The Case for Removing Radar

I know I brought up the artillery complaint, but requiring a targeting facility and once they require energy to fire may reduce some of the pains. Cause when I watch replays said pelter turtles definitely don't have enough pgen to support the machine gun like fire of them.....

God no, the last thing I want is to spend 50% of every game manually targeting radar blips.

Agreed. Manually targeting radar blips is unacceptable. A radar targeting facility is also a bad idea for the same reason, and also because you are tying a very integral UI function to an in-game asset which costs resources and can be destroyed.

Artillery should behave like fire support for your troops, not as the fully independent long-range unit that it currently behaves like. You can't use it as the bulk of your army because it can't acquire targets for itself; you should need scouts and troops for the artillery to support.

Short range radar could easily work. Giving certain units blip detection at short ranges, or even moderate ranges, would work just fine. Especially with some wobble to still encourage you to get vision. But Radar of Sauron is just boring.

In addition, units like artillery, bombers, etc. should hit very hard when they successfully connect. But you shouldn't always hit anything within range. Artillery can be made much stronger if you can't always fire as long as there is something on radar. A bombing run of only a couple bombers should wipe out a small area of practically any small unit. But you can only use them intermittently, you have to know where to bomb (requires scouting), and it should be painful to send them in to be shot down by anti-air. Especially if they die before reaching their target. But even if you trade a bomber for a single bombing run on some tanks or bots, it should still be favorable for the person who got bombed.

there's a host option called no FOW

you're welcome.

Once again, tatsujb, you post with no idea what you are talking about.

The entire point is that there isn't enough fog of war. Radar is so inexpensive and provides so much intel that players are already mostly playing with no fog, or just very little fog of war.

Playing with fog of war off is not even in the correct universe of related answers.

I think it is for someone suggesting radar removal. do not make assumptions as to the correctness of my answers.

I am entitled to my thoughts.

Hey, Tatsu just asked for radar to remember blips you visually saw (so if you see a commander, then stop seeing him but your radar still does, then radar remembers it as commander unit) as to avoid micro in the form of player tracking blip manually.

That gave me an idea actually. Radar blips currently let you shoot with artillery, except for air units which you can tell are air by selecting your artillery and trying to target just to find you can't target that blip (making it air because artillery can't target air). SO, what if artillery just dumbfired at radar dots like it was manually clicked by player? You know, a wide variety of tracking ahead and behind and not telling if it's hitting or can be hit and such.

Then it would shoot and miss air (because you don't know it's air), it would miss moving units often (leading target ahead sometimes and behind other times). It's hard to describe, but basically shooting at radar shoots like a manual shot rather than a target lock. It shoots at that point of land and not the target itself.

I dunno, doesn't sound like gameplay improoval to me.

I just found it weird you could technically tell what was air or not.

Needs fixed in some way. That fixes so you don't know what is air or not, and makes artillery work to shoot blips while still having a magnitude of "blindness".

you DID, did you?
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/different-blips.49424/page-2#post-764593

No, I didn't mean I can tell because radar should realistically tell if something is miles in the sky or not.

I mean I can tell from a inherent game mechanic of "cant shoot air with artillery" being used on a vague piece of information "this is an enemy of some unit/structure".

The game mechanic should be fixed. Ask for real life or not, I just care if it is balanced. If radar was MORE accurate, it would need some nerf to make scouting do something better than it in some catergory. Generally, with radar being easy-up-see-everything, they have to limit it somehow in effect.

well I see no reason why the bots under your command would (or should?) be dumb enough to mistake something zooming miles above the ground for a tank, seriously...

Radar serves another basic function, which is giving you some rudimentary AI control over what may be a multi-planet, multi-front war.

If I'm directing a battle on this side of the planet, I would like my defenses on the other side of the planet to automatically shoot at your attacking blips as they get into range. I don't want to have to abandon my attack just to go queue up attack orders on the other side of the planet. If I have a catapult on the moon with radar coverage I expect it to fire at anything that lands without me having to go there and eyeball it and order it to fire.

I don't want to give up automatic radar targeting. Keep it simple, keep it dumb but keep it in the game. If I want intelligent targeting then I can scout out those blips and queue up more specific orders but let the dumb firing be automatic.


Pelters consuming and being limited by energy definitely needs to happen though.

Very long range radar is not necessary to obtain the kind of rudimentary AI control you describe Slamz. Multiple sources of vision and short range radar will accomplish the same goal, although you won't necessarily be aware of every enemy within your very long range guns' attack range.

