The Case for Removing Radar

I want to re-emphasize my disagreement with this concept.

Long range radar lets you do a couple of things:
* Automatic "dumb fire" at blips without the need to scout or identify them
* You can see incoming attacks from a fair distance away

And that's not bad. BUT...

Long range radar does NOT:
* Enable you to intelligently fire your weapons. For example, you will not attack the 10 engineers speed building a catapult instead of the 20 doxes standing in front of them.
* Enable you to see what, exactly, the threat level of those blips are. The enemy nuclear missile launcher looks the same as a wall segment. Levelers look like Ants.


Also, if you are actually scouting the enemy, you can find his radar and bomb it prior to moving up / attacking. If you aren't scouting then his radar is just another blip.

The current implementation of radar does not replace scouting.
It mostly replaces a lot of painful micro to obtain very basic information.

Is it this the first real RTS you guys play?

I'd like to mention that the developers have already stated several times that this will be more of a macro game than a micro game, please remember that when this game is fully realized, well be dealing with thousands of units with one player alone, trying to dumb down the radar at this point would make this game too micro heavy, especially when dealing with multiple planetary fronts.

I vote targeting facility, and increase the price and build time of arty and decrease their health

I'd say the problem stems from units having no hp currently and artillery having to much....... sick of the pain caused by trying to pass the wall of pelters that people throw up early game that requires an astronomical number of units to overcome. I'm sure things will change when energy is required to fire these weapons nevertheless very annoying atm. 5 ffa yesterday and everyone except me turtled in behind pelters on all sides. I expanded over most of the left over Planet butt still had great difficulty cracking their shells, even with vastly superior eco. So balance is still required for crashed eco situations

No. And I still say, in leau of the fact we cant just "black out the unscouted parts of the planet" and then artillery wouldn't know what it is shooting at because you have no visual to know if you are hitting anything, and since artillery can still hit stuff if shrouded but with a memory graphic over it, then I say we either nerf radar somehow or change how it works.

I am fine with fine tuning what it detects, making jamming, adjusting it's ranges, balancing scouts against them, or adding a roundabout system for you to pick targets using radar.

Yeah, lately I've been having games against people who make HORDES of Ants. Ridiculous numbers of them. Like 15+ factories doing nothing but cranking out Ants and they come to my base in these massive waves.

It's silly how easy it is to stop them. It's not like I sat down and focused on an intricate defense plan. I just scattered pelters around and Ants stopped being a problem.

Early on, the only reasonable answer to a pelter is your commander or another pelter. If those aren't options then you'd better get to T2.

I don't think the issue is radar, the issue is how accurate long range weapons are. Why **** around with radar and making the UI harder? Just make the weapons track slower, have greater variance in where they shoot, etc.

There are several hurdles here. First you need to convince Uber to include the possibility of such autonomous intelligence in scouting units. Second the intelligence given by scouting units needs to processed by the player. If the scouting vision is relatively small the players will have very little time to react to enemy maneuvers, straining their attention even further in a multiplanetary RTS.

You want make options viable to make the game deep. Increasing the number of options is at the very heart of this. In R.U.S.E. the default is that you can see enemy units and buildings. You can see exactly what type of buildings the enemy got and you can distinguish small units from big units.
It is then up to the players to use their Ruse cards or hide their units in forests or cities if they want to deny the enemy this information. It is an interesting approach that allows the players to perform much more calculated actions.

It also gives a target that you can destroy if you want to disrupt the enemy counter-intelligence efforts.
This really does increase the number of options you have and sounds like really good gameplay to me.
You can go with no jammers to save resources. You can make one but risk losing it or you can make several so that you have redundancy when you use tactics that require that you stay hidden or untargetable.

And this really gives the players more options. They can skip making jammers and they can specifically target the enemy jammers for example.
The thing is that without radar you are likely to just resort to blind guessing rather than playing mindgames.

You should list those types of mindgames.
Personally I only see excessive attention and micromanagement strain by removing radar.
If keeping track of enemy movements is expensive it is likely to force the players to make much riskier actions without being able to actually trick their opponent. It's like fighting in the dark.

I am glad someone finally said that.

