Shooting Robots in the Dark

There's a lot of things that can be done with intel in PA. Generally, too much vision is bad. it gets rid of the chance to do surprise attacks and be sneaky. Too little can be troubling, but with good unit control it is manageable.

It wasn't a problem in TA because the minimap was nearly useless. In Supcom and beyond, radar gets a HUGE boost from strategic icons, intelligent firing, and long term scouting memory. Getting a T3 radar up was practically a permanent map hack, with only a handful of scouts needed to get huge amounts of intel.

In PA, curved planets can be a huge aspect of intelligence. Due to how a horizon works, taller units can both see further and be seen from further away. Radar can not cover huge tracts of land, simply because it's not that effective beyond line of sight. It gives a real advantage to high ground by granting greater sight for weapons like artillery and missiles.

More interestingly is that it scales, such that huge worlds can give greater vision to help with searching, while small worlds have tiny vision to create a claustrophobic feel.

I think you nailed it, however the question is: will PA have terrain and planet curvature based vision and radar? Because if they go with Supcom based radii vision, that mechanic doesn't work.

Of course it is! It's one of the features of all TA games that stand out for me, as it's a basic implementation of the intelligence gathering game. The fact that stealthed and radar jamming units are available make it all the more interesting. It also adds a target for the enemy to attack. Having your radar taken out is a pretty important loss.

And it certainly doesn't replace scouting units in any way, as visual confirmation has been important in all of the games, one way or another. In fact, it adds a broad range of unit functionality, simply because "dots on the radar" can be so deceptive.

Now I agree that radar range shouldn't be so huge that one radar can handle most of the map, like T3 radar in Supcom. But it should be big enough that you can see an enemy before they can attack (excepting certain artillery units). Otherwise, the player should be encouraged to make radars a part of their expansion process, which again, is how land based radar is used in real life. Using the curvature as a natural method for balancing this out is a potential idea. Using radar LOS, like in Zero K (which is something I mentioned before), is another potential method of limiting radar omniscience. (Now radar location is just as important as building it, and building in open, vulnerable places makes sense.)

There are tons of ways to balance radar while maintaining its traditional functionality and keeping all the depth it adds to the game. I'm just surprised that fans of TA-like games are so quick to cut out such a defining feature.

The way TA did radar is completely different from the way SupCom did it. First of all, generally speaking you can't fire at radar signatures in TA. There was a radar targeting facility, but it was highly expensive and basically ate a fusion to maintain.

In my opinion having serious vision limitations which govern where your firepower is effective is far more interesting than having essentially global radar, which allows all units to fire anywhere within range, regardless.

Having a spotty intel picture creates tension, and makes the combat more dynamic and uncertain. It means players can pay variable amounts of resources to get an intel advantage, which can increase the use of an army so greatly that a stronger army might lose to a weaker one which is better informed and better utilized by a clever tactician.

Furthermore, it means long range units need support to maximize their effectiveness, whereas an extreme range radar tower that just enables them to always use their maximum range untethers units' range from vision entirely, and makes their damage picture extremely absolute. If an enemy is range, it will be attacked. If it is outside of range, it cannot be attacked. Units within range which you can't see does not happen with global radar.

Radar has always been very cheap even at T3, so losing one isn't a problem for more then even a few seconds.

But it doesnt, becuse supcom is about army's and not smaller groups of units.

So the expectation is that your enemy would have a veriaty of units, and so it really doesnt matter on the spesific units they are using but the quantity, as is shown.

while visual scouting is good, it is by far, Far not as important as you say it is.

Just becuse it was used before, doesn't mean that it was a good idea in the first place and that we shouldn't change or keep it.

Radar wasn't that useful in TA?
Go on to TAuniverse and try to say that.

CORE players didn't have an effective raider like the ubiquitous and all-powerful ARM Flash, their Slashers were superior to the Samson, and they gosh darn golly gee-whiz well had better have radar to get those extra free volleys of missiles before they came-a-calling with their EMGS to knock down all your Mexes (Metal extractors).
Guardian creep, anyone? Bertha shelling? Timmy shelling? LoS was just as important, yes, but Morties had quite the ability to be effective without a spotter unit . They were important in the fact you could start shelling and missile shooting before your Goliaths or Flashes or what have you got in range to spot. Radar was NEEDED to tell when bombing raids were incoming aside from the scouting peeper/fink and stacked shadows (ololol line bombing :3), to ascertain the power of the enemy force, and to generally do stuff, it was a valuable informational tool.

