then will people not use it as an excuse for balance problems in the game.

But seriously, how long are we going to put off discussing balance?

How can a game even be considered a beta without a full unit roster? They're kind of an important feature.

I just feel like people keep putting of discussing it for bull reasons.

Games have all had skewed definitions of beta. AAA titles define beta as "game is completely done but build up hype for that release day sales surge". Any other testing before that, is usually done by paid staff who is supposed to intentionally try to break the game and then even tweak its build themselves.

This game is early crowdfunding. Its different. See prison architect and such...

BUT ON TOPIC...

They should limit both radar and counter radar. Meanwhile, I'm sure the scout would be the one unit that would balance radar by making radar resistant and maybe even making it "detect radar signal"

I thought we agreed before that stuff be it units, functions or balance is still missing ... as much as i hate stating it many times it simply is a fact
What op is suggesting is removal of a imo very important feature/function that has been put a good ammount of time and money into (i imagine) ..

I really like the idea that came up recently of making any radar unit show up to anyone nearby. This would create a lot of situations where you would prefer to leave your radar off, like a sneak attack with mobile radar or a secret base. Your primary base would probably always have it turned on.

It is too early to talk about balance. This thread is about gameplay. Specifically, whether it is more interesting gameplay to have a radar tower that gives you a large land detection range, or to remove that mechanic.

I think that radar is detrimental to gameplay by giving too much information away for zero effort, and for a quite negligible investment. The player constructs the radar tower, and then can be reasonably certain about enemy movement within a large range around the tower with no further investment or activity.

PA would be greatly improved in terms of gameplay by forcing players to be active on the map if they want to learn where the enemy has deployed their units, and to target them at long range. Both sides will want to push units forward to gain vision, driving them into conflict. And both sides want to both scout and deny enemy scouting, meaning light presence in many places is actually very useful. Blobbing a large army together gives you more combat power, but you see less area and have less map presence to deny enemy scouts.

With long-range land radar targeting, a group of long-range units can always use its full range. Including to control the map. You don't need real hardware anywhere you have radar confirmation that there is no enemy presence. The amount of cheap, reliable intelligence a long-range land radar provides just makes your force deployments and combat way too efficient; so much so that even a large price tag wouldn't dissuade players from using it. It should just be removed.

Relying on vision makes for better gameplay, regardless of unit balance. Instead of being able to freely target any blip you like within your radar's range and your guns' maximum range, you must use units to get vision, and those units can be blocked or destroyed where radar cannot. Artillery will have an easier time targeting the front lines because both sides can see the enemy's combat units. And artillery can attack at tremendous range if you have confirmed there is a target there using a scout.

How about this for an Idea:

Imagine the pic below is from Planetary annihilation



So basically, if you cant read my scrawl:
Black area = Radar can see that there is an enemy there, but you cant shoot anything into the Unknown

Shaded area = Area that you have scouted, and now have Radar coverage. Units can target and shoot into this area.

Clear area = No radar required for targeting or shooting.

This would enhance scouting and would make radar very useful, baut at the same time, not an auto targeting mechanic for anywhere on a planet.

This was similar to original TA. When the targetting facility was introduced, it let you shoot into the black areas...maybe this could be something used in orbital instead of just revealing all the enemies units/ bases..?

Thoughts?

Nanolathe, the problem with having radar targeting be based upon whether or not you have scouted the area one-time, ever, is that you will just scout the entire map once. It's a manual labor operation, not strategic scouting, and its effect is binary and permanent.

Even if the enemy has established a very well-defended base in an area you have never scouted, you will just kamikaze as many expendable units as it takes to get vision of it one time. And then we're back to normal radar targeting. One-time scouting of the area is not a good solution.

However I am open to the idea of intermediate solutions than just removing land radar entirely, if someone can come up with something elegant.

For example, giving some units 'ears' or some other detection radius that extends a short distance beyond their sight range, but only reveals blips with wobble. Scouts can then be used to get short-range blip detection, in a much more interesting way than just building radar towers with very long detection range and not scouting on the map at all.

