Differenciated Radar Blips and The General Approach to Intel

you're forgetting the mechanism by which power loss equals intel loss.
and also you're equating PA to something easy. I'll only accept such a statement from Gunshin. Or from you if you beat him. In any case it's not the macro way. this is supposed to be the ultimate macro game, let's make it so.

It shouldnt

Lets not turn this into "you're are not qualified to have opinions on difficulty since you are not a pro" .

My issue with the radar blimps wasn't about how easy or hard it makes the game.

Making the ultimate macro game shouldn't be about making the game incredibly easy.

It wasn't my main argument, my main argument is that the game is not "incredibly easy" nor do you have to do anything to make it harder. Trust me a decent AIs plus online opponents are already going at it with all their heart, the opponent shouldn't be the game. let's have a UI that doesn't fight you on top of that.

I'm not sure that you have a clear notion of what difficulty is and where it stems from (or, more acccuratey, the places it stems from that are probably not obvious, or more obscure, to mr. john doe). You should start there before taking it upon yourself to make the game more "difficult" with the UI. (all of this is meant in a friendly way, smylies for backup cuddles -> )

I want the Bleeps, the Sweeps and the Creeps!

that's not all you've lost : D

Not angry at you tatsujb, but i've heard that "pro's are valid in provide balance/difficulty/skill/etc" argument thrown around to much to shrug off arguments of other players of the game.

I see we are in two different fields of thought with no real compromise between the two other then slightly better blimps.

In simple terms

• Radar should only provide slightly detailed blimps(Distinguishable air/land/structure) and nothing further
• Visual confirmation with detailed information from scouts and orbital satellites only
• Visual information is the gold that is constantly being searched for, radar only provides a buffer to visual scouting but can't give the same gold value.

No matter who you are fighting or the million battle fields you encounter. Radar shouldn't be both a buffer and visual gold on what is coming to attack you.

just my stance. Surely, uber will do something they deem worthy and awesome for us in the end.

This model is what I'm proposing with the simple modification that the memory trick shall be the UI's job, not yours. I think you don't quite understand. In no way is sending a scout once sufficient. For one; there are constantly new units, two; units walk in and out of radar range and when they walk back in they are no longer identified. three : energy surges which will happen quite often will also remove that data from you.

so you must constantly provide scouts to ID the units.
I like this model because it encourages scouting. "look at all those blips! my that's scary, John go see what's out there!"

the model I'm suggesting is just short of providing so much info that scouting is discouraged but the radical opposite produces the discouragement again, as we have seen with starcraft. where scouting is the rarest thing.

the SupCom model, however saw the glory days of scouting, so it must have been doing something right.
People will scream for a scout so often in supcom that it could make my ears fall of.

and my supcom mentor .... well... do you know Dragonball Z abriged? take what Piccolo keeps saying to gohan and apply it with the word "scout" instead

How about a special type of radar that is about 2/3 times the regular cost that is capable of remembering unit types for a fixed amount of time after scouting? Lets say for about 20 seconds slowly fading away, It is enough to check if an army is coming if you have to divert your attention elsewere for a moment. But short enough to keep scouting important

explain to me why it is important to you that intel ...fade away?

The fading away is more or less an indication of how long the icons will remain.

And the rest of the idea is because the need to scout on a regular basis remains, this way you can reduce micro by not having to check constantly on every place your scouts fly over.

well I explained here : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/different-blips.49424/page-7#post-866269 in what scouting remains a constant necessity in my model. Are you capable of maintaining positive enery throughout your games? be honest now.

tell me this, why should we need to reinvent the wheel?

I think that your idea is a fine idea but with the current radar ranges (mostly adv ground radar) this will still be overpowered imo. Scouting will still be required but 1 every 5 min is more than enough because it will take too much time to retreat your units every time outside of radar range. If the range of the radar would be reduced it would be a good idea.

and on your question about maintaining positive energy: I think I am well capable of doing so and I really enjoy PA but there is always room for improvement.

In Fa this wasn't much of an issue the radar depicted in my OP was a t1 radar and could be upgraded all the way to t3, by that time and in that position it covered the entire map benefiting from the rules I described and yet still scouting was a dire necessity the way I described it earlier. So it musnt've been OP at all.

I think that it's not at all the same knowing that there are ground units someplace and knowing that these units are T3 Tanks or just T1. Keep in mind that in this model, landed planes, until scouted would show up as land troops.

And again there's the energy surge thing which in all these types of RTSes was always a frequent occurrence, and considering the rhythm at which they occur in PA, I don't think the radar needs to be as badly nerfed as it currently is at all.

I havent played FA so i cant really compare to it, I have supcom 2 however.

In most of my PA games I notice that at the start of the game i have plenty of power, mid game I do switch a lot between having enough and not having enough. However the more I reach end game the more stable it gets. Making sure I have constant radar coverage(even now) because if you miss one attack you will lose a big part of your base. That is also why I think it would be bad to be able to see the icons when scouted. Because you will be able to scout once in endgame and know mainly how to counter it. And if the forces split up there still wont be much of a problem. When you let the icons disappear however you will have to scout multiple times in order to check which part of the army is going where.

ps. I guess I dont expand enough at end game because i always stall on metal instead of energy

I don't get it, you recognize the importance of scouting and knowing what's going on yet you deliberately give yourself handicaps versus micro-maniacs and people with photographic memory.
You say you played SupCom 2, how did you find it's intel model played out?

I think the idea was pretty good it however felt a lot closer to your actual radar/base. If you spotted it in your radar it was quite close to your radar and often closer than you would like. In PA however it feels like if an unit comes into range I will still be able to rush about 5 bots out of every factory. In SupCom 2 this felt like you could get out maybe 1/2 units each factory.

I do however think that this will have to be tested a lot by devs

What I do agree on is that you do give yourself a handicap vs micro players or ones with a photographically memory. So I do agree with you on that but I cant really tell how large that handicap will be without playing it myself. That is why I am giving this option because it think that it is halfway between the macro and micro players.

I don't see a point of using different radar icons, you can distinguish unit types by their moving speed, also whole point of radar is knowing that something is coming, but you don't know what it is before you actually see it.

a big part of this discussion isn't about knowing what something is before you see it. But about what happens after you see it within radar range.

I support the idea that the icons are temporary visible.
Tatsujb supports the idea that the icons should be visible for as long as an constant radar cover remains.

that's pointless micro, who would put up with such a chore in a 1M unit game, you're not playing this game at the right scale.