TA had quite the unique excuse for their Fog of War: All their anti-detection technology was so advanced that units had to rely on the most basic of basic detection methods, which were apparently irreconcilable with countermeasures (extremely limited visual and radar).

If there is a detection method such as radar, the radar would do well to give a unique overlay outside of visual range, maybe like a green wireframe in the fog of war, pulsing every once in a while and outlining the moving enemy units before they fade slowly, or simply outright reveal the terrain with the excuse of 'by using the detection information we can run it through a few programs and come out with a convenient image for our commander that looks just like our visual overlay'.

Personally the only problem I see with radar is that it's too cheap and easy to replace. Besides that I see no problem.

I personally love radar, and I love using it for everything that I can. But in all the games from TA to FA, its extremely useful but it can be fooled, tricked and jammed which creates a ton of different game-play models. I think forcing a player to physically scout to find ground enemy is forcing one type of game-mode that the player just might not like. If that player is happy with the limitations of Radar and would rather spend the time to get a long distance radar up then clicking on a scout unit for 2 minutes then thats cool. What the non-scouting player does or doesn't know just makes the game more interesting.

I really enjoyed playing TA, with Multiple vulcans defending my base, and they'd just grind out hundreds of rounds full auto endlessly trying to suppress huge enemy advances. Sometimes they'd kill them off a the edge of radar range. Other times they would be overwhelmed with multiple advances. And I would play hell trying to deal with it. Really it was hugely gratifying to have those artillery pieces that cost a mint just pounding on the map for hours in long LAN games. That was fun for me.

Something that worked well in TA and could work here is the terrain, Make it a hybrid approach. Valleys and high mountains obscure the radar slightly. And there is low-radar Visibility units/stealth units, jammers etc. And make the artillery hit the cliff sides and rarely hurt the advancing army in the valleys.

Yeah, I'm going to chalk this one up to you not actually knowing how to play TA well. Multiple Vulcans? For defense? You're telling me you couldn't win the game with just one? Or, you know, with 45,000 metal of anything else? For EACH Vulcan?

It seems to me you enjoyed building Vulcans and such more than anything else. And obviously cheap radar and radar targeting makes that type of nonsense much easier and more effective.

Besides, if you have that kind of bankroll, then TA's situation does in fact reduce to a SupCom radar picture where you have cheap long-range radar and radar targeting capability.

And radar as an intel war is actually extremely boring. There are basically only two things you can do with it- stealth, and create fake blips. Because it's everywhere, you can see everything unless it is stealthed (absent). And fake radar signatures sound cool until you realize the function is actually quite useless. Basically, divergence from a background picture of cheap, available knowledge is boring. Divergence from a background of solid fog of war, on the other hand, has many possibilities.

When you may come down from your mountain. You may realize that not all players want to play on the best edge of the game to just win win win.

There are people here that want to play to have fun.


On the other side if you cripple Radar then thats it for me and PA.
I dont want another 10m LoS ****. If i want that i could also play starcraft.

I completely understand where you are coming from syox, but it is axiomatic for designing a game that you have to make it interesting for players who are trying to win. You are going to have a very hard time creating a consistently interesting gameplay experience if you design the game to be appealing to players who are just messing around.

If TA was designed with this turtle-into-mass-Vulcan style in mind, I guarantee you it would have been incredibly dull. The structure of TA, and every other RTS, is designed with players who are trying to win in mind. If turtle-into-mass-Vulcan is actually effective, then it will happen a LOT, and the game become hours and hours of not much happening. For obvious reasons, if turtle-into-mass-Vulcan were standard play, it would be extremely bad gameplay.

Players doing suboptimal things because they are fun is entirely compatible with the properties of the game intended to create a tense game. Designing the game to incentivize suboptimal "fun" things by making them more prominent gameplay features is going to be a big problem.

Well as you stated before Turtelling with some Vulcans is not a good usage of ressources so a player doing this may likely lose to a player like you, so i dont see the problem.

And I'd join you.
But thankfully it won't happen, as the devs have proven themselves to be smarter than the whole "Hey, this idea could be improved on. Let's do that by removing it!"

