Sometimes in SupCom FA you find yourself in a position where you are being attacked but do not know what is attacking. Sure, you may have a general idea but unless you have memorized projectile animations, weapon ranges AND got a good look at the projectile and where it came from you won't have a solid idea of what's going on. In other RTS there is feature where you can briefly see a ghost of an attacking unit outside of LOS. When combined with an under-attack notification this allows players to quickly make informed decisions. "Oh that's T2 Artillery attacking me, I better make shields." This isn't giving players additional information though, it just summarizes information we already get based on what projectiles look like and unit weapon ranges. There are some exceptions to this of course, like missiles, nukes and anything else that corrects trajectory. I've noticed this is more a problem in SupCom though because you're usually zoomed out and need to zoom in to see projectiles. Robots should be able to handle ballisics and recognize different ammunition, modern militaries certainly do.
FA's system is completely obvious, it's either a little yellow dot or a big yellow dot, and it's either slow or fast or maybe somewhere in between. Completely obvious. Joking aside, this is a good idea. Don't know the best way to implement it but the more information can be made available the better.
I've never realized that this can be seen as a problem in FA. There are not that many types of ranged units in FA that need to be learned, most units see each other while shooting. The few types of ranged units that matter in the game can be told apart even with the shooting symbols only, even from the maxed out zoom.
Given that we're expecting less unit types in PA than FA, I'd wager that it'll be easier for the player to learn what's shooting. Now, telling the position of units; I consider that to be a skill the player should develop. And before you all get your panties tied in knots; no, it's not bloody micro. You're not doing any clicking to estimate where things are, so pipe down.
I don't disagree. Deducing what type of unit is firing and where it is located based on projectile type, fire direction and weapon ranges is a skill. I'm just not sure it's a fun or necessary skill. This is the system in StarCraft II: Protoss perspective Terran perspective (brief ghost-unit after fire) The ghost unit quickly appears and disappears, it wouldn't be targetable unless you have radar.
Figuring out the direction is easy, even for a newby, and at that lower level, it's all you really need. Knowing exactly what is attacking is something that is only really needed at higher levels and is something that can be learned naturally just by playing and being observant. Mike
Brainstorming a bit. I use sound a lot in Spring games both in order to determine where I am being attacked and from what I'm being attacked. Since many sounds are played globally I can know even before I have seen that the enemy has a certain type of unit and from what direction they are attacking me. Well maybe not micro per se. What could the correct term be? I compare it to cloaking in Starcraft. If you have your screen on the location of the cloaked unit when it moves you can see the ground morphing as the cloaked unit walks past. If you put too many "attention-heavy" spotting tasks into the game the player might lose the overall picture because he is zooming in close to spot what enemies are firing at his units when they are out of LoS. Anyway. With skill, such an assessment doesn't take long and I guess they aren't that frequent. On the other hand, the annoyance for a new player when he doesn't know what is attacking him might be more important though. You could have intel systems where radars would provide an ability to determine projectile trajectories out of Line of Sight which would allow you to perform counterfire on enemy artillery positions for example. A raytracing system with different multipliers could simply raise the visibility when units fire their weapons, making them easier to detect. Sniper units, units that are made to fire and stay undetected should in my opinion be hard to spot so that that they should be hard to detect even if you zoom in and look for their projectiles. Snipers in Zero-K are like the opposite of that though. They have one of the loudest firing sounds, have a very visible projectile and a very distinct hit explosion. Once the snipers start you can usually know where they are even before you zoom in on that location. Of course the snipers are cloaked so tracking them down, getting close and detecting them is kinda hard if the Snipers got support. However if you got a few napalm bombers you might be able to bomb it by watching carefully to determine the snipers location when it fires. Projectiles could actually have the same visibility system as units. I remember some dev say or post about treating projectiles the same way as units. So some units could have more visible/loud projectiles than themselves. They could be snipers that give away their position or artillery for example and the risk of counterfire could be high if you don't reposition them after they have fired. Some other units could have very low visibility and very silent projectiles which would make their position really hard to pin down if there is other fighting going on.
Right, I meant figuring out exact location based on knowledge of unit weapon ranges and what direction it came from. For example, estimating where T3 mobile artillery is in FA.
PA probably has this, but a small icon telling you there's a battle going on would be useful, you could click it and jump to that location if you wanted to oversee it or just quickly jump to where you just got ambushed/attacked. It would be handy what with multiple planets and all.
How do you do that in FA? In Spring I usually time the sound of fire to when the projectile enters LoS to determine the distance to the weapon and watch the trajectory to estimate the position of the weapon. I don't think you can hear artillery fire in FA when they are out of LoS. I guess you can watch the trajectory from different angles to determine the parabola. A 3D screen would also be useful to determine a parabolic trajectory but I haven't tried it in a strategy game. :/
Basically yeah, from terrain, direction of fire, and type of fire you can sort of deduce from where and what is firing at you. Assuming you realize you're being fired on, zoom in and are familiar with projectiles/ranges. I usually play with sounds off/low so I can't speak to that in FA.
