So for some reason when I sleep in late my mind can whip up an amazing idea. This morning I was thinking "Data Charts" But usually in an RTS the developer will either just let you have all of the data for how you and your enemy's are doing, or no data at all. What I was thinking was that in PA we could mix it up a little. First by letting the player have full data on his army, but not knowing anything about what else is out there, and to find out that information you would have to send out little scouts to do research for you. The scouts can scan areas, find minerals, and bring back information on your enemy's. Think of the scouts being like little droids. It was just a quick idea I had and I will most likely expand on it as the day progresses. Best, SteveZ
The kind of unit you're thinking of is an intel specialist. A moving radar can capture the existence of an enemy base, at good range, without having the ability to discern units. In Supcom, this was shown with the greyed out radar blip. Anything that is fast, cheap, with some kind of vision can quality as a direct scout. An explicit scouting unit is redundant when simply visiting the enemy base provides intel. A scout that can find minerals but has no ability to take them is kind of a waste. Especially since reclaiming is such a HUGE part of previous games. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ One place where scouting may be essential is with scouting other worlds. The difficulty of moving from world to world can be very easy or very hard. Either way, having strong intel on an enemy world is critical for planning an attack, or figuring out if an attack is even possible.
I think something interesting might come from these scout. I propose the following. A stealth unit that, when stationary, functions as a radar. Seemingly redundant right? Here's the kicker, you can put it inside one of those rockets to explore worlds (like in the video when the commander traveled to the moon. The rocket itself probably should be detectable. As soon as the unit hits the ground (and maybe some activation time?) it stealths. You can use it for vision to scout around the area to find a nice spot for an invasion or maybe prep for a base. Useless in direct combat maybe, but useful to have it on the flanks as advanced warning for incoming flank attacks and stuff. Possibly a specialized unit for the Tier 2 due to it's stealth and deployable radar function. In the tier 1 have a throwaway cheap, fast, long direct vision unit to quickly scout an area.
I think land based scouts should have some passive protection like a stealth or ability to bury the scout in the ground. For air I think UAV system is best. Just a small "RC plane" hovering over the battlefield. The UAV should be cheap, because it is lightly armored but fast. Supcom had some nice scouts as well but PA should have its own solution. Something that works well and is versatile for many different tactics.
Hm, you mentioned it would be redundant because any unit can scout out building and see them on radar. What if only a unit with the scout ability could do this, as in "tag" enemy buildings and units. This may be frustrating but it could open up some cool options.
1) Because it doesn't scale. You only ever need one scout for any scout mission ever. 2) Why doesn't anything else have scout memory? The battle of intel vs. counter intel could be a very important part of PA. But it's not really needed that early in the game. The map has mostly no vision, so why waste effort hiding on a barren map? Any unit can be used for basic scouting(as well as killing things), and aircraft especially have no problem mapping terrain. Counter intel is more useful later in the game, when armies are larger and basic intel covers large parts of the map. It becomes more important to have active hiding, for ambushes/raiding/comm safety and the like.