Also, see Zero-K's implementation of radar wobble. Yet another potential method of encouraging visual confirmation.

Sounds like a good idea to me, would need play testing but all aspects of a game do.
simply give radar towers different scanning ranges taking into account size, stealth, land sea or air, hidden in trees/next to cliff. all the benefits of radar from SC would still exist, but scouting would become more important, as would setting up a forward radar post, protected by a radar jammer. its a strategy game, enhancing the benefits of scouting is useful. then having air dominance around your base - so that you can see a land attack coming becomes a prudent action (few people use the patrol order - this would give it a purpose). whilst if you remove their air dominance your land army can attack form any direction. - make air poor (but not terrible) at destroying bases, then you need a combined forces approach.

the idea adds possibilities rather than subtracts - the key question will be balancing the ranges appropriately, but thats what beta is for.

Radars are pretty fine the way they are. Even in 20x20 maps they rarely revealed the whole map unless you build them in the center of the map, which is unlikely. You have to use spy planes anyway if you want to know what your enemy is doing. Spy planes are for scouting places where your radar cannot reach. Just play larger maps if you don't want that the radar reveals the whole map, simple as that.

The only bad thing about radar was that you were able to see sluggish and weak land units approaching from far away. Some people have suggested to remove land units from radar's sight but I have a better suggestion. The real problem is that land units were vulnerable against everything. They had no good anti-air and most base defenses and ships out-ranged them. Simply: buff the land units and there is no problem.

To OP, you can always save the replay of the game and watch the battles without fog of war. That's what I do.

In addition to radar wobble (which is great in dimishing the effects of shooting blips on the map) and adding in radar los (which means that a big hill will block out radar scanning the area behind it and you basically need to build your radar someplace high) dealing with most of the potential radar troubles, you could also add in blip-merging. If there are many things close together, instead of seeing each item seperately, you just see a single, very large blip.

That will diminish the effects of blip shooting even further and the player will mostly see that something is coming, but he can't be sure if it's one very large thing or multiple tiny ones, or anything in between.

It still paints a clear picture on enemy troop and base locations and strengths, and provides most of the advantages a radar should give, but without really focussing players on artillery shooting.

It'll also make artillery look far more interesting for the defender since most shells are going to miss, and they'll have to carpet whole areas with shells to get any effect. Which looks really cool, even when it happens to you.

Why deal with detection at home, when you can find the enemy by attacking him? Jamming radar signals should be par for the course. Of course, a jammer works by out screaming every other signal on the field. That pretty much immediately reveals that an area is being jammed.


I wonder if terrain and planetary destruction will play a larger role in detection? Ion storms ruin radar systems. Obscene amounts of obstructing ash and smoke are par for the course both during and after battle. Don't forget that these robots don't even need direct vision when they're communicating with each other. It's no problem to deliberately block vision everywhere. After all, pollution is just another asset for obscuring detection and staying alive.

Hey. That pin ***** vision played a HUGE role TA, because most units had more range than vision. You needed front line units, mid line units, and rear line units to make use of everyone's weapons. Bases had to be sprawled out to make AA weapons effective, and artillery was nearly useless without spotters. It was more intense than you give it credit for.

[Didnt read the WHOLE thread]

Wait, whats the problem here?

If aloot of explosions is a must for the game to be "fun" for you (or "more fun"), then why dont you stop using long range artillery units or send some units to scout for them (just so you see the explosions).

The intelligence war gameplay in supcom was/is awsome and i would be very disappointed if the version in PA is dummied down, simply becuse you guys feel a need to see everything your shooting at, especially when theres nothing preventing you to scout out your targets soo that you see the explosions even if it isent "needed" for the targeting.

I feel like radar was too good at being omnipresent leading to battles where you never actually see your enemys forces.

So I proposed that radar no longer be able to see ground targets in favor of scouting vision like in real life where you cannot use radar to see enemy forces.

I feel like it will add to ground warfair by making it harder to scout enemy positions via the use of overwhelming radar to see anything and almost everything, meaning that players who wan't to use long range artillery will require the use of scouts to find their targets.

... Why not just use stealth units? They kinda allredy fill the role dont they?

They will very likely exist in PA and since theres only one faction everyone will have access to them.

Maybe im just more used to using stealth since im allways playing Cybran in supcom, but it seems like a obvious answer to me without having to (basically) make every land unit stealthed.