Differenciated Radar Blips and The General Approach to Intel

that's the bad way to look at it.

let me open you to another, more deeply thought out, perspective :

currently people turtle up mostly because things come out of the blue and the best counter to that is no longer offense but defense because you can't predict it and it's preparation against a catasrophy. Also as I mention here :

we're really left with players who don't know what they're facing and face it anyways. if you're going to fight in the dark of course you're going to turtle at least a bit more than you would if you knew what was going on.

not to mention that my suggestion serves the agressor MUCH MORE than the defensivist : what's a turtler got to do with the coms position? not much, that's not his department, he specializes in nukes ...or hayleys. (that's gonna take awhile)

an agressive player on the other hand knows EXACTLY what to do with a com's position.(this is effective immediately)

And out of the two the agressive player will win first (or much much faster if you prefer).

But really the whole focus of this thread was to guide the game towards it's macro holy grail, which for the moment FA still holds.

you're taking the defense of micro, are you looking for a micro game?

You are essentially arguing against the fog of war as a general concept -- something that's been pretty fundamental to strategy games.

The whole point of the fog of war is that unexpected things can come out of the blue. As your opponent, it's my job to send you that unexpected thing while simultaneously worrying about what unexpected thing you are preparing for me.

Turtling is a lot easier if I know exactly what you are building up, which is why good turtles always scout. The more the turtle knows, the easier it will be to prepare for whatever goodies you are building up. You can't surprise him. Presently, scouting is fairly easy anyway because you really just need to use some scout planes and an eyeball. By making radar do it for us automatically you're just simplifying the act of turtling.

The turtler will need your commander's position later -- for now what he needs is the location and layout of your planned attack. If you are building artillery near his base, he needs to know about it and he needs to know which blip is the important one. "Turtling" is not the passive act of sitting there and killing things that show up -- it's about building up a base and being selectively aggressive against things that threaten the base. He needs to know if you are building up 500 tanks, 500 bombers or 50 laser satellites. He needs to know about your nuke buildup and your new fire base and those tons of bot factories you just made. This helps him know what to turtle against. The turtle doesn't waste time building laser turrets if he knows all you're doing is making bombers.

You haven't thought this through, or you aren't aware of how good turtles actually play the game.

To me, eliminating micro means I shouldn't spend time telling my 50 tanks to kill your 50 tanks, target by target. Instead, I should be working on my grand plan and letting my tanks fend for themselves, with only basic movement orders for the most part. But eliminating the need to scout or the need to tell tanks to specifically target your anti-nuke facility or the need to even vaguely remember what it is I saw with my scout plane is taking the "anti-micro" concept too far.

This is still fundamentally an RTS, about attacking, defending, surprising and scouting to avoid surprises. You seem to want it to be basically an economy competition? No ambushes? No surprises?

The advanced orbital radar takes care of all these issues, it detects and reveals all units in REAL TIME. Good topic, i just dont think its needed.

Incidentally, I think advanced orbital radar is way too cheap and powerful. Like maybe it should just be radar and not super line of sight. I dunno about you guys but I don't even build that other radar satellite. What's the point when this one is so much better? It's costly but it's not like it cripples me to make 1.

I think I'd like to either see it:
* Cost 5 times more
OR
* Keep its current range of radar but cut the line-of-sight to 25% of that

I guess a lot of you guys dislike the "fog of war" but I've always felt it was fundamental to a good strategy game. Revealing what the enemy is doing shouldn't be quite this easy.

Im in agreement with you on this, but the
Best way to attack an enemy is good intel.
And having a birds eye view (like a preditor drone) can make or break any attack, also considering thst battles will be multi planet wide.

I agree on price but I like my los area..... it doesn't cover the whole planet only on smaller ones....... yes seems tatsu just wants no micro at all..........

very wrong, do not attempt argumentation through distortion of my words, I won't take kindly to it, not to mention if you have an interpretation about what I said you may hit home only if you at least back it up with formulated arguments +proof. Nothing corroborates what you said there. I invite you to reread my post.

If you knew me even a slight bit you would find it queer to make such an assumption, but the simple assertion that I play RTS games competitively is enough to negate that.
I feel sad that you are turning your back to my arguments without a second glance back. I am using experience to formulate my ideas, experience on the competitive FA scene. And if you disrespect that no need to transfer that disrespect onto me. Please at least treat me with respect rather than start off with offense.

remember if you wish to argue without offending your interlocutor, you want to start by speaking only of yourself and your words and not of him or his words.

nothing is obvious untill it's happened, don't sell the bear's hide until you've slain it.