Radar is pretty ideal after all - there are many many strategy games that don't give you Radar, but instead give you lookout buildings (and that's all that a permanently stationed scout is, it's a lookout building) Lookout buildings dispel the fog of war completely, whereas at least with Radar it's still present.

I don't believe the issue is with accurate long range weapons, but it comes down to the effectiveness of static defences. In most strategy games, siege units have a longer range that static defences.

When you build static defences and the siege units come and attack your static defences, you either have to use defending units to sally and destroy the siege units, or use counter battery fire.

Likewise, "cavalry" units are strong against siege units, so when you come under attack you just rush cavalry at the siege engines.

In PA you have the dual issue that there are no units that defend against siege weapons and no units that out range stationary artillery.

(There is the stomper - but the Stomper is T2, whereas the Pelter is T1, so there isn't an easily available counter at the same tech level. Meanwhile, catapults are T2. A catapult can kill 32 stompers before they get into range, assuming perfect accuracy)

While I agree that this is a role limitation, do you see the underlying issue here? That stationary artillery can always use its maximum range, meaning in order to engage it at range you must out-range it. The reason it can always use its maximum range is because it can target any enemy in range using radar.

If there was no radar, you could actually counter long-range artillery with different units. Potentially even shorter-range artillery. You scout to identify the enemy artillery's position and use your own guns to take it out. Even if it "could" attack you if it knew where you were, without troops in front of it, or without scouts to find a target for it, even the best artillery cannot necessarily attack anything within its extensive range.

Fighting in the dark is an excellent way to put it.

First of all, consider how needing to use eyeballs for vision changes the way you deploy your troops. Instead of a tight ball of units which you keep together to minimize your exposure and maximize overlapping firepower, you should spread your units to cover more area for intel purposes and also to increase your units' effective ranges using vision. Add to this the fact that you should have scouts mixed into an army to increase your vision range, and if you want to micro them you can send scouts out by themselves or in small detachments.

The reason this is important is because it changes the way an army looks to the enemy. You don't see a big group of radar blips in the distance. Your combat units or scouts instead run into a large enemy formation, and can't necessarily see the whole thing at once.

Therefore, mindgames about how large a force is become fairly straightforward to execute. Small forces pretending to be large forces and vice versa, for example. The same applies to defenses; pretending to heavily defend an area when in reality it's a quite thin line. Especially with lots of land area and multiple groups of units, information about how many units (and also of what types, to a lesser extent) are in one area is very important. Using those units to engage enemy units tends to give the enemy more information, but also gives you additional information.

Raiding can force overspending (or underspending) in turrets or defending units because estimating the number of raiders is much harder, especially if the raiding player is being tricky. And, conversely, you can expand somewhere and not defend it, and rely on the lack of radar to keep your completely exposed mexes or other assets concealed. Aggressive expansion is also concealed, where a radar would reveal every mex unless you also build a jammer on every single one. You don't have to spend resources on a jammer, meaning you can conceal the position and quantity of small things, like a mex or small group of raiders.

Obviously it is possible to sneak a group of units into sensitive areas. Protecting an area from all directions can be cost-prohibitive, and therefore you need information in order to make efficient decisions about where to build or move. PA's spherical planets is probably going to mean cheaper, more powerful defenses due to the lack of corners and larger area to protect. Lack of radar means vision range is also an important part of such defenses, especially those with range. But detecting attacking units before they arrive requires putting units or defenses further afield than your hard defenses. Defense in depth is useful for denying scouts as well as for ensuring you have adequate warning of any large attack, letting you move your own forces to defend.

Which, of course, means you can feint exactly such an attack by sending a group to chew on those perimeter defenses. Because of the limited information available, players are forced to extrapolate on the information they have. As a direct result, it is easier to give your opponent an incorrect impression because you can deliberately give your opponent a small amount of misleading information. Most 'misdirection' in an environment with radar is rather hollow because there is just so much information available.

Very limited information leads to much more intricate mindgames than baked-in mindgames using jammers and whatnot. And your opponent hasn't got the kind of Eye of Sauron vision to see through your deception. With long-range radar, with jammers, there is a rebuttable presumption of accurate information, which can be defeated (sometimes) with jammers, which cost resources.

