i have heard people talking about invisible and radar resistant units before. i wanted to make this a discussion on the pros and cons of both and which should make it in and the possible rules it could follow. personally i don't like the idea of having invisible units in PA, but i do love the idea of radar resistant units. with all the mortars, missiles and units that have huge advantages over invading parties when radars are used something that doesn't show up on the scans would have a huge element of surprise . visually invisible units probably would be countered using radars, but how useful and wildly used they are visually invisible units will be rather useless in most situations.
i know that is what im saying radar resistant would have a better surprise valeu then visually invisible units
I think the safest way to implement an actual invisible (cloaked) unit would be if it's a much higher tier unit that cost a lot to make, this would mean losing it would be a big problem so it might balance the unit out. Radar immunity is always a good thing for certain units, as mentioned the element of surprise is still one of the best tactics of war. If you had no way of removing your enemies radar in a tight situation then an option to try this tactic could be very useful indeed.
this also takes down the effectiveness of catapults and lobbers sense they cant attack what they effectively cant see
And increases the usefulness of scouts. There were a lot of really cool stealth units in supcom, but they all ended up being pretty useless because of how OP the omni radar was. I think as far as detection, it should be visual only, to encourage defensive patrols. But also don't have something like a monkeylord where you'd have no chance of killing it without heavy losses once it's on top of your base. I feel like something fast, mid/low range and mid/high damage low health would be a great stealth unit. It'd be great for taking out high value targets or breaking into a weaker area of a base, but not able to take many hits because of the armor sacrifices made to give it stealth so you wouldn't be able to spam it effectively since once the enemy sees your attack force it would be destroyed quickly.
In Total Annihilation there were radar jamming units that blocked enemy radar for a certain radius around the unit. Really good for sneaking in attacks if the opponent was relying on radar and also good for setting up hidden fire bases close to the enemy. I would love to see something similar in PA
But these units were pretty much broken in SupCom due to the larger scale of the game. Radar resistant units were close to useless when attacking an base which had T3 radar (omni) and on the other hand close to invincible when attacking an enemy without T3 radar. However, often enough their weapon range was still lower than stationary radar's vision range so you couldn't even call it a "surprise" and doing an ambush in open field? Forget about that, unless you were playing maps which only had a single path. Even worse with cloaking and stealth combined (like the Cybran SCU), pointless vs omni, but guaranteed win if used before omni has been established (unless your enemy manually enforces ground attack as your units are so stupid, they don't even bother about the laser beam emitted from thin air...) If you want an element and imperfect information, then choosing an intelligence system with multiple levels of active and passive elements is already the right approach, but having just 2 levels (radar and vision, stealth and cloak) is completely insufficient. Why? Because the is a GIANT gap in between. You can't grade in any useful way, a unit can only belong to one of 3 classes (normal, stealth and cloaked) and you have only 3 grades of intel on a location (vision, radar, none). Moving it from one group to another changes the gameplay mechanics in a fundamental way. This has so an severe impact on the balancing, if you wanted to prevent abuse you would need to make the unit close to useless under normal circumstances. The result? You can't really use stealth as a game play mechanic, it will aways be either broken or imbalanced, based on the situation. But it's not the idea behind "stealth" which is broken, it is perfectly normal to say to certain units should be able to sneak in further while others should be impossible to hide since the are potential game enders. It's the limit of having only one grade of long range intelligence which is broken. Right now, radar is an absolute thing and it has the same effect on every object in range. But it's not part of any equation, it's just a mandatory feature. You have radar coverage? Great. You have not? You loose. And thats just what needs to be changed, in order to turn radar into an intuitive and flexible gameplay feature. First of all, get rid of treating radar coverage as an absolute thing. It isn't and it should never be treated as such. Radar degrades over range, the further an object is away, the harder it gets to detect, this is just natural. You may have a hard border behind which radar can't pick up anything, but detection rate even degrades long BEFORE you hit the border. But not only the range affects the performance of the radar, so does the shape and size of the observed object. Large buildings might be detectable at full radar range, but small units might be only detectable at 1/4 radar range - even WITHOUT "stealth" attribute. A stealth unit just behaves like a smaller unit, just give it a reduction in detection range over units of the same tier. (Btw.: No need to introduce a T2 radar station which just has bigger range, the effective range already increases with the increasing size of T2 units....) Difference to absolute stealth attribute? You can balance it. You CAN now create a "stealth" unit with long weapon range and you can balance it because you can adapt the detection range to match the threat caused by this unit. Even such a thing as "long range stealth artillery" would work, as long as weapon range is just slightly above detection range so that it can be scouted with reasonable effort. PS: This is just the minimal requirement for a working radar / stealth system. It can be tweaked even further to make it even more intuitive / realistic, but this isn't actually required for the basic mechanics to work. It is just important to understand, that long range intelligence may never be an absolute thing.
Everyone should always have intelligence coverage of some sort, no matter what. When I start off a game, I produce 1 scout, 2 engineers and another scout as my first unit. My second factroy is an Air Factory which immediately produces another scout, an engineer and then fighters on a loop. I often dedicated one factory to producing bombers and scouts. I often dedicated one engineer to building a ring of radars around my base as well. As the Inner Sphere would say, Information is Ammunition.
Perhaps it would be useful for a stealthy attack if a unit could detect when it came within range of radar. That would make it more possible to probe an enemy's intel network.
Another difference you have to bear in mind about SupCom is that stationary defenses had a GIGANTIC range advantage. In PA it is actually possible to flank enemies without loosing half of your force before you reach the enemy, and even then stationary had shields and ***-tons of health to boot.
