Omni-radar like units are too powerful

Now who knows how radar etc will work in PA, but for me omni-radar [that appeared in supreme commander] that can see through every disguise are too powerful and generally render stealth & cloaking obsolete.

I wouldn't like something like omni-radar in planetary annihilation, I would still want something like stealth & cloaking to be useful until the end. I think both cloaking & stealth should use energy and a way to cut down a players cloaking & stealth ability is to shut down and/or sabotage their power.

Maybe even units getting close to a cloaking unit could shut down their cloak. Could have something like an emp pulse tower that a player has to manually click to see if there are any cloaked units around. Visual confirmation could be used on stealthed units so that long range defences cut through them [they could even have less armour to show their compromise for being stealthy].

Those are the kind of solutions I would like instead of a one size fits all radar.

Clicking to check for stealth units adds to micro. I hate to bitch about this beaten pony, but people will. The little asian guy with 20 monitors will have an advantage over the casual single monitor gamer who cant spare time clicking a scanner.

How about having different units do different radar things? Like one for scanning distant stationary things, one for scanning nearer things but can detect uncloaked enemies, and one for detecting steath units within viewing range of the unit.

All having a cost to balance against having them absolutely everywhere, and weak so you can pick it off with a scouting attack and have the stealth move in afterward.

They cost a lot of energy to run. Energy is mass, both because the energy source costs mass and because energy can be used in mass fabs. Also, there was always the issue of knowing WHAT the radar-detected units were.

I agree with this. HOWEVER, "useful" does not mean "practically uncounterable". It's a balance.

Also, if the equivalent of "omni-radar" is too expensive to spam (as it should be, either in up-front or in operating costs), then there won't be dozens of them. If that's the case, why not just make it a high-priority target for a surgical strike of some kind?

Lets try a thought exercise!

ascythian, What is single biggest issue that you have with How Omni Sensors were implemented in FA?

Mike

It is a fix all solution to cloaking & jamming. Its an imperfect solution. They can also detect water units which basically is pretty stupid. Oh and they don't take much power and don't take that long to build.

If it did something like only show the dots for a few seconds in a sort of activated ability, then that kind of thing would be more acceptable. But it doesn't.

No no no, pay attention to the italics, it's not about WHAT it did, but HOW it did it, try again.

Mike

Dunno, you tell me.

I thought he said it clearly enough. His concern is in how unconditionally the omni radar pierces stealth / cloaking, and how little effort is needed to make that happen.

Can't say I entirely disagree, but not sure what my opinion is because stealth never played a large part in any game I played. Maybe thats an example of why theres a problem regarding stealth.

I feel that this problem may already be solved by the fact that the battlefield is now much larger. You would have to build enormous amounts of omni sensors to cover all of your planets and asteroids it would surely be cost ineffective in PA while in FA it only took a few to get your area covered.

What I'm trying to get at is outlying targets should be vulnerable to stealthed units because of the expense of an omni sensor in outlying location, and aren't stealth units supposed to be used for non frontal attacks anyways so it should work out. Of course it may need some balance in terms of cost and range of detection but I think it should be fine.

Well that's no fun.

Anyways, from what I've seen the biggest issue people have had with Omni is not the fact it's Omni, but it's range, upkeep cost and how it's bundled with Radar. Fact is that some way to defeat Stealth, Stealth/Cloak and Jamming(to a degree) is needed, no one likes having a Stealth/Cloak+Mazor Cybran ACU Walking around killing everything.

So then we want some way to stop that kind of thing from happening, my ideal solution is to first remove Omni from T3 Radar, without changing it's cost, it still scales nicely with the T1 and T2 Radars so no point changing what ain't broke. So we've moved Omni into it's own building, now I don't have any concrete numbers for this, but I know in BlackOps we reduced the Range by half, and even with the enhanced cloaking abilities in a few Cybran units we haven't had any complaints about balance in that regard, so it's a safe starting point, from there I'd give it the same cost to build(maybe a bit more in Energy) as T3 radar, but a higher energy upkeep, to the point where it's sapping at least one T3 Power Gen.

Spotting Boats/Subs is a little weird, but considering how in FA there aren't any reliable options for taking back your coast from subs once you're lost it I'm willing to overlook it, might need some other fix in PA thought.

