Counter-Counter Intelligence measures

I've searched using keywords to cover the general PA discussion here, but I couldn't find anything right off relative to counter-counter intelligence measures in-game. UNLESS someone has referred to it in a different manner-- If so, point me to the correct topic.

What I mean by Counter-counter intelligence is the means to tell, for example, if someone is jamming your ingame radar or sensors, and what to do when this happens. I think this is a generally a sought category in intelligence communities. If the enemy has figured out how to throw off your intelligence systems, how and what do we do to fix/prevent this from happening?

I was wondering, then, if this could be addressed in Planetary Annihilation and what others think about it. Lets say that the enemy has mobile sensor jammers deployed with his army. I could have a structure built at this same point that indicates to me: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING IN THIS AREA-- someone is screwing with your sensors. I could then have a related structure that engages sensors on another frequency at the cost of more energy use. This is just the general concept, so I'd expect to go deeper than that (for instance, cloaked units?)

Usually, you can tell pretty easily that someone is having their way with your sensors. Things like unholy amounts of unit blips where there are only two or three units or a nice little posse moving with a circular hole where there are no units, or a unit blinking in and out of existence.

True stealth takes some effort to pull off, and if the game negates that then what's the point?

Yeah as far as game play goes I am betting it will be much harder to be stealthy than it is to detect someone. Also if anyone can build cloaking sensors then what's the point of having radar cloaking on your units. Remember the omni sensors from SupCom 1?

Then there is this constant one upping problem. Well if my electronic counter measures are defeated by his counter counter measures, then what I really need are some counter counter counter measures to sneak up to his base!

Yo dog! I heard you like counter measures, so we put some counter measures in your electronic counter measures!

I think that a suggestion like this would imply a larger stress on intelligence and counter-intelligence as well.

For example, that stealth skill that you mention could be pulled off from optimizing the frequencies that your sensor jammers are emitting (to counter a certain sensor frequency the enemy is scanning). Lets say you have 3 sensor jammers: all the would do in TA or Supcom is make the range for sensor jamming larger if you have them spreaded out. What if you were running 4-5 sensor jammers together? Which, I might mention, loads of people did because they were too lazy to distribute them over all of their units. It is almost no different than having just one (virtually same ground covered). However, if each of these were to address a certain sensor frequency, a larger stealth range could be achieved. It may be too much micro to set frequency levels, but maybe they could auto-scan for the most non-covered frequency when they are running in a group and auto-set themselves.

Good stealth requires knowing the means of which to counter enemy intelligence and how to do it. In Supcom/TA, I see only a sensor jammer, and spreading them out between your units the only way to efficiently use stealth.

I think that a counter-counter depth-level of ingame intelligence would allow for both parties to have a good "intelligence" battle in the overall metagame. I also think that it can be said, in general, that all of these aspects could be expanded upon greatly from what we have already had in SupCom/TA. Otherwise, the intelligence/sensors/counter-intelligence portion of the game wouldn't be much of a novelty from its predecesors

That's because what you're talking about aren't called counter-counter intelligence measures, but instead Electronic Countermeasures, and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures, or ECM/ECCM for short. That said, there hasn't been a whole lot of discussion on the topic.

With the naïve implementations of ECM in most RTS games, this is true. While I think there's still a case to be made for the single radar jammer shrouding a small strike force, it would be cool to see some more convincing decoys.

I also like the idea of jamming radar at the source, rather than at the target. An active radar jammer that actually disabled nearby radar capabilities entirely could be pretty cool.

One things we've never done is have multiple combined radars be more powerful than one radar. Any thoughts on this people?

E.g. the more overcoverage you have the harder it is to spoof or evade.

Thinking out loud here, no current plans to do this, fine print etc etc.

That seems like it might be a slippery slope: neither side is likely to be sure they have enough radar or jammers, so they'll keep building more "just to be sure". It would be like rock-paper-scissors where two rocks beats paper.

So it would create an epic arms race building radar?

Scoutplanes are basically like Counter-counter intelligence in TA and SupCom. When to use a more expensive counter-counter like omni-radar in SupCom can be determined by the cost of keeping planes above enemy stealth units or patrolling a large area.

You could offcourse add a type of sensor that can detect enemy jamming fields but personally I dislike the type of omni sensor that is provided in SupCom since there is no way you can use stealth or cloak to your advantage in the range of the omni unless you destroy it.

Armor Command had an interesting radar and jamming system.
At the furthest range of the radar you would only see dots that all looked alike. When the unit came closer to the radar you would also see the size of the unit. When it got really close it would become fully revealed. Radar also stacked so if you had more radars covering the enemy, the unit size and unit type would be revealed much earlier.
Jamming worked in the same way. A unit on the edge of the jamming range will be detected by radar quite easily. A unit right next to jammer is almost impossible to detect with radar.
Armor Command also had directional radars with additional range that you could point in different directions.

This sounds a bit like Multistatic radar, which is a real life method for obtaining more information about a radar detected object, plus it is known to be better at detecting stealth aircraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistatic_radar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft#Detection



EDIT: added a nice picture...