By contrast, with no radar, there is a presumption of no information. You are playing with an oppressive fog of war, and should take extensive steps to get solid information so you can make better strategic moves.

All this does is give an even bigger advantage to a high APM player, because you simply fly a few scout planes over and quickly queue up attack commands.

If artillery being able to fire at its full range is an issue, then that's an issue with the artillery, not the radar. Not long after artillery comes massive vision orbital items.

I don't understand why everyone is bending over backwards to come up with stranger and stranger radar systems to resolve an issue with the sheer deadly accuracy of artillery. Make artillery less accurate and that in itself is a reason to get LOS, because it will take too long to kill everything so you need to ensure it's going for the high priority targets. Reducing turn speed will ensure it's used to barrage stationary items or massive mobs, with smaller groups of mobile units being almost immune.

I am completely in favor of inaccurate artillery, Quitch. But I get the impression you are thinking of unit types in terms of times when they hit the field. Specifically, that expensive orbital units that give huge vision 'hit the field' a certain amount of time after artillery does. Ideally every type of unit is designed to play together, not as a progression through time.

The minimum point where any particular type of asset becomes available should not really be that important compared to how they play when they are being used in quantity by both sides. While it is true that more expensive items are impossible to acquire until a certain amount of economy has been created, which does impose a time component, that time component shouldn't really impact any unit's design. Ideally unit availability will be a cost-quantity factor, not a time-availability factor. Zero-K flat balanced units, even regarding an expensive unit that is impossible or unwise to acquire extremely early, actually plays nice with every other type of unit and does not have an efficiency or other improper advantage despite its high 'tech level,' high cost, or later time when it first becomes available.

Inaccurate artillery is an excellent mechanic that PA should probably rely on more heavily than on precision artillery. But ideally bombardment artillery should also require scouting instead of being used against any radar blip in range. It functions differently from precise artillery, but the underlying behavior with radar making it able to attack anything in range is the same.

With respect, your complaint is about artillery, not radar. Radar is just the unit with the longest line of sight. A firefly achieves the same as T1 radar, per tick.

I do agree with objections about advanced orbital radar though - in many games that kind of intel is extreme late game, only given to one player and fooled by deception units.

Actually I would argue that artillery in PA doesn't have enough range in order to qualify as fire support.

With the exception of the Holkins, most artillery has a range advantage, but is not actually very different in kind from a unit like a Leveler. Its extra range and lack of tracking moving targets means its extra range actually changes its behavior slightly, but not to make it behave like genuine artillery support.

Artillery should be extremely different in kind from any combat unit. Wargame does this right; even relatively inexpensive artillery can reach literally across the entire map, which obviously a battle tank cannot do (obviously PA is larger scale, however). However a battle tank can drive up to an enemy and engage it, where artillery is pretty much helpless. This is, in my opinion, the key difference between a main combat unit and a support unit. Dependence on other units to find targets. A main battle tank drives around shooting enemies it can see itself, or which a nearby friendly can see, to extend its range somewhat. Artillery fire support cannot actually fight enemies effectively within its own vision, and you must use scouts and combat units to find things for it to shoot.

You keep your artillery far behind the lines, and you keep it hidden until you need fire support. You use your army to find targets that can be extremely distant from the artillery. And when artillery fires, you are shelling a target area, and are not usually firing accurately to eliminate a single specific target the way a main combat unit does. Certain special precision artillery might be able to do that, but in general you are bombarding an area, not shooting to kill one enemy unit. In general, artillery does not shoot to kill a single target, and it cannot do anything by itself. Artillery is fire support for your regular army, not a radar-assisted independent combat asset.

Radar has the effect of turning a "fire support" artillery asset into a genuinely independent fighter. And, as you say, in addition to that fact it can also shoot to kill single targets, which I agree is also quite bad, or at least you should be paying a lot for that capability.

