Radar, Jamming, Stealth, Cloak in PA

If you paid any attention to that conversation Mike was in fact wrong. FAF is a mod, 3603 was pretty much an unofficial release only available on steam. The 3500 damage was present from patch 1 of vanilla to FA 3599, that is the vast majority of time that supcom has existed and certainly anything that could be described with the tense "was".
Death weapons do in fact, not even have projectiles. You'll notice a a projectile is not defined in the blueprint, not in 3599, not in vanilla and not in 3603.

FAF is, daily reminder, a mod.

You post dumb thing after dumb thing and tell me that my antics are getting stale?
You obstruct rational discourse at every turn.

Only Available on Steam Hmm?

Do your homework bmb.

The final steam version is in fact different from and incompatible with the beta. Which is and was just that, a beta.

What are you guys talking about?

nanolathe and bmb please dont go off topic ,
tnx for the very good post exavier724, still am a very big fan of your mod and hope you will contribute to the PA in same way you did in FA.

Totaly agree, but was made this way to be as simple and resource low in my opinon, but still worked, especialy if you had few of units with jammers.

Hehe the whole Blackops team is here so I don't think I need to say more

Shrug, I would have to disagree... But to be honest some of the code in Supcom was just weirdly written to begin with lol. Still I'll take the system being there, and thus moddable, than not being included at all I guess.

Besides it would be silly not to have some concealment tech considering there will be no shields. Could you imagine how much a pain it would be to set up a forward base if your opponent knew immediately when your engineers landed on his planet? Not that I am not up for a pure slug match but I would very much miss the "Strategy" in RTS

Radar jamming is absolutely needed and Omni should either not exist at all or have seriously limited range. Cloaking worked fine in TA and something like that should be fine for this as well, especially since the energy cost was prohibitive.

My 2 cents on this subject

For good strategic decisions, information is the most important aspect of warfare, so means to disguise information and create false information are essential to interesting strategic games.

I like the idea of jamming radar to either remove radar signatures, or to add false signatures, forcing the enemy to come scout things out with planes and bots.

I like the idea of spy satellites that can view vast areas, but it would be nice if these were impacted by clouds, so that bots were still essential in the Intel gathering. Some planets might be in 100% cloud, preventing use of satellites completely.

Radar would ideally be good at short range but fuzzy the further away you are, I like the idea that putting on a hill, gives you more range, over the horizon - as it were, but not so much that it went through the planet. This also makes then harder to defend from bombers.

Metal planets should interfere with radar, making it virtually useless, forcing high resource planets to have epic out in the open combat, instead artillery fests, because now you can afford 10 big berthas.

I don't like Omni, it just removes a whole aspect of the game, much better to force patrol routes to keep your Intel fresh.

Instead of cloak - something I am not keen on wither, you could have units that look like terrain, boulder Bot perhaps, you can park it under the enemies nose. Until it is harvested as a resource!

Something else to ponder is day/night impact on vision, these are robots with infrared but still, perhaps night time could reduce vision, again, making night time strategic for attacks. Perhaps you have bots that don't generate heat, to hide from infrared, so, it is just down to normal vision.

Ok, that was more like 4 cents.

Slim

One thing i wish someone would answer... Why so much hate for Cloaking systems? I realize that several games recently have botched their version of the system in several ways but I have yet to see a nice constructive reason for why cloaking is actually a bad idea?

Considering this game is literally still being built from the ground up its sorta a good time to figure out why people are against it so that maybe the idea behind it can be improved if its included in a new game.

I mean seriously how is "Radar/Stealth vs Vision" any different than "Vision/Cloak vs Radar" assuming you leave the argument of an Omni out of the argument. We know everyone is opposed to a catchall revealer. But what is truly wrong with a cloak as a counter intel option?

EDIT: And please don't just point out that Stealth+Cloak combos win... We know this already but it seems all the hate is directed soley at the cloaking side of the field.

It should probably be a special ability for special purpose units rather than a field that you can overlap with other fields to get perfect invisibility. Stealth fighters ala cybran or arm would be one example. Or cloaking raid bots or something like that.

I dunno.

Interestingly enough, Omni was well balanced in supcom on 20x20 and 40x40 supcom maps even though it's dumb on anything smaller.

How is intel going to be handled on larger and smaller maps?

When you have maps that get twice or four times as large as each other, ranges become more difficult to balance.

With LOS the smaller the planet the smaller the vision radius.

it'd be interesting if radar tower range was a matter of the curvature of the planet (like that image in the OP).

i expect that satellite intel might take precedence over tower based radar though

The Cybran ACU's cloak is mostly at fault. On top of being bugged to never fail, it looked absolutely stupid when it shot its mazer. A laser pops out of mid air and no one can figure out that they should shoot where the laser is coming from. Da fuq.