However as I have said before, at long distances introducing radar wobble doesn't do anything because it still enables shooting at a target with impunity; the fact that it will take somewhat longer to eliminate it doesn't really change the calculus at all.

A multiple levels vision system is always more interesting and flexible than a single level one, also it provide more potential unit properties like stealth, jammering, wobble increasing/decreasing etc and potential tactics to misdirect the enemy.

Radar is also important for jammer based sneak attacks, since you have to know enemy positions to avoid their optical visions. Remove both jammer and radar from game it would be more rely on luck, you can't use scout units instead because that would raise enemy‘s alertness.

Luck? Not having units in the right places to see enemy movements? Not attacking in places where you have scouted ahead and seen the enemy is ill-prepared? If anything having to rely on vision means you have more opportunity for deception and misdirection since you can use almost any unit in plans to do so. And the enemy can't get the kind of wide-ranging information that radar offers to see through such plans.

I completely disagree that the intel game becomes about luck if you take out radar.

Imperfect information and luck are very different things. Especially when you have the option of spending resources on a variety of tools (units) which can give you more information. And where your decisions about where you build structures and send your units gives you information about those areas.

Lets throw an idea into the air and see where the winds of the forum take it...

So I have been reading about radar for the good part of 4 hours today and I think I may have something. What if the difference between basic and advanced radar is that basic can only track moving targets and advanced is able to pick stationary targets out. It seems this is a real life problem that is solved with really hard fractal geometry equations and general 'math magic-ry'.

You can 'math' your way into detecting moving units by measuring how fast a given signal pulse returns from where your shooting it versus how fast it returns from those objects around it (if its moving closer with respect to its surroundings then the pulse returns faster). But to detect stationary objects the 'math-ing' gets more complex and it mostly comes down to getting a bunch of intelligence on the stationary object your hoping to find (material composition, size versus the surrounding objects, and a whole bunch of fractal geometry for pattern matching to discern bg noise from a structures return signal)

But we don't need to do no stinking math, we can dumb it down to fit PA by giving basic radar the limitation of no stationary targets shown unless LOS is gained by unit intel. Then we give adv radar the gift of 'math magic' and let it detect stationary objects with no LOS intel needed.

We could probably make it a power sink too if that would balance things out, or whatever.

Just an idea, its probably over simplifying the issue and I'm sure someone with better knowledge on the real life radar front will completely destroy my Google University level of knowledge on radar.

Edit: This mostly applies to ground units/structures as there aren't a whole bunch of plane sized objects flying around so air radar is relatively easy in comparison.

Scout units are only good for stable informations, not for the rapidly changing ones.

Imperfect information is not luck, but it always make the game more rely on luck, there is a limit how much of it a game can have, too much of it the game become more like gambling.
You can play Zero-K with a prohibition on radars to know what I mean.

Usually a well tuned TA like game is much more unpredictable than games like starcraft when it comes down to unit types, so having more information on unit positions is a good balance to it.

This post made me remember one of my previous ideas for a mod for an old game from a LOOONG time ago, and I'm surprised it isn't implemented in more games: Slow sweep radars.



Like one of these. A full 360° cycle might take anywhere from 10 seconds to a whole minute depending on balance. The radar sweeps, detecting radar blips (it cannot detect whether or not a blip is moving, only whether or not it has changed location). This way, you limit Artillery to either dedicated offensive roles (destroying enemy bases) or dedicated defensive roles (where you can scout the enemy army without significant reprisal). Artillery can only effectively fire at units in LoS, or units that are still/immobile. It also makes the intelligence war a real thing; scouting becomes direly important for any long-range attacks, which turns Artillery into an investment you have to make intelligently. You can't just use Artillery as a souped-up base defense, you have to feed it information for it to be effective.

In addition to this, making the sweep ridiculously slow, but proportionally ridiculous in range (like 2-4 times what we have now) could make for really interesting intelligence wars. Maybe there would be a unit that allows you to see enemy radar sweeps, so you can use stealth fields and clever maneuvering to move a flanking/raiding force through enemy lines undetected.

