Natural Stealth

The topic of stealth units has been discussed to great length already - with the outcome being that it expands strategic options just as it does tedious micro. I love the option of hiding units from my opponent's view but I hate to monitor every square inch of the map for signs of stealth shenanigans.

But still, I would love to both eat the cake and keep it.

And I would solve this problem by the use of the Cloud. Or rather, lots of them. And fog, and storms and whatnot. Let's call them atmospheric effects.
Now associate with those atmospheric effects a visibility modifier, e.g. surface and air units under a high cloud are invisible to orbital units, surface units in a foggy area are invisible to air and orbital units and have reduced vision, a sandstorm raging over a planet's surface reduces unit vision and visibility in that area but constantly moving on, a planet shrouded in thick clouds denies any surface information before actually landing on it, etc.

But how is this different from units generating stealth at will? Any such atmospheric effect is readily visible to everyone and so is the knowledge that it might contain units you don't see (, yet). Furthermore, it can't be directly controlled by any player, only used. So there is an easy way to hide your units form your opponent's view but he is always aware of this possibility and can react accordingly without having to guess if and where enemies might be hiding.

But what about radar breaking stealth easily? Fine by me! I would like radar to be blocked by planetary features such as mountain ranges, ravines and craters thus creating a second type of stealth corresponding to the second type of vision. Since that might be a tad too much to ask I would then opt for atmospheric effects affecting radar too and subsequently keeping their numbers per planet low.

TL,DR: Provide natural sources of stealth to expand strategic choices!

The thing about atmospheric effects is we're on a randomized planet. So it would be terrible for the game if players were to win because they got lucky to have a random planet effect that helps them win the game.

Planet effects like this have been discussed a bunch already.

As far as I've seen planet events/effects/whatever have been rejected by the community.

And the devs. I believe I distinctly remember Mavor mentioning that weather would totally DQ PA from the pro gamer circuit for the reason you listed.

Yeah. Winning or losing because of a random event is terrible for competitive gaming.

What I am proposing are not randomly coming and going natural disasters - I would rather see them being tied to certain biomes. Fog in swamp regions, clouds along mountain ranges, periodic storms on dry planets, high clouds on planets with huge bodies of water - nothing that I would call totally random. You could always make it optional to please the competitive crowd. I am simply advocating adding more style and substance to what are otherwise simply different paint jobs on a bunch of globes floating through space.
I understand your point but I really think the planets need more features that create opportunities and obstacles.

The problem for me is that it's not so much adding "more style and substance" as much as just throwing wrenches I to he works. Stealth is a very tricky thing to handle in a way it has just as impact on a unit as its weaponry/other stats and if you just to place it around the map randomly it becomes difficult, if not impossible to balance it.

Mike

The way I see it, terrain generation already does and should confer natural advantages and disadvantages, so the argument that luck can't play a role in competitive gaming doesn't hold much water with me. If you choose a mountain range or canyon or bottleneck for your spawn, that's luck and could heavily influence a game's outcome. That's the beauty of procedurally generated maps - the luck of the draw forces you to adapt to different situations, rather than repetitively making the same decisions over and over. E.G. Seton's Clutch and the roles based upon where you sat on the map. This mindset needs to change - in PA you can change where your base is, even expand to other worlds very quickly. You are not stuck in your spawn position.

I don't think that natural disasters would be useful or popular, but unit behaviours and economic advantages/disadvantages altering in different biomes would be a nice feature for making biomes more tactically valuable, rather than just behaving as pretty backdrops. Nothing major, but I loved the idea of jungles being inaccessible to smaller units - or if they could, perhaps visibility range could be decreased? Features that really involve you in your environment without drastically altering gameplay.

Nor do I think the community has been as hostile to these milder forms of natural effects as the guys above have claimed.
Hell, I'd be happy just to see clouds for aesthetics.

To actually address your question, I'm for stealth in PA, and certainly some areas of the map being danger spots would make things more interesting.

Thanks for addressing my point more concisely. I wasn't talking about unleashing random apocalypse upon planets, I was proposing a narrowly defined gameplay extension - visibility modifiers - that would be tied to an already existing concept - biomes - that is already present in the game. Lastly, any design decision should first be examined in terms of its effect on gameplay, effects on competitive play should always be second to that.

Here is my take on stealth/radar jamming.
Both of these will add a great deal of tactical depth to the game for, what I believe to be, obvious reasons.

