Radar, Jamming, Stealth, Cloak in PA

Depends on how realistic you really want to make the effect (keeping in mind the more complex the more processor cycles it takes). Truth is by the same token that bumping decloaks it would be impossible to use a cloaking device on a jungle world... since there is no way the game could simulate dodging trees

I'll take a little bumping and chance my enemy will notice his formation splitting cause of it than completely loose the cloak in the middle of an army. Besides most cloaked units would have opened fire long before bumping range unless you deliberate had them on hold fire for scouting or deliberate infiltration reasons.

Yeah no problem on that, I just thought that units shouldn’t just go around inv units without detecting them, and of course I didn’t think they should be detected by moving around trees just in a very close proximity to enemy, say in a 1 or 2 meters even without them firing, wouldn’t you agree?

Cloaking is no excuse to herp derp through an enemy army.

A cloaked army can avoid ANY engagement they want, and are very difficult to catch if they get away. It is an exceptionally powerful ability to have. You can put a thousand downsides on cloak, and it would still be excellent if the game has no detector, because the burden is on the cloaker to screw things up.

A strong but fragile cloak is good to have. It scales for big armies much better, and allows far more sneaky play than having it all ruined by a single omni.

The near impenetrable point blank cloak was a unique trait of the TA commander. Generic mook cloaks had a detection range roughly equivalent to a peewee's range, or worse. Such a range is more than sufficient to stay out of trouble.

Really nice one bobucles, now all I would like to hear, are some thoughts of someone official, let’s say mister neutrino for example , do they have some concepts worked out already on those subjects, or is it still too early in development?

@bobucles: Depends on what your trying to do by walking through an enemy army... If the terrain applys a path limit (seeing some of the neat canyons on the planet in the last livestream for example) it might be the only way to get to say an enemy power generator or factory. Bumping would just be a side effect of the scale being abstracted rather than realistically trying to sneak through a formation of tanks

For the record though I never said I was against a detector unit. Just that giving the ability to every unit in the enemy force (even if tiny) is just about as bad as the supcom massive omni ranges. I guess to some extent doing it would be similar to every unit having visual range and countering stealth when they see it. But then i generally think of cloaking units as low HP harassment/surgical strike units rather than cloak field invisible army systems, unless its a static structure generating the field. And of course shame on the enemy for not having detectors nearby

Sadly I never played TA. Was a Homeworld, Starcraft, and even C&C brat (at least until EA bought it out) for RTS games until SupCom came out.. SupCom was my first experience with TA style system and i just haven't found time to go backwards in time and play the original. But generally I leave commander abilities out of general discussions, unless its about commanders, since i treat them as a unique hero style unit with different balance standards, at least in my mind

Even if movement doesn't break cloak (bumping into a unit definitely should and it would create very tense moments with your cloaked units) firing with a cloaked unit absolutely should.

Found a cool image of stealth missile destroyer ship, what do you think of stealth ships possibility for PA?


Another impression of USS Zumwalt by umbry101, on Flickr

V.cool image, I like the idea of Stealth for all types of units, forces folks to patrol and get real Intel on the enemy. Ship are especially a good candidate, as they are (should be?) pricier to build.

I hope that some maps are 90% water to get some really impressive water battles, I know, move the sliders, have any planet you want. But, a good mix of shallow and deep water will make for some cool battles.

Also, I want realistic carriers, like so then don't appear to have 1000 planes in them, maybe only 20-30 planes, a carrier would make a nice floating factory, that would be cool, just please, don't give it legs!

Slim

(personal note. Stop with the word 'Cool' already)

start with:
mobile stealth generator
air transport
naval surfboard transport

result:
land, air, sea mobile stealth

emergent gameplay like that is rly good


Slim:

ya i agree real carriers would be nice. only way real carriers happen though is if we get a real airbase system not that refuel mechanic in supcom.

How does a stealth generator even work? I think it would be nice if it was more unit specific like the picture where stealth is part of the design.

in supcom it was a unit like the mobile shield generator but created a field of stealth

Yeah you also had static stealth generators for all races with which you could stealth your base so when enemy would build his radar in near he couldn't track your unit movement inside your base.

I like the idea of stealth being a part of a design, but I must admit I liked those generators, maybe not mobile but static ones, you could imagine them as creating a sort of jamming field in which radar couldn't penetrate so to allow you more options to counter radars if you wanted to.

Edit: mobile units should have stealth by their design, I would add only static stealth gens.

i just dont want to see the factories clogged up with special variations of the same units

zero-k has a similarly flat tech system and they approached factories differently than supcom for that reason.

instead of 20 land factories, you have tank factories, bot factories, hover factories, amphibious factories, etc. and all the unit diversity you would expect in each factory.

there's also a special factory for the miscellaneous support stuff like field engineers, stealth generators or shield generators.

That could also be a viable solution, specialized factories, not a bad idea.

Yeah, I'd love that! Lots and lots of different units, many somewhat the same with special things that set them apart, and there are so many factories that you can't just build them all and be done with it. Would be awesome if it was implemented in Planetary Annihilation!

I actually never liked the idea of omni radar in SupCom.