The way to make this interesting IMHO is this:

1 radar can tell people that there is a stealth unit in the area of coverage. (ex.: orange dye on the covered area shown on strategic map)

If the enemy stealth unit is inside the coverage of 2 radars the orange area becomes the intersection between the two.

If said unit is in the area of 3 radars then you can pinpoint the enemy unit exactly where it is and attack it with long range defenses.

This avoid the stochastic variables (% chance of not being detected) and clever positioning of the radar dishes is rewarded.

Yeah. If you ever end up in a situation where you have to build more radars or jammers to win it would be kinda interesting because radars and jammers can't fight on their own.

I would be interested to know if it would be possible to both have "overcoverage" and terrain blocking radar. It sounds abit simulation heavy but I don't know if it feasible.
1 problem with terrain blocking the radar in the Spring engine is that it follows the ground and if an air unit is flying behind but higher than the hill that is blocking radar it won't be detected.
But radar blocking is still a very good gameplay mechanic as the placement of radars are very important and have strategical implications such as if you got a bunch of kiting units that needs radar to be effective then they might not be able to get enemy units hiding behind radar coverage.

If I'm allowed to go abit offtopic an interesting mechanic could be that the weaker the radar coverage on the enemy is, the more the radar dot wobbles and effectively units firing at that radar dot will miss more.
Jammer could still be useful even though some of the units in jammer coverage are revealed because their radar dots wobbles more.

I like it - you could hook them up in a pattern like they do it with telescopes.

Maybe, maybe not. What happens to standard vision? Have a few scout patrols, and the gig is up. The big downfall is that it's very difficult to show as part of the interface. How much anti radar is enough? How much radar is too much? Will it be color coded or what?

I like the idea of things like stacked radars giving boosted range, or stacked anti-radars giving a larger blank spot on the map. Surely players have packed 2 dozen sensors or spoofers together and wondered "Why isn't there any more coverage?". All too often there's one tiny spot with 50x coverage while a single tank slips more than 3 inches away from the jammer, revealing the whole thing. This also gets rid of the need to have multiple tiers of the same role, since to get better results you just pack more things together.

Linking things together can also be good on the bandwidth, by simply having fewer things to tell the host.

hinthint: Such an idea could work for linking shield generators together, to limit the 50x spam issue seen in other games. More shields = larger, stronger, better, but easier to slip under as well.

But not the good kind, like you want.

I think any evolution of radar/sonar/stealth mechanics should start with an attempt to make it crystal clear what kind of coverage you have on every area of the map. Requiring users to mentally calculate the union of a bunch of coloured circles can't be the most effective way to present that information.

Since we are using many large robots, why not a seismograph style detection as well? Bury detectors in the area you want to detect to pickup the vibrations. UI will display roughly the size of the disturbance so you can tell if its a few units, or a whole army stomping your way.

1a. Typically you could draw different colors or different outlines on the terrain at which units will be detected. If all units would be detected at the same range you would only need to draw 1 circle/line where units would be detected.
Using jammers to hide your own units and knowing when you would see stealthy units in radar range would be alot more complex though.
1b. If radars can overpower jammers you could draw circles or colors on the map where the radar will overpower 1 jammer, 2 jammers, 3 jammers and so on.
2. If it will be nearly impossible to detect the jammer and units very close to the jammer while the the outer edge of the jammer range is very weak then it gets more complex however.

3. An additional way is to show how much radar that hits the unit.
Radar sends out waves of electromagnetic energy. Typically a unit could detect how strong the radar is and determine if it is detected or not.
This could be interesting from a strategical or tactical standpoint as you might wanna turn off the radar to hide your presence for example.
3a. When you try to hide units inside a jammer field you could micro them to stay close to the jammer where the jammer overpower the radar.
3b. It could even be possible for the units to handle this automatically as units grouped up with a jammer will go closer to the jammer when they are close to being detected.

4. Nobody has mentioned different radar signature yet.
Basically large units could have a large radar signature and be detected earlier by radar.
Special stealth units could have extra small radar signature.
It would be abit complex to visualize but I think that combined with 3, detecting incoming radar, it could work.

Would it be crystal clear? I guess visualizing when a unit is detected could be pretty easy and the size of the jammer range could possibly be reduced as the jammer pick up more radar making it pretty clear.

You would figure that this far in the future we would have a tech better than 'radar'

Drop it, its old. Use sensor based objects that operate on different principals so we can move beyond this silly radar discussion.

Sound, Vibration, Heat, and Energy Emissions are all far more viable and interesting forms of detection for a game of this type.

Whilst I started this topic for a different reason it quickly became quite focused on the idea of intelligence and counter intelligence

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=39371

This thread seems to be going quite well but if anyone is interested there is that one too

Sure. Vibration/seismic detection is one thing. It could be possible to impliment a vide range of different methods to obtain intelligence. You can present them and their gameplay implications if you want. Hell even standard Line of Sight might be based on Heat emissions. Actually I don't know what Line of Sight is supposed to represent. A camera from the robots perspective? Doesn't look like that.
Anyway as far as I know neutrino is in on this 'radar' thing.