Yeah I agree with the sentiment here - artillery doesn't actually act like artillery. It's way too good at engaging close targets. I have no problem with it hitting individual targets with splash, but time between shots is insane. You should be able to rush undefended artillery with a small number of bots

It does fire more than twice as far as a Leveller. It doesn't need to be able to fire over a hemisphere, but the land units (Stompers/Shellers) do a much better job emulating artillery than the Pelter. I think range is fine, it's just the target leading which it does.

Artillery really should only be used against buildings. But then pelters are totally useless. So they need some ability to hit moving targets, but it should be against big blobs where they aim at the first unit, miss and hit the middle. You should actually have to rely on point-defence, which you don't currently have to do.


Honestly, if you took Radar out, people would just use aircraft on patrol. (in fact, with energy cost, aircraft on patrol is more reliable anyway)

Aerial recon is a perfectly legitimate way to scout for artillery. But obviously anti-air can make that an expensive proposition if planes are appropriately valuable. Having units more like recon helicopters that can float in one place but lack the speed of a fixed wing plane can do a lot to let you maneuver around anti-air, but at the end of the day anti-air is just going to make air recon difficult, and possibly unwise.

Air recon is a much more interesting mechanic than all-seeing radar. For starters, you have to pay for it. And it can be deterred using anti-air, air superiority units, and so on. And when air recon is no longer a good idea due to too much anti-air presence, suddenly the quantity, concealability, and survivability of land scouts starts to make more sense than the sheer speed of air recon.

So while I think an air scout design like the ridiculous stream of Peepers is bad design, air recon in general is perfectly fair. Just avoid creating such an absurdly inexpensive plane like the Peeper. Air recon involves much more interesting decision-making about when you need information badly enough to risk exposing a plane. But you could potentially get a lot of valuable information.

It is too early to talk about balance here, but I think it is fairly obvious that the Firely is so drastically underpriced for its vision and mobility, completely forgetting its actually moderate weapon, that its price needs a huge increase. Air units in general should be paying for the fact they are immune to so many weapons, and also for their tremendous mobility and speed. This means air units should be more expensive and fewer in quantity as well as being less HP and DPS efficient to compensate for their strategically powerful mobility and flexibility to be used in many different locations. The Firefly's pricing is bad enough that it seems like a design failure, not a balance failure. But you are correct, if there were no radar, and under the current game's balance, players would spam prodigious numbers of Fireflies. Would that be silly? Yes. But would it be an improvement over Radar of Sauron? Yes, since they cost resources and create counterplay.

The core concept that inspired this thread for me is that PA as a strategy game needs to treat information as being highly valuable. That means depriving the player of information unless they choose to pay for it, and making that purchase deniable by the opponent. Obviously you need tools to get information, but they shouldn't be such ridiculously cheap and effective tools like all-seeing radar. In fact, I would say that absolutely no single unit should convey that much information at all, completely ignoring its ridiculously low price. You should need to spend a substantial amount of resources on many individual units to get anything close to the kind of information that an advanced radar tower currently provides for virtually nothing.

Radar of Sauron is bad design. Nothing should give that much information at a shot; it's just too convenient. Replace it with something that creates counterplay by the opponent, and which costs more resources and which can be actually lost in the process, like recon units.

I disagree, pelters seem to serve the same function they did in TA, being the artillery for small maps. And indeed this game has pelter creep, though personally I wouldn't object to a longer range on them. It's simply that both sets of artillery are way too good against mobile units.

Also, catapults are total BS.

I like pelter's, but they do have a high fire rate.

But catapults man, dat tracking.

If artillery can only be used against artillery (counter batteries) and against buildings, then you could only pelter creep. Pelters would be a terrible defensive building. That's what I meant. They have to have some ability to hit units, but not hugely so. And if they aren't changed there should be some T1 mobile unit that is good to use against them (other than bombers, which don't do enough damage in a bombing run, especially if the enemy has anti-air)

Yeah. I generally only use scouts if I have artillery bots. They aren't doing that very well yet

At least Radar costs energy now. It's pretty disastrous when your energy fails, and then your radar fails, and then the enemy attacks your defences. Thought it was such an epic glitch when I first saw it.

To be fair, Sauron Radar (Are we really calling the satellites eyes of Sauron?) can be brought down cheaply by the b-wings.