Also, if you didn't have omni up by the time a cloaked unit went rampaging through your base, you instantly lost.

cloak should only work for units not moving or firing, obviously you'll notice tracks/footprints appearing in front of you (or jet propulsion in the air) when a cloaked unit moves even if its cloak isn't actually disabling - and obviously if something fires out of thin air you'll realize that its coming from an enemy cloaked unit

i think most players would be okay with that implementation

What's wrong with a moving cloak? It's all sneaky like.

The TA system basically worked as reverse vision. Anything that got within cloak range could reveal the unit. In addition:
- Anything that did splash damage
- Any shortage of energy
- Anything the unit did
could also reveal the unit. It was incredibly fragile and difficult to use on the attack.

There is a small issue of trying to hunt the map for cloaked units, but PA can solve this with super weapons. A nuke's flash or an asteroid's impact can create far reaching effects that pull cloaked units from hiding. It also creates fewer places to hide. Tee hee.

Cloaked trouble can also be addressed with a local energy economy- units can't cloak without having a visible base within nuke distance. This has a lot of other repercussions too, but it's one neat side effect.

Really nice post slime, I too like the Idea of the spy satellites, and would like them to be limited by clouds (if there will be any in game, which I hope there will because it would be supercool) and terrain, also if they will fulfil that purpose I would really like to see some sort of anti-spy mechanic, For example I could imagine units that escort small armies and create a sphere projection above them that visually camouflages them but they are still visible to anyone that is below that sphere/shield so it could only serve as an anti-satellite defence or high altitude aircraft maybe.

Totally agree don’t know why so much hate, if it’s made in way where units consume a lot of power for moving, and break it as soon as they fire or do anything that makes them interact with surrounding, or come in a certain rage to some unit. I don’t see a big problem with that, it could also be a sort of a mechanic vs. all seeing satellites for example.

I also noticed none of you liked omni in Supcomm, but I kind of didn’t dislike it too much because I loved to play big maps and there it served a purpose. Personally I think if you make units stealthy that they shouldn’t pop right in your visual range from nowhere, in that way radars would kind of be useless. I would like them to be a strategic asset, a target that is a priority before you execute your stealth attack. I would like radar to have an ability when you get close to it, signals get clearer and you even start slowly uncovering faint signals of stealth units as they get closer as someone already proposed. That range could be whatever you like, but I think radars shouldn’t be blind totally to stealth, they should still be a strategic asset that takes resources (energy) to maintain, but should also give you at least some small radius of early warning, it should force you to build a few of radar stations around a larger base to cover more approaches, and attacking player should be forced to try and disable radar before proceeding with main attack. But I agree a range (omni) that uncovers all is kinda dull, I would like radar to be influenced by terrain. What are your thoughts about all that?

I think no one liked omni because the larger maps where uncommon. I generally couldn't push my computer higher than 20x20 maps simply because of the processor bottleneck the AIs caused on anything larger. And most of the players I played with didn't have machines for player only games on the large maps. This made the range on the omni coverage just seem ridiculous. Also I think it was the fact that omni was a do everything... sonar, radar, anti-stealth, anti-cloak, anti-jamming all rolled into one. And I don't mean the tower it was on, I mean the way they had omni hard coded.

My personal preference would have had each counter system separate (even if some units or towers had multiple abilities with different detection ranges) so there is chance the player will forget to build one of them. That and it would be easier to tweak the balances between them.

As to cloak I am not sure I like the forced decloak when you get too close to any unit. If it was a dedicated counter cloak system (such as an energy pulse like radar disrupting the cloak fields) I could live with it but being applied regardless of the unit your near cuts the hit and run tactics (which is what the cloaks are idealised as) down alot.

I like the decloak when fire mainly because it gives you the "surprise" advantage before they can shoot back and if your target dies you may even escape to do it again once the cloak reactivates.

I would say I am flat against the "general movement" causes decloak... Whats the point of a cloak if the enemy caught a quick glimpse (considering my own strat zoom habits of jumping everywhere) deciding to just start randomly force targeting the area with artillery... You either reveal yourself so the standby bomber/fast bot attack team can single you out, or you die by artillary. There is no retreat option at that point

I could live with an increased energy cost during movement since it still allows me to make use of the tactics, I just have to put more planning into my energy economy to do so though at best it just an additional strain.

But don't you think it would be a bit dumb if your unit practicaly chrashed into an invisible unit just to go around it and not notice it, I was thinking more about that kind of proximity detection. So if you forget about your cloaked force and it runs into an enemy patrol it doesn't get unpunished

In supreme commander, i felt the stealth was extremely weak, as the omni would see right through it at a ridiculous range. i think that omni radar should have very limited range to make proxies and stealth units more powerful. proxies especially. For example, in the video, how the hell does the guy make a proxy ramming base if his opponent has omni that sees everything on those nearby asteroids??