Well, I did like the fact that there were different grades of intelligence (vision, omni, normal radar), but not the fact, that there were only hard borders in between and that "stealth" always meant that a unit would be completely excluded from one tier of intelligence, making it a overpowered all-or-nothing option.

Similar thing is the distinction between vision and radar. If both technologies are LoS, then there is no need point in differentiating in between them. Modern intelligence should be reference, you don't distinguish over the source of an information, but all informations are rendered into a single model.

The goal should therefor not be to emulate the different sources of information, but the resulting, combined informations.

I would even go as far, as saying that "vision" can be left out completely (as long as both radar AND vision are LoS!) as it covers only tiny areas which could also be handled as short range "radar" with 100% detection rate.


Now for the radar, don't think about omni as an absolute thing. There is not only one, but actually 3 factors which must be considered when determining if a unit is visible. SupCom and TA simplified it to two factors, being intel range and intel class (vision, radar or omni) with exceptions (stealth, cloak), emulating the third factor.
But with todays computing power, this simplification is no longer required. Now all 3 factors can be considered, and these are: Visibility to the unit, distance to the sensor and strength of the sensor whereby the strength and the range of the sensor are kind of the same as the capability of an radar to detect a unit of a certain size over a certain distance can be calculated from the strength and the distance.

It may sound more complex than the original system with the 3 hard borders at first glance, but it also solves many problems.
Lets take a very simple example, did you ever wonder why your tiny scout could be detected at the same range as your T4 unit? And both could hide by moving a single step outside radar range? Thats because they were treated the same, the size of the unit was missing in the equation. With the new system this is no longer a problem as units can be assigned different sizes. If a unit is 10 times smaller, then it is also 10 times harder to detect, being able to sneak in much further WITHOUT the need for artificial abilities like "stealth".

But "stealth" also becomes much easier at the same time, instead of just completely hiding it from one type of intel (as I said, intel is actually a combination of various methods, it's neither "only" radar or "only" aerial image or "only" vision) you can just reduce it's signature, making it behave like a much smaller unit.
Useful side effect: Every unit which has any type of intel (every unit does, even if it's just very weak) acts like omni, if only getting close enough. At the same time, really massive units can't even be hidden when using stealth, they will be able to avoid detection or at least identification at long ranges, but you can't just hide them anymore when getting to close. A smaller unit however might get much closer so you even gain an additional level of tactics as the use of small units is REQUIRED for stealth attacks while the use of large units will give your location away.

Jamming also becomes quite funny, you can create (real!) units which show up at high range, but unlike regular units they only become tracked, but never identified. So they will appear like much larger units, but they do exist as real units and can be controlled like such so the owner has full control over the decoy. And again jamming does no longer need to be handled as an exception (like jamming in SC), but becomes just a powerful and yet simple application of the improved intelligence system.

There is also no need to distinguish between stealth and cloak. A unit with a very strong stealth behaves just like it had cloak in the original version. The only combination which is no longer possible would be a unit which had cloak, but no stealth, but I can't see how this combination could have been useful at all.

I have worked this out even further some time ago: viewtopic.php?p=687594#p687594
This thread also suggests grouping not yet tracked units into cells to encourage more spread formations instead of turtling, but that is independent from the smooth degradation of sensor sensitivity.
Important are only the facts that every unit has individual thresholds when it becomes detected, that radar sensitivity always degrades with range and that every special counter ability can be recreated by just tweaking the parameters.

Nice points, I like some of the ideas you had a lot. I still think cloak could be some kind of ambush tactic which could allow already stealthed units to become cloaked when standing still to avoid some patrols that aren't equipped with sophisticated intelligence equipment or could even be used in crazy ideas like the one I discussed here

Sure, and "anti-stealth" is also an option where units light up like a beacon when using certain abilities. E.g. an artillery firring, you just can't hide that thing. No need to follow the tracer by hand, every intelligence station should be able to do that for you. You see the tracer -> You know where the artillery is.

A "cloaked" unit would only have a visibility which is so ridiculously low that even a scout would have to crash right into it in order to see it. I don't see any problem in modifying the visibility of an unit on the fly upon activation of a certain ability or event.

You would need a total of 3 thresholds per unit:

• Tracking range
• Identification range
• Hiding range

With: Hiding =< Tracking < Identification

Stealth would reduce the first two factors, making it harder to detect the unit in the first place. However the third stays the same, so if the unit is already tracked, it won't be able to hide again.
A more powerful version of stealth would also decrease the third factor, enabling a unit to vanish again.

"Anti-stealth" would increase the first factor, but leave alone the other two. So you know SOMETHING is there, but you can't tell what it is. Anti-stealth could either be triggered by artillery fire or voluntarily by deploying decoys.

A unit leaves a marker behind for a few seconds when hiding (only some type of "aftershadow"), so units which break stealth only for a short period still become visible enough.

hehhehehehe all this would be such a wet dream for me I think If they would implement mechanic like this I would create more money to give them hehehehehehe

Uh, I just noticed that this would also solve the problem with satellites for intelligence...

They act just like any other type of intelligence source, except that they simply provide a constant, but low level of detection for the whole planet (or the hemisphere). That means that they can detect large units and structures, but they will never be able to replace scouts or ground based radar stations for base defense.

Everything is so easy once you get rid of the old, limited system....