Cyber Warfare

A thread by christopher1006 http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?uid=1759276&f=61&t=39369&start=0 got me thinking about the idea of capturing enemy units as a gameplay mechanic.
I would be interested in some kind of cyber warfare as a way of implementing a capture enemy unit mechanic. It stands to reason that wireless jamming/aggressively hacking or reprogramming enemy forces would have been at least attempted with the advancement and assimilation of war technology.
I don’t have any specifics at this stage but I think it is a topic worthy of discussion and development. At the very least a listing of the pros and cons could be put together.
Just a thought and I wanted to see what the opinions in the community are.

[Edit]: I didnt realise that adding an option to the poll would wipe peoples existing votes, sorry about that!

[Edit:] Edited poll for clarity. There is now an option for people who voted for Any-Yes option vs No for an unbiased comparison of for/against.

[Edit] I thought I would begin noting down some of the ideas in this thread, it seems in terms of electronic warfare that unit capture is one of the least popular, but no matter! some other more popular implimentations of e warfare are being suggested.

Thread Ideas:

-Redirect Nukes back to point of origin (SC2)

-ECM on some aircraft and/or ground units to attempt redirects of guided munitions (wouldnt work on 'dumb' munitions) (like passive tac missile redirects for loyalists in SupCom/FA)

-False intelligence (faking radar signatures)

-Control/repair units as a countermeasure against cyberwarfare units

I liked the way unit capturing worked in supcom, if you lost control of a unit you knew why, and you had a good chance to defend against it (as opposed to something like cnc yuri's revenge). From a story perspective I'd assume after centuries of war all of the software holes would be plugged, and only direct hardware access/close proximity would let you turn enemy units

I haven't played cnc yuri's revenge so I cant really comment on it, but you would be happy to retain capturing as implemented in Supreme Commander with engineers and the commander?

I had assumed that any such mechanic would be limited to local effects, so to be clear I wasn't suggesting beaming it down via satellite or anything as far reaching as that. Perhaps as a kind of localised defence or an infiltration unit.

Any ideas or adjustments that you would like to see?

Coming from SC2 with that blasted loyalty gun, I am all for it.

a good, idea, cyber warfare ie. hacking, ECM, ECCM etc.. is a staple of modern warfare it would be nice to see how well a cyber warfare approach could be implemented in a modern RTS title.

thinking on the idea of capturing units it was present in TA(dont remember it in supcom) but was never a really viable option the way it was implemented, but the basic idea was sound, it just needs to be expanded ie. a type of tactical missile, (lets call it a nanobot missile or something) the idea being that it detonates and disperses a nanobot cloud over an area capturing the mobile units within that area in "X" Time for "Y" Time before their AI re-establishes control

EMP Blasts would be nice(missile based emp blasts, give em a chance to shoot em down first, interfers with turrets, maybe bots too doesnt disable them but pulses through their power source so they sort of flicker, for "X" seconds sometimes being active and other times being shut down

targeting jammers(ECM)(passive tower based, or emitted as a constant field by specialised bot, affecting all units in its area), maybe(not sure how well it would play, could just end up being frustrating), given that PA is likely to be based on th TA/SUPCOM style of targeting its entirely possible that this could be an effective method of cyber warfare just lowering the hit probabilities, countered locally by ECCM

Cyber warfare in general does have a lot of good ideas, as long as it doesnt stray into the area of becoming a unit special ability that needs to be micromanaged

There were some "hacking" elements in supcom.

You could capture enemy units with engineers, and there was that tower that captured units at a distance (I belive it might have been introduced in the expansion), not to mention that tactical and strategic missles (nukes) can be hacked and sent back at the sender (Cybrans, how i love them).

ooh, thats a good missile redirect, either off course or return to sender, nice..

I wholeheartedly agree, I wouldn't want this to be some kind of unit ability that the player had to micro, that to me would ruin it somewhat.

