Shooting Robots in the Dark

I find a common occurrence in these huge scale RTS games is that units often end up engaging enemy units at radar range before you have visual confirmation of feedback on what you are shooting at. From a strategic point of view this is a great and realistic feature. However, it can lead to fighting almost an entire skirmish without seeing any enemy robots blow up if you are using a lot of artillery.

I am not saying that the fog of war mechanic is really broken, as it helps to create a really good strategic RTS game. I just hope that some balancing of ranges or something is done so that you do get to see much of the destruction you caused.

Possible fixes I can think of would be to have spy planes or satellites not be so expensive or if they had large observance range. In past games the rectangular map size was too small to allow surveillance to be too easy, so I felt like they artificially reduced visual contact radius to create room for stealth. Hopefully planetary annihilation is large format enough to not have silly 100 meter visual ranges. It would be nice if you aim the camera horizontally across the valley you can obviously see what is coming for a kilometer and the strategic view reflected that.

How does the community here feel about this?

Could have radar only work on air targets like real life.

This might also help reduce aircraft-dominated endgames. (Discussed for ages in another thread, but I don't think this came up.) Keep aircraft very mobile, but would give land an advantage in some situations and help remove the imbalance that comes from much much lower mobility for ground units.

Ok, so if you wanted to do an artillery strike, you would have to "paint" the target with aircraft visual or radar confirmation first? That sounds kind of like real life although I have no military knowledge.

What is the problem again? If you want to see your enemy blow up, you gotta get in visual range, Arty at max range shouldn't see that far without a unit spotting for it.

Mike

The issue I suppose is that visual radii are a little artificially small in TA and Supcom to help make it possible to play a stealth game on a small map. I just hope that mechanic gets addressed. The core thing is that many of my artillery based games skirmishes turned into shooting dots on a radar screen. It is really a matter of making it easier to enjoy watching destruction without going to an unreasonable effort to see what the results are. In TA style games you end up needing an unreasonable number of spy planes to blanket the map with visual coverage.

Incidentally, I like the recommendation above to trade radar range for visual range. I think that might make the game visually more fun to play while creating room for stealth maneuvers. What do you guys think?

Could steal an idea from Warzone 2100, where indirect fire weapons could only fire if you hooked them up to a Sensor array that was painting the target. That allows you to have both long visual range, long artillery range, and not mess up the game with the combination.

Very cool! Nice find, I didn't know any game had tried that.

My gamer sense wants point-blank-flying-battleships-getting-in-a-punchout, a la Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, but muh immersions wants the missiles-from-twenty-miles in "dogfights".

Again, that's not a problem, when you use long range weapons like that you shouldn't be expecting any visual confirmation unless you give them a camera ability like the UEF Lobo, and even then the limits to that are obvious.

No, switching around visual and radar does not improve the gameplay in any way, for one it removes a lot of the mis-direction/subterfuge type stuff because you can see everything, Anti-radar systems would have to be practically commonplace to get something even similar. If you switch them around you take out a huge chunk of strategy.

Also consider that we have the orbital layer which we don't know much about yet, it's plausible there will be some scouting sats or something to extend your radar and/or vision beyond your base/units.

Mike

I am just saying that radar was kinda overwhelming in SupCom, all but the largest of maps mean that you could cover everything very eaisly without having to need scouts, making turtling very easy.

Just consider the idea of radar not affecting ground targets, could make ground wars a hell of a lot more interesting when you can hide around corners and trees.

Except radar was a horrible replacement for scouting, Radar only tells you 2 things.

-Where a unit is
-What type of unit it is(land, air, naval, structure)

That's it, it falls way short of giving the player complete info.

Radar is a great supplement to scouting, as it can help the player focus his scouting to be more effective(but don't for get that Stealth can be anywhere and radar won't see it[as per SupCom/FA])

The very idea that Radar is the root problem of Turtling is actually insane, anyone who uses solely radar for scouting is someone who doesn't know what they're fighting, only where.

Mike

When it comes to turtling the 'what' doesnt really matter, only the where.

Your enemy is expected to come to you, so you prepare defences in case of attack from any enemy units not just a particular type.

And trying to protect against everything leaves you open to being spam attacked by one unit type. Or maybe they'll just evac the planet and send some KEWs in.

Radar is not the problem.

Mike

I am with igncom on this one. Radar in SupCom was way, way too effective. However the primary reason for this is because in SupCom it unconditionally allowed long-range weapons to fire, not because of the information it provided.

I can see radar being similarly effective and only applying to air units. But having such cheap long-range targeting capability for ground units is extremely boring. And it makes sense to have targeting and detection coincide. So the best solution seems to be to have radar detect flying units, and different mechanics to allow longer-range detection/targeting of ground units, and such a system should be shorter range, and more expensive, than air radar.

Scouting enables you to be more efficient with your choices. Early detection gives you the opportunity to react to maximize efficiency, such as moving exactly the right number of reinforcements to a particular location (not too few, not too many). Having such available detection like omni removes this entire dimension of scouting. And this system mainly works because in smaller games, a positional commitment is typically not that significant in terms of time. Which means the player cares more about what that blip is than the number of blips in a number of different locations. If it will take substantial time for the enemy to reinforce a group, or for you to send forces to engage that group then the division/distribution of forces, the how many and where, is more important than any individual unit's identity.

From the largest strategic scale, you don't care so much about what each individual signature is. What you should be most concerned with is how much is deployed where, and only secondarily interested in exactly what those signatures are.

But it is boring to use.

The ability to automaticly know the movements of my enemys without having to ever bother to leave my base is really dull and removes any point to having to scout for my enemy, I know where they are, even if I don't know the type.

Radar seeing ground targets is really boring, and really what would be lost from changing this? Scouting efficentcy? You would just need more scouts, or even then as it is for ground targets you would need to build more defences or ground forces of your own.

I am really curious to hear what Mavor's take on this is; from the guy whom the ultimate super artillery cannon "The Mavor" is named. "The Mavor" was specifically designed to kill every radar blip on the map.

By the way, I say this as a huge fan, practically all my skirmishes used to end with turtleing against cheating AI and building "The Mavor" beat them back.

Yeah, you should at least need a spy plane to spot for you, but the fact you can do it with a radar is just boring!

None of this was a problem in TA, because your units couldn't engage enemies they they couldn't see, unless you directly targeted them. (Although there was a building to help, but it was expensive and nobody built it in multiplayer.)

And yet, when Supcom came out and units intelligently shot at enemies on the radar, it made complete sense. Many of the Spring games follow this trend too. I've always seen it as an improvement and never an issue.

Knight also makes the very good point that knowing where an enemy unit is only half of the intel. Knowing what they are is even more important. This is especially true in a game with wider unit variety than Supcom, such as in TA and ZK. In those games you never want to engage an enemy until you know exactly what their units are. (And in ZK, you get punished severely for not knowing.)

Besides, in modern real life conflicts, more often than not the opposing sides have a very good idea where their opponents are, and more often than not they know exactly what their opponents have.

Intelligence should be a precious commodity in a strategy game, but it should also be used.

Considering the scale of the game, not knowing what the enemy is using isn't really a problem becuse losing a few hundered units is no problem.

But that is still beside the point, so I ask you:

Is using the radar to see ground targets fun to you, over using actual scout units?

I don't feel it's nessesary to have ground targets appear on radar becuse that kinda undoes the point of having spotters when you can just see the moving of your enemy.

Not knowing the type really isn't a problem unless it's a experimental, and spotting them isn't hard due to their travel speed and the way other ground targets wrap sround them.