I agree that automation of things like base defense is a good idea. But long range radar is not necessary for when your defenses are being attacked; such long-range intelligence gathering is primarily useful for long-range weapons.

Perhaps you might say that intercepting enemies at such long distances counts as 'defense.' I would say that for gameplay reasons you should not be entitled to automatic cleaning of the entire area within range of such long-range weaponry. Especially because of how this makes long-range weapons so dominant. The result of allowing this is an inability to enter the range of long-range weapons without being attacked, creating an arms race of increasingly long-range automated attacks.

When such long-range guns rely on other units to get them vision for targeting, you fight in the field with your own units instead of using long-range weapons to deny an enemy force entry to a large area. The artillery then supports your troops by attacking enemy units your forces engage or just see.

Automation is good, but not when it massively changes the character of a unit's role, such as fully automated radar targeting for long-range artillery against any target within its range. Such automation changes the artillery's function from supporting an army to independent long-range area denial for its entire attack range.

I dunno, I think without advanced radar matching the range of the Catapult/Holkins, you'd make it too easy to secretly build a firebase to counter another firebase. Your first warning of an enemy Catapult being in range of your Catapult is going to be your Catapult blowing up.

As it is now, the burden is on the attacker, as it should be. If he wants that fog-of-war advantage, he should scout the enemy area to find his forward radar and blow it up. In the window he has before the enemy notices and replaces the radar, he has a chance to get his own firebase up and running.

But he can't just do it for free.


I believe that if you really hate radar and really think it's an OP unit then your first priority in any attack should be to kill the radar with a quick bomb strike. If you're attacking a remote firebase, there probably isn't even a fabrication unit hanging around to rebuild a new one (or if there is, assign 1 advanced bomber to kill it too).

radar isn't necessary?

Ah yes I'm sorry I failed to see it your way. It seems clear to me now after all this time that the picture on the left is better.

Except in order to do this you have to scout the location of the other Catapult.

Two Catapults could easily be in range of each other and still not be able to attack each other until one side gets eyes on. In fact that kind of situation should be extremely common for artillery. That is kind of the whole point here; that a battle is more than just a comparison of barrel size for who has more range. There should actually be some back and forth of combat units and scouts in the field. Either to allow units to close to range through the artillery's zone of fire without being shot at, or to allow your own guns to shoot at enemy artillery you can see, and to try and prevent the enemy from getting scouts close enough to do so.

Again, this is just an attempt to re-create the gameplay of having actual fog of war, temporarily, by requiring sniping the problematic radar. And this dynamic even fails to account for the fact that the radar is inexpensive and easily replaced.

Not to mention that in practice, "just snipe the radar" does not work. In real play, there will be redundant radar dishes (especially of the extremely long-range variety) to avoid exactly this kind of intelligence failure when one radar is lost. Radar is very cheap, and information is incredibly valuable. Even in SupCom, where the omni radar was actually expensive both to build and maintain, the sheer amount of information it provides justifies redundant omnis to illuminate the entire map. And the range-based standoff that results from both sides avoiding each others' zones of fire makes it even harder to eliminate the radar.

First of all, you are confusing balance with design. Both sides can construct mega radars, so it's not imbalanced. But the game that results is one of extremely available information after virtually zero expense or activity. And the near-perfect information that results is bad gameplay.

Short-range radar, the kind you would actually find in a firebase to give local detection, is not the problem. Short range detection that gives you nearby detection is just like superior line of sight. Not the game-changing mechanic that extremely long-range land radar is.

You will only find long-range radar at a tremendous distance away. Sniping such a long-range radar is impractical, heck even locating it is extremely difficult because the enemy can have it buried behind so much other stuff. In addition, a surgical strike to eliminate such an inexpensive asset is almost guaranteed to be a bad investment, especially if it is so far behind enemy lines. It makes no sense to destroy the radar when you are committing so much to a surgical strike, when you could destroy a superfusion or perhaps the long-range artillery that the radar is assisting.

Imperfect information is critical to strategy games, and this is something that SupCom struggled with immensely by offering players far too much information too easily. PA appears to be making the same mistake, whether as a placeholder because of the rough state of current units or not. PA should mimic Total Annihilation more closely than SupCom with respect to radar. TA gameplay almost universally had no radar targeting; radar only informed the player, units didn't fire at blips. However this causes two problems; 1) manual aim at blips, and 2) the radar targeting facility tying a UI feature to an in-game unit.