I remember that capture tower, I think it was an Aeon building in SC2, but I never did play much Aeon. I remember thinking that it was an idea that could have been explored a bit better. I did enjoy the idea of redirecting nukes as the Cybran.

I thought that SC2 went in the the wrong direction and I enjoyed the originals a lot more but there were some neat ideas in SC2.

idea just came to me, generating false radar signals, its been done before but it could be a really effective tactic. build a single structure on a world to generate a large number of false radar signatures to the enemy, make it appear that theres a large base there, (only on radar or equivalent systesms)

Your ideas would be great for small RTS game, but not for a massive war like PA.
I firmly believe that PA will be a quite complicate enough without the elements like cyber warfare and space battle.

Space battle was never mentioned on this thread.

Also, SupCom/FA had your hacking (ie, capture units) that worked just fine. It also had passive abilities as well. Loyalists had a field that could auto redirect tac missiles away.

SupCom 2 elaborated on some cyber warfare, even if all the details were not necessarily ironed out. The loyalty gun was an interesting weapon, not sure how well that could be implemented in PA. However, redirecting nukes was an awesome idea.

Exactly, even devices like cloaking and jamming are technically cyber warfare.

TA had the spider tank EMP enemy units and is a perfect example (Although I believe units should always have a kind of side arm if their primary weapon is not damaging)

While more complex ideas are not especially good for a game of this size, there can still be more simple versions.

Unit capture in any real gameplay context is a very gimmicky mechanic, and should be avoided. Except for edge cases, it should be downplayed, if present at all.

The problem with this thread is you are referring to a broad real-life concept which applies to a lot of different areas with a single label, and that they somehow all count as "cyber warfare" despite the gameplay mechanics differing immensely.

I think some cyber warfare elements might be interesting, such as ECM and ECCM, or perhaps communications and vision-affecting applications. However it is debatable if there is any way to implement these things that adds more depth than it does surface complexity.

The simplest would be having ECM available to counteract computerized weaponry, such as guided missiles. Certain units might deflect nearby enemy guided missiles in some significant way, but would not work on kinetic shells or dumb rockets. This is a reasonable counter to long-range, precision guided weapons, and might be more ubiquitous than hard point defense, especially on mobile units. This would also have applications for certain aircraft as a defense against extremely dangerous long range surface to air missiles.

One way this mechanic might function is to have tactical missiles miss mobile units even if they aren't moving. This negates needing to keep your army in motion to cause slow vertical fire missiles to miss, which is pretty tedious micro. It also enables guided missiles to have excellent range and power for cheap, with a readily available ECM counter, which can be negated by actions from combat units, such as nearby troops destroying things along the intended trajectory of the missiles.

One of the main issues I see with unit capturing is that it typically is fun for the person doing the capturing, but is just frustrating for the person whose units are being captured. Losing control of your units or character tends to be annoying in any game, partially because if it makes you lose/die, it feels like there was nothing you could do to prevent it. Starcraft 2 is actually having a similar problem: some abilities are stuns or have other instant effects, and there isn't much that the player on the receiving end can do except try to avoid it in the first place (which often isn't feasible). It is a lot more fun and exciting if there is some way to actively counteract the capture or disable. Since posters here are so anti-micro, this somewhat eliminates unit capturing.

SupCom/FA did have unit capturing, but it was mostly a gimmick that could be done for laughs. Players had to use engineers to capture units or buildings individually. It took a while, so it was possible to destroy the engineers before anything happened. This is probably the only form that I would want unit capturing to take if it is in the game at all.

Cyber warfare that affects intelligence gathering could be cool though. Jammers that create false radar signals or no signals at all, that sort of thing.

Maybe make it something the enemy could avoid with healers?

So they have a "health bar" on their current owner's control, and they have some sort of fading-to-white coloring when they are losing control-health, and they need to be "tagged" with control-taking abilities multiple times to lose control to the enemy, maybe with some animation once they are solid white of them fading into the enemy's color instead.