Stealth and Jamming have the potential to be very micro heavy, but they don't have to be.

Stealth:
- Stealth should be a passive part of the unit. Stealth fighters are inherently stealthy to radar because of their design not because some device has been turned on. Stealth is simply always there.
- Stealth should not prevent vision just radar awareness.

Jamming:
- We should have both fixed and mobile versions.
- They should function by masking radar signatures or distorting them.
- They should be on by default with the ability to be turned off when necessary.

Terrain should block radar as well. A group of units in the radar shadow of a mountain should not be detectable by radar.

As much as I do like stealth mechanics I don't think per unit stealth is viable in PA due to the fact that it is so much harder to defend against in terms of awareness and micro than it is to make use of it - hence my proposal for static visibility modifiers.

As for mountains blocking radar, I am all for it. It would actually encourage making more use of terrain features in an intuitive and accessible fashion, e.g. establish bases/staging areas in deep valleys. Furthermore it might lead to positions not being solely evaluated by the amount of mass spots they provide.
As long as the number of radar capable units and radar blocking terrain features is low this might even be implemented without noticeably tanking the simulation speed.

There's nothing wrong with having certain behaviors that cover an entire world. For example, a metal world could create so much interference that radar simply doesn't work. Everyone would have stealth, creating a play style that favors huge aggression on all fronts.

Random patchy events are a really bad idea.

What? Nah. Stealth helps a unit close the distance. If getting close is in its job description, then stealth is the perfect tool for the job.

The first thing I though of when I read the topic of this thread was the idea of bots being able to "hide" in areas with a lot of trees.

I started a discussion about this a while back here

As far as I have seen in my thread we have came to a general agreement, and have not rejected it despite it being heated at the start. Although we have rejected random environmental events.

Consensus seems otherwise.

Some people are fine with stealth, some people are entirely against stealth. But it seems that pretty much everyone that wants stealth wants unit based stealth – not environment stealth.

.... I was not even talking about stealth. unit based or otherwise. I was talking about environmental events as a whole. Please read and check links before replying.

I was only talking about the last part of your post. ^

I get what you're saying now. You should be more clear. I read it as that link was a reply to the other person and since it was above my reply box and subsequently not pertaining to my response.

I assumed that "my thread" would have given away that the top link was pertaining to the second response as well as the first because I had not included a link on the second response. Also that the over all context of your reply I quoted would have shown that we were not discussing stealth in fact we were discussing environmental effects. However I assumed wrong, my mistake.

To A: I didn't flesh the idea completely out in the OP to keep it a bit shorter and more concise. My line of thought was not random areas conferring stealth to units. It was extending the existing biome concept in a reasonable fashion:

• Larger bodies of open water --> Higher total amount of fog/clouds.
• Coast lines/rivers and swamps, valleys --> Fog
• Mountain ridges --> Clouds
• [No open water --> Fixed size storms moving slowly in a fixed (circular?) pattern] - Dynamic/"random", so I would concur with the perception of it being to cumbersome

To B: I agree with you as far as a stealth unit's job description goes. In terms of balance stealthed units simply demand relatively too little attention from the one using it and too much from the one defending against it since a stealthed unit could be/not be just about anywhere. Since attention is at a premium in PA I am against personal stealth and instead propose fixed areas that confer stealth and are easy to be used and easy to be aware of.

To brian, antiglow:I propose non-random areas conferring stealth-like bonuses that are tightly coupled with the existing biome concepts. Nothing random, no other effects.
My motivation behiond this: Since visibility modifiers seem to me to be really hard to mod in afterwards I would very much like the engine to at least support such a thing even if it doesn't make it into the official game modes.

So the reason to not allow a patrol evading mechanic is because players might use it to evade patrols? That's a pretty damn weak argument.

Players will invalidate long range detection when unit cannons start dropping tanks directly on a base. Why use the ground if it can't do anything an orbital drop won't do better?

Evading a patrol is nothing that can't be done by an effort comparable to setting up the patrol since it is a one-off thing. Checking for stealth globally and constantly on the other hand is something that requires much more effort than using it locally every once in a while.
Apart from that I am not against unit stealth per se but I think it is much harder to balance and thus convince people of it than my proposal.

That in my opinion is a shortcoming of the orbital design and doesn't really affect my proposal.