Even better idea! Radar works on a line-of-sight basis, so it is obstructed by terrain; you could hide ENTIRE ARMIES within groups of mesas or mountains, and when your enemy thinks that your big attack is coming from the east, SUDDENLY ATTACK FROM THE MOUNTAINS IN THE NORTH! Such wonderful implications and propogations could come out of this simple change... It would make the intelligence war a very important part of the game, where information becomes a resource and a commodity instead of a convenience!

And in addition to the sweep radar, you could have a "pulse" radar, which does a full 360° radial pulse every few seconds (like, once every 5-30 seconds depending on balance), but it has reduced range and increased power cost. That way you get significantly more accurate radar readings on enemy tanks, allowing your artillery to function as an aggressor to mobile armies; but you have to get them in the right locations. You'd have to stick them on mountains and stuff to give them adequate line of sight and defend them so that your artillery doesn't suddenly become useless.

And yes, yes, I know that slow sweep radars don't really *exist* in real life. Our radars are so accurate and the transceivers are so sensitive that you can have a full 360° sweep done in a matter of seconds (Lidars can sweep in a matter of milliseconds), but the GAMEPLAY COULD BE SO FUN!

Edit: And I know this is getting a bit off-topic (and into the area of stuff that Uber has said they wont' do), but what if radars detected CHANGES IN WEATHER?! So weather would no longer become a random thing, but a predictable thing. The more radar coverage you have, the more you can use situations to your advantage; you know there's going to be a freak rainstorm in the middle of that desert, and some land units will be drowned as a result. So try and get your enemy to engage you there! You know that a fog of chlorine is about to descend upon the enemy base, so you can use his reduced line of sight and radar to set up an artillery base nearby.

AAAGH THIS SOUNDS LIKE IT COULD BE SO COOOOL.

Confirmed already to be a power sink. It costs energy to run a single radar station.

On Radar detecting stationary objects - you're kind of right.
Consider a boat though. Relative to the radar mast, the land doesn't actually move much. The land doesn't suddenly turn invisible because it has stopped.

Likewise, any object hidden by a rain shower just requires the radar set to be retuned to detect objects of that material again. So a metal target in a rain storm will completely disappear, retune the radio set, it appears again.

Doesn't matter if the target is stationary or not. All that matters is the material composition and the size.

And of course, you expect to be detecting a metal object, so you tune the radar to detect metal objects. It's really that simple.


For buildings, if stuff looks different to the surrounding environment, it will show up differently on Radar.

Unless you build stuff to the same radar cross section as the surrounding material, it's always going to be picked up on Radar. (Building a secret base at the base of a cliff is a bad move if you cover it in radar absorbent material, because then your base will make a huge amount of the cliff face "invisible" and instead, it will look like something with a much smaller cross section)

(Does that mean that wooden yachts are practically invisible to tankers in the middle of the open ocean?

Yes. Yes it does. Which is why you hoist a radar reflector into the rigging)

(I realise that technically, you can argue that both objects are moving. . But at ranges of 150 nm, I don't think a 4 meter movement really matters all that much, and in fact yachts grow less visible as they move because the angle to the radar deflector changes.)

Ahh, I get ya...makes sense. Honestly, in all my time in the navy the most mind boggling thing to me was sonar/radar stuff, every time I saw the sonar station I just kept thinking of 'The Matrix'. I didn't get to poke around in that scene, as I was permanently 'imprisoned' in the engine room, but it was something that I found really interesting...That and the radio/comms stuff.

All of the suggestions in this thread needlessly over complicate something very simple.

The problem with changing anything is if you can see the unit on your radar, you can guess where it is on the map and just order the unit to 'blind attack'. (artillery for example) This is just mindless/pointless micro management. There is a reason that in the TA CC expansion they added a unit that allowed auto targeting of units on radar.

In summary: Removing radar and forcing players to scout for a unit to attack would be a huge step backward.

I think making radar sweep to show blips would mostly just be really aggravating to look at.

The downside to this entire discussion is that mostly what you're doing is adding more tactical micro to the game. Currently the focus is on economics and strategic maneuvering with SOME scouting required to see what the blips are and to find specific targets.

Without radar there's a lot more setup of scout flight paths and positioning of scout vehicles.