Then units that "take" other units will have to do it like it's a weapon or ability, but would need to do it in mass to take a proportionally smaller group of units.

Lastly, whatever "heals" in this game should be able to repair control-health as well as regular health.

So this in theory:
-Units that can take other units need to "hit" multiple times, either the same unit making multiple tags, or multiple units tagging on the same target, to take that target's control.
-Units that are being taken would slowly show color fade to white or something, and when their color is completely gone and thus their control health limit reaches zero, they fade to new owner's color.
-Units that are losing control can be "repaired" just as easily as normal damage by same things that repair normal damage, restoring their color.

Would create this in practice:
-Having a tech of units that can take other units, yet are very combat-weak and completely counterable by an enemy with correct composition (has healers with their group), but useful to have with groups so you can perhaps take out healers and capture perhaps a decent enemy unit or two.
-As such composition is needed, requires players to think out correct composition, needing some mix of fighters and healers and takers, although not making it absolutely necesary since healers and takers shouldn't have a massive battle turning effect.
-When different compositions fight, groups with more healers will be more effect against ones with more takers, ones with more takers will be more effective against ones with less healers, ones with more fighters will be stronger agaisnt ones with less fighters and more of the other two.

It would require between lots and no micro, depending on if units smart-target and smart-counter enemy abilities. I am sure they will be able to make healer automatically heal and heal-by-priority, so they could make them heal prioritizing against units losing control, and they could make takers prioritize enemies that arent being healed and enemies that are higher targets, and prioritize fighters trying to attack main sources of damage. Then players could mid-combat choose to supervise this by selecting all the units in a mass and overriding their natural targets with chosen targets, in case they want to risk not killing more valuable enemy units in hopes of taking them instead, or they want to simply cycle targets in hopes of dividing enemy healing off of big units so they can be more easily killed.

I apologise for the somewhat vague nature of the thread, I didnt have any hard ideas when creating it and I wanted to see if there were any aspects under this broad term that the community wanted. Certainly there is much more to cyber warfare than taking over units and I wanted to appeal to the communities creativity in this regard : )

See this is what I'm talking about, awesome idea : D

Some really good points on the cons of that kind of electronic warfare

Cool this seems to be a less random implimentation of E-war

Also in favor of being able to create decoys.

I mean, you could use them to bring enemy defences to the wrong side of a base to protect, while real attackers hit the opposite side of the base.

Just some way to create fake radar blips looking like a mass attack incoming, maybe a jammer ability or a radar ability or an infiltrator ability.

... most of the cyber warfare ideas in this thread is allredy in SupCom and considering who's making PA i bet that they are in PA too (Or that the developers are atleast aware of them and considering them allredy).

Cyber warfare currently in SupCom (I might miss one or two):
Reprogramming units (Capture).
Redirecting tactical missiles.
Redirecting strategic missiles.
Radar jammers (stealth) both mobile and as a structure.
False radar outputs (Creates several contacts instead of just one).
Optical camouflage/invisibility (Cloak).
EMP (Electromagnetic pulse, its basicly a stun ingame).
Special anti sheild weaponry (Not sure if it should be included, but i did).

Theres also counters to stealth/cloak (Works for both):
Omni radar that breaks radar jammers (And possibly false contacts, not 100% sure) both as a structure and a flyer.

Theres also some advanced intel gathering things (Could be considered part of cyber warfare):
Radar, Sonar.
Shellcam (Gives vision of a artellery shell until impact, giving you some input of the area being shelled)
Buildings that gives vision for either a huge area like the Perimeter Monitoring System or a small area that you get to choose like the Quantum Optics Facility.

Yeah I'd like to have a spy plane that could make a pile of fake radar blips around it, or bring back the SupCom radar stealth units.

Also I'd like to build cheap buildings that look like real buildings but with none of the functionality. So you could line your base with fake nuke silos and scare your opponent into building anti nukes.