Radar is the kind of building you want built ASAP, but after a while, I've noticed a few quirks of the system which could be improved. Firstly, Landmines show up on radar. This makes mines almost completely useless, because if you see a radar dot in a seen location it's certainly a mine. Mines should be stealthy, maybe make them visible to advanced radar, with advanced fab/combat fab being able to make completely unscannable advanced mines. Secondly, a Radar only shows a dot, even when the player knows for certain what thing is there. If an enemy unit/building drops back into the fog of war, radar should automatically extrapolate, and keep the right icon on the detected unit. Only revert to the dots if the unit is mobile, and it leaves the radar range, either by moving or by the radar shutting off from lack of power. Building identification could be permanent, because buildings don't move. This would be useful in many ways, such as, when a scout finds a base and dies, you have a clearer snapshot of what kind of army they've built if you look at it right now, and you don't need to use the chronocam to do so. It would also make minelaying a viable strategy, eg. doing a short raid, then retreating through a minefield if you seem to be taking heavy losses. As it is now, turrets work better for retreat support, when they ideally should be best for defending against raiding parties and as a last line of commander defense.
Mines are cloaked from vision, but not radar. They can't be cloaked and stealthed or you can't counter them.
You can counter them by assuming everywhere has mines, and testing potential vectors with scout units?
Lol. Anyhoo, who uses radar when attacking people's bases (on other worlds or huge planets). (basic radar anyway.)
If you're doing a land offensive, why would you not? They make pelters and other artillery more effective, detect land mines, and make any unit which has a range larger than its vision radius able to shoot further than before. Plus you get advance warning of defensive troop movements. Without that, an effective, low-cost raid can easily become a massacre. If you're bringing a few fabs to the front for artillery or turret backup support, a basic radar is an obvious build. .
I'd love to make mines not show up on radar, BUT it needs a counter. (every defensive weapon needs an offensive weapon to counter it or you get world war 1 before tanks were invented) So what I think we should do is make Combat Fabbers automatically detect and reclaim any mines in their range. It makes the Combat Fabbers more useful and it makes the mines more useful while making radar slightly less useful (it's honestly a bit too important right now)
Combat fabbers detecting mines would work if it wasn't unintuitive and didn't implicitly force bot vs. bot. I haven't used mines enough to gauge their effectiveness, honestly, but what ways are there to remove them - reclaimers and throwaway units? Because if you can use walls and mountains to shape corridors, then you can force your enemy to have no way around the mines. Detection is irrelevant in that instance. Also, if you're just throwing them on an open field, detection forces the opponent to search for ways around to re-evaluate their attack. Sometimes it helps to let the enemy see a threat.