The best solution is to have line-of-sight focused gameplay, in the same manner that Total Annihilation did, instead of the SupCom situation of having omnipresent radar detection, which also radar targets. Short range radar is perfectly fine; just avoid the single radar towers that reveal huge amounts of the map. You should have to put units or structures all over the place to obtain that kind of information.

Which is easy to do if you're the attacker and therefore know where you want to strike.

As the defender, who is quite possibly operating multiple firebases on a large map, potentially against several opponents, potentially on multiple planets, I probably have no chance to defend against your new catapult.

You've placed 100% of the advantage into the hands of the attacker. As a defender, you've left me with nothing except my eyeballs which is probably fine in a 1v1 or on a small planet but that's not what I perceive PA to be about. For multiple planets and large battles to be practical, there needs to be a high degree of automation. Simple things like "I want my Catapult to shoot at everything that comes into its range" should be automatic.

Intelligent targeting still requires me to notice there's a fight going on and start directing it but it should at least do something without me being there to give direct orders. If you want to build a catapult in range of my catapult you should have to take out my radar or run a bunch of Dox up to act as fodder or something other than just drive up in the fog of war.

Basically I don't think you're looking at this through the lens of "may be a big game with many players on multiple fronts on multiple planets". Saying "Radar is bad, we should scout" is fine on a 1v1 but not in a 10-way, multi-planet free-for-all where it's probably all I can do to keep up with the big stuff.

The Advanced Radar Should have a little more con in its abilities such as being detectable on the planet as a little blip that randomly pings in the fog... sort of like. if you plan to have advanced radar, you better be able to support its construction. At the same time this is a horrible suggestion and just throwing an idea out there to give advanced radar a reasonable con.

I'm against removing the advanced radar considering that planets can get downright large in the amount of available area to attack with.. It may be perceived that the large radar is big on a size 400 planet, but on a 950 size planet it can only cover one front. Removing the advanced radar would make the game more tedious with building more of the basic radar and having scout units in patrol to get the same area of data. Should the Radar scale up sort of like the way the experimental units in SUPCOM had scaled range? I don't know.

I feel like the idea that units that are blips should not be accurately shot at with the same accuracy as visualized units. That is an idea I can get behind. The rest of OP... I'm strongly against.

The Catapult will still shoot at everything that comes into range that you can see. It's still automated, you just need to arrange to have vision, such as with defensive turrets spaced out far in front of the Catapult, if you really don't want to pay any attention. And under this approach you actually benefit from scouting instead of destroying all intel gameplay with a single inexpensive long-range radar structure.

The defender does not have a harder time scouting than an attacker. You have the option of pre-placing scouts and turrets around areas you control, including attack paths, and so on. If anything the defender has a much easier time scouting an area he or she controls, and nearby. Spaced-out Defenders or other light turrets could easily give quite thorough vision, with zero micromanagement required. The player defending is also very likely to acquire more information about the attacking force sooner when the attacker runs into their scouts or turrets.

Why do you assume the attacker knows things like where the Catapult is? And not that the defender knows where the attacker's Catapult is being constructed? You have assumed your conclusion; that the attacker knows more than the defender, and therefore has an intel advantage and will destroy the other Catapult first. You could just as easily assume the opposite; that the player defending scouts the firebase under construction and kills it.



I disagree about the level of micromanagement that scouting creates. True, radar just does all the work for you with zero investment or action, and that is exactly what makes it boring. But you can't take a giant-map free-for-all with tons of players and say 'oh scouting is so hard' under those circumstances.

It is unreasonable to take the most demanding use case, such as a 40 way free for all, and hold that up as 'normal' and design the game's mechanics around making such a ridiculous game manageable. If you want to play a very demanding game setup, you should expect it to require more multitasking. Massive free-for-alls with tons of players on huge maps are obviously going to require more management. Holding up a massive free-for-all as a justification to change such a fundamental mechanic as fog of war for automation is a terrible argument.

You're making the largest, most demanding, and in many senses the stupidest game mode, and saying that mode is enough justification to obviate all fog of war. Even if it makes smaller and more reasonable game modes easy to the point of being boring. What about two large teams? What about 1v1? What about small team games? These game types are going to be far more common than huge many-way FFA's, and you want super-convenient effort-free intel merely because in the huge FFA it's too much work?

The core game mode has to be 1v1, not because it will be the most-played, but because it generalizes to dual team games as long as they are fair. And I am quite certain that scouting with units is very manageable in 1v1 and in fair team games. In huge FFA's, you would just have to live with having less information than a Radar of Sauron would provide.