No omni-sensors.

/thread

Okay but seriously, I did like Zero-K's method of having to chose what kind of detection your sensor did (I think it was Zero-K), but in general, I'm opposed to omni-sensors of all sorts. Intelligence gather should either be a tactile thing (scouts) or require sensors nets that *can* be spoofed by radar jamming.

Radar jamming should counter radar, not vice-versa.

Agreed. The omni-sensing ability in supcom was one of the first things to go in our mod. Horrid concept.

I disagree, omni gave you a small radius where the enemy couldn't sneak up on you. There were too many things that could kill you commander in about a second to not have omni.

Omni completely devalued stealth.

No to omni-sensors, if you want that kind of capability have visual sight around the area. Optical sensors are the only non spoofable thing. If you want to improve visual range, have units on patrol or standing guard.

In supcom, I would sometimes disable intel structures and force people to have air scouts on patrol for seeing things or having a single unit posted every so often keeping overwatch.

In our mod it wasn't simply the removal of omni. That by itself doesn't work because supcom also let you fire while cloaked and did not have a decloak distance threshold.

TA did both of those correctly and that needs to be in the game if you don't have omni. In other words, a cloaky unit that fires a weapon will decloak. Perhaps even a manual decloak some seconds prior to being able to fire your weapon. Secondly, if an enemy unit gets to within a certain distance of your cloaked unit, your unit will decloak due to proximity. All of this should be configurable in the unit's blueprint.

Omni is still usefull on some units, the ACU should still have omni, simply to prevent a straight stealth assault on critical units. Well, why not give any unit omni, even if its only within a range of 10-15 meters? In TA the detection range was a bit to low, you needed to collide almost. A sparse line of units (of any type!) placed in a bottleneck should be sufficient to prevent sneaking.

But i agree on removing omni from the normal sensor towers or at least on reducing the range of omni to that of the visual or even less, slightly (!) above weapon range of the stealth unit with the longest range would be fine. Placing sensor towers on the border of your base should be sufficient to defend against stealth units.

In return there may be no long range stealth units or even mobile stealth field generators, otherwise it would be to easy to abuse natural borders in the terrain to get units into a fireposition which can not be reached in the early gameplay.

Omni with a slightly lower range, like barely able to cover your base, but with the same energy cost?

The commander's omni, arguably, was fine. The T3 omni. tower most certainly wasn't.

I dislike the hardcounter relationship of omni but it depends if it fits in what they make with this game. Decloak on fire + proximity is my preference for what that is worth.

OK having a little brainstorm here... I dont know what kind of sensor tactics are likely to be in the game but no harm in throwing out a few ideas.

I was thinking about this wrt water planets and submarine bases, I like the idea of a sensor being specific to a type of location eg air, surface, sub-aqua pelagic, sub-aqua surface.

Add space and you have at least five sensors which would be graphically distinct. You would not need all of them in all locations. I would like to see some kind of configurable sensor turret on buildings and units which allows you to choose their loadout.

Would like the option to set an alarm on a sensor so it pings me if non friendlys are detected.

Might also be nice to have modifiers for sensors, like electromagnetic passive, electromagnetic active (radar), doppler (gives vector display), photonic active (lased radar), photonic passive (computerised telescope), seismic/sonar passive.

Active sensors should be visible at a range about twice their detection range, giving away their location, passive sensors would not but would have a lower detection range and be unable to reveal passively stealthed units.

Active would reveal passive stealth but would not reveal active stealth (optical cloak) except for laser radar which would be expensive, very visible and have different ranges depending on location, ie low / local in water, low / local over terrain surface, medium in air, medium plus in upper atmosphere and very long range in space.

Networks of sensors of the same type in a local area could increase their detection range up to 50% ish.

Is that too complicated?

I'd like to see omni still in, but subject to more restrictions. Omni towers do not project a radius of omni around them, instead they only function if there are multiple omni towers within range of each other, and a unit can be detected by them if it meets the following conditions:

It is within range of at least two omni towers.
It is closer to the furthest omni tower than the separation of the two towers in question.

This means single omni towers are useless, and the most efficient arrangement is a triangle with a side length equal to the range of the towers. And there are exploitable holes in a player's omni coverage. And a player has to necessarily spread their sensors out, rather than putting them right in the middle of their base.

Yes. No more then 4 sensor classes please. We have omni (we will always have that one, the ACU can't be without it, but never larger than visual) and we have visual. We also have one type of long range radar which is independed of visual. And we need sonar as complement to radar in naval.

The diversity between passive and active stealth is great however.

Passive stealth would hide you from radar and sonar, but you visual breaks your disguise immediatly. Any action (except for movement) breaks passive stealth, this includes the activation of shields, consuming trees / rocks or any type of factoring / charging. Passive stealth is limited to the actual unit, but is free of enery upkeep. Once you know where such an unit is, active STEALTH REMAINS BROKEN until the units leaves radar / sonar range. You can't retreat from a battle stealthed.

Active stealth hides your from everything except omni (including visual). Only moving to close to other units will break your stealth. Active stealth requires additional energy for every action you perform, including movement. If you can't maintain the energy cost, stealth breaks. If your unit is affected by anything, stealth breaks, this includes damage from indirect fire and assistance by allied units! Own fire will always break stealth. Active stealth requires charging to activate stealth, beeing affected by anything which would normaly break stealth or increasing stealth costs will reset the charge process. Once the charge is complete, you can even vanish within visual range.

Agreed, I think stealth and cloaked units could play a much bigger role if the only unit that has any sort of omni sensor is the commander.

Omni was terrible, and PA should go back to the TA method of stealth.

I'll also point out that I'd like radar to be sensibly limited. Line-of-sight would be nice but completely impractical since we're fighting on relatively small spheres. In the same vein as omni-sensors, I didn't like the T3 radar that let you see practically the whole goddamn map (on all but the largest maps).

Zero-K's near-LOS radar was the best, for sure, but like I said that's not wholly practical here.

In my mind, radar coverage should be fairly range-limited (maybe T1 radar is the ONLY radar) specifically to give purpose to units which carry radar themselves.

Omni sensor in SupCom is good imo. It is sufficiently hard to get up and especially maintain with power requirements, and the omni radius I feel was not too large. There needs to be some way to counter those dang stealthed Cybran boats shelling my base! It's not like maintaining good omni coverage over a wide area is trivial.

I support the notion of no omni-sensors. The closest we should get to such might be an orbital platform on which you would build multiple sensor types.

De-cloak on fire and with proximity, ditch omni except on the commander. Omni was ridiculous in SC and made stealth worthless after a few minutes of gameplay.

limeted Omni, IE commander starts with it, and mabey one strong enough to cover average base size, NOT the whole "T3, your stealth is nearly useless"

have had good matches where oponent dropped ACU behind our lines, builds stealth generator, and about a dozen artillary before letting them rip!