I agree on his points about it being a memory skill to remember what blips were seen.

...however, I do not believe all blips need more info than that.

If you saw the unit, radar should remember what the unit was when it was visual. Once it walks out of radar, radar should lose info about that. If it walks back into radar, radar still should not show it's info because how does it know its the same unit and not a different one?

Besides that, there are some things that are obvious what they are by movement speed, but that is not a taletale factor because units can be stationary and some units share speed with other so let the player assume based on their own judgement.

I just feel like that is the bare essential for "replacing human micro" in the form of tracking units to memorize what they were when they were visual, without giving players anything they don't already have.

Uhmm ...ya.
XD re-read what I wrote and you'll see that we're in full agreement.

I'm asking for the Sup Com workings of blips which is exactly what you just described.

I'm even asking to take away unit army ID which radar currently gives you in PA for whatever reason...

alright time for some more input.

After reading Slamz responses, gonna have to say I agree with his points.

Radar should inform you of whats coming but shouldn't be so perfect that visual scouting is obsolete after the first pass.

Honestly, if there is blimp concerns after you scouted around the world. I wouldn't mind if the bases stood out in contrast to the terrain. Sometimes I just have difficulty spotting Grey from black red buildings or orange blue on a desert planet.

You did what Slamz did, you didn't read what I said. I never said radar would tell you exactly what unit it is: for example you'd have no idea which radar blip is a land factory which one is a bot factory, and you wouldn't know which blips came out of a bot or land factory.

You wouldn't for that matter be able to tell the com apart from a tank or a bot.
so yes there is an advantage to go scouting still at that point.

You know what the SupCom intel model looks (and plays) like?

I was just agreeing with Slamz, I didn't really read anything else... I'll read yours when I get time.

After reading your initial posts, I guess you are heavily favored towards more intel knowledge from the Radar to distingish between bots and tanks/air/boats. I've played SupCom and FA a lot and I thought their intel system was pretty good.

I guess this wouldn't be to bad of an addition. However, I don't think you consistently need to know what a unit is once it enters radar range and you have visually scouted it.

*mod edited - Please don't troll people, not even dev-people*

It's like there is this other game that is really similar that we could learn some things from or something. Weird. Why didn't Uber think of this...?

@iron420 give them time to implement it first.

Ok, argue.

must of missed this alert.

(Lets assume we have radar blimps of Structure/bot/tank/air/boat)

When you have Radar up and have this new information presented on your screen or mini-map, you are given basic knowledge already of what could be in range of your base.

• a Fire base
• A land/Air/Boat Army in the general vicinity.

You know whats coming without even knowing visually what the units are.

Okay. You decide to send scouts to confirm what type of land units or air or structures in the area.

Now you know if its

• Offensive fire base, Or random metal collection structures with power gens
• A land army of bots/ or fabricators
• A swarm of either fighters or bombers

This is all from 1 scout (lets say a scout the scout dies but you followed its movements)

You now know all you need to know about the enemy in this area. You can build a counter fire base, you can build appropriate forces to counter the army blobs and send them to this area you have researched. They are indeed in your radar range so you know if they are reinforceing or leaving.

What more should you need to know now?

Now if you had this scout remember all the unit types and building types in its first pass through and tell you the exact same information. What has really changed? You know the exact same information, but instead its more detailed and exact. Is this good? I don't necessarily think so IMO, since its an overabundance of intelligence. You now have visual in your radar range without reworking to regain visual of the enemy.

Remember is the key word in your post.

when you're zapping from one planet to another, one battlefield to another on each planet, you're attention's shifting everywhere.
So: do you perform a memory trick to remember what it was you had to deal with or do the damn robots have enough RAM to remind you of it?

I personally see memory tricks as micro, this is not the Mass scale RTS way.

For some reason, just your quotes aren't alerting me and its weird. I can see when someone else quotes me.


I'm okay with memory being part of my micro since we can't make the game easy. I'm all for making the game less micro intensive. but remembering army details isn't micro, it is brain power to remember and having your opponenet swarm you is a strategy. Your arguement of expanding chaos theory requiring that radar store all the visual memory for all the crazy battles happening at once is not the fault of the radar not giving enough intel, but just being swarmed from all directions. Just because you are swarmed doesn't mean your radar should basically be fog vision if those swarming units are scouted.

The current blimp setup is too vague, i 'll agree. However, if we give all the information in one scout swoop, then its just to much information. I'm okay with the Land/bot/structure/air blips but if we reveal unit type and all that jazz. it just like replacement vision.

That's where I stand.