Fog of War

Explored should be ladder standard, otherwise it will introduce a luck-factor: How long will it take the players to find resources?

Umm, exploration is also a skill factor. You need a reliable search pattern.

If resource distribution is sufficiently uniform, this is pure skill.


You could conversely say that FOW needs to be off in Ranked play, because if your scout fails to see the enemy force or a TML installation on its quick flyby, you lost to bad luck.


If we establish scouting as a skill factor (which I find is debatable), then scouting for resources is also a skill factor.

That would work really good.

Resources are randomly distributed, TML are usually in certain spots. Imagine a game of FA without explored terrain and randomly placed mex-spots. You would have to randomly run around(yeah sure some patterns are more effective than others, but one player might still get lucky and find a mex-spot within seconds while the other player has to search longer. Also it would randomly change the distance that the players have to move before they can start the first additional mex.

Point taken.

Maybe some kind of graphics glitch / static would work for differentiating between non-FoW and FoW?

I can see the whole planet being engulfed in blackness from the start but by the time you have a base on the moon/an asteroid I think you should be able to see terrain, but not enemies unless you get close

I think the fog of war should be literal, like in Demigod. Easier to distinguish than in Total Annihilation (I still have trouble with metal and desert maps when fog of war in enabled), looks cool, obscures unexplored stuff. I'd say unexplored would definitely need to be an option too. Not sure how you would implement it without a black veil, but as some have said, it would be nice to have for procedural maps.

[/quote]
I don't think you have to be vision impaired to have difficulty with those maps, the metal ones were even worse! But the fog in Supcom is fine in terms of visibility, probably the issue with TA was fitting it into 256 colours.

So in terms of appearance it's easy to get the fog right with modern high-colour graphics. I would say no to static or interference because it could get distracting and old very quickly. Just a darkened version of the map would be fine in 99% of case.

If you look at pictures of the earth from space, you can only make out small details (green here, brown here, blue here, shapes of continents), Its not until you actually go to those locations that you can see the detail

With no bases in space, the earth should be blacked out except for your base, once you get a base in space, everything in its view should be lit up but with much less detail until its explored

I would go along with that, any enemy thats out of range of LOS should just show up as a radar ping (If you have a radar offcourse)

The problem i have with that is how do i know how far my unit can see if there is no clear difference between seeing ground and not? Maybe i misunderstood and you only mean explored map vs unexplored. A dark shade where you do not have vision is a must for me.

I personally like exploring and vote for the option of being able to choose when hosting. I think emb4 has a good compromise between explored and unexplored initial map by having a low detailed version of the map visible until you explore there.

As these worlds won't be pre-built and thus no one could have any knowledge of what where is, I think having an "Unexplored" option would be awesome. BUT units should then have 2 sets of LOS. One which functions like normal and reveals the lighter gray unit shroud. And a second larger LOS which only reveals the pitch black map shroud.

It would be nice to have true LOS, one of the options in TA. This would be pretty sweet if spy satellites are included as well. Those would help fill the vital information war across mountains and major terrain features. It would also mean that you could attempt to actively keep your opponent from having eyes on you if you kept shooting his satellites down.

Just watch a lot of high level replays showing the "Bomber First" opening, or any particular opening, really.

There is a huge difference if that first scout was able to spot the bomber (or ACU rush, or LAB raid squad, or naval factory), or if they somehow missed each other (northern approach to southern approach or no raiders at all). It's an early coin flip on small maps that can decide your game.

This is exactly the same type of luck as finding a mex spot or not (assuming they are uniformly distributed, not fully random, which would mean they could all be on one side, all be in one lump, etc.).

So, I'm not arguing that "unexplored" is good, I'm arguing that "no fog of war" is, skill-wise, better and purer. It'd also remove a lot of strategic elements, obviously, so it's, from a game play perspective, not better. But "unexplored" is, from a gameplay perspective, not worse than "explored".

All options are valid, and as long as "explored" remains an option for competitive play, both "unexplored" and "no FoW" should remain as competitive play options as well.

As for VISUALIZING the Fog of War: I'd actually like to see a mild static grain in the "uncovered, but unsurveilled" areas, that'd have the potential to work really well from an UI perspective.

Sheesh, in TA just use +dither to change fog of war to dithered instead of b&w terrain.