Mike

Pretty much this. Stealth works when the map as a whole is relatively sparsely populated, whereas the speed at which SC games progressed, it wasn't long before a player could reasonably be expected to have closed up all the neutral areas with units, giving little space for much Stealth. Bigger maps (or rather, more sparsely populated maps) would nerf Omni without actually needing to nerf Omni directly. Cutting the vision radius on buildings not directly associated with sensors might help.

Don't take this completely seriously please, just an interesting idea:

What if all radar/detection/sonar systems scanned in circles? It's generally how non-targeted detection methods work, so may be interesting to see in PA. Obviously, technology could have evolved to the point where each time frame uses a different pulse, so can be distinguished when it returns, but it could be cool doing it the old fashioned/current way. Always found it a little strange that detection perfectly tracked everything within it's range.

Eg: Some distant unit slowly moves back and forth. You assume it's some basic unit patrolling. All of a sudden, the blip appears to have moved inwards a bit. 2seconds later the blip is nearly at your base. You were mistaken and it's actually a condensed group of advanced gunships.

It may get confusing with multiple dots, since it'd be harder to discern which is travelling at which rate (more 'current-tech' though).

Another way is to consider splitting cloak and stealth detection into 2 different buildings. Spread the load.

Imo T1 radar was far more OP than T3 (seriously) in FA. I actually think it was one of the most OP units in the game.

What if stealth couldn't be detected in a radar's radius until like 1/3 or 1/2 of it's maximum range?

What if cloak wasn't perfect but would "shimmer" to allow it to be shot at?
It's not invulnerability, it's really awesome camo that would mess with laser and other optical sensors? Kind of like only 1/4 of the shots hit?

What's wrong with just using scout planes and tanks to detect stealthed units? I never bothered using any stealth tactics in Supreme Commander because they would be rendered useless from the omni radar.

Best solution to this is to remove cloaking from the game. In lore all the factions have all the technology. They know exactly how cloaking would work. Why wouldn't they be able to counter it.

I also think cloaking doesn't really fit a grand strategy game. Cloaking in SC2 is about making sure you've nailed key points with detectors and keep a scan around for that banshee rush that is incoming. This sort of stuff is out of place in the PA vision as I understand it.

Radar jamming makes more sense though. I'd have that in the game (though it still doesn't make sense in lore). The counter for Radar jamming is scouting.

This post is not about radars, but I think it's close enough to topic.

I never liked the entire idea of fog of war, actually. How does it work? Okay, for PA we would say that because planets are round and you can't see past the horizon. But what about moons? You should be able to see them, if you are on planet. And see planet from them, maybe? Or not?

I think that it can be done otherwise. Instead of not seeing anything and using radars and scouting to find enemy, we could see everything and use cloaking fields to hide stuff and scouting to find hidden stuff.
That idea is probably not good for PA. That would require a lot of work to balance and still will not work properly with commanders: if you did not hide you commander, you will loose to a single artillery cannon or rocket, if you did and sent him on far asteroid, you are unbeatable.

You clearly didn't read Total Annihilation's manual. The Fog of War in TA is explicitly stated to be a result of "weak cloaking" and electronic countermeasures possessed by all units.

This is a terrible idea that defeats the point of cloaking in the first place. And the point of having ballistic calculations in the game. Cloaking is for stealth, not dodge-tanking, and a flat 75% chance to avoid attacks is worthless because the point is to not let your opponent know you're there at all, and makes no sense with AOE.

This topic has already been discussed in all details:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36437
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36439
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35862
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35378
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35336

Short summary:
Distinct omni is bad, one type of intel per terrain only. No LoS for intel. Distinguish between stealth and cloak. Unit visibility is based on size of the unit and distance to intel, depending on range unit appears as "smoke" (you can't tell multiple small units from one large unit), dot (you can tell apart large units from the "smoke") or is fully identified (=visible). Stealth makes the unit act like a smaller one. Cloak breaks when unit collides with enemy, when unit fires or when the unit gets to close to high range intel and can not be reestablished while the unit could be identified. Stealth is passive and makes the unit also disappear faster if out of range. Stealth and cloak can be combined on one unit.