Unit Suggestion: Radar Jammer

Uh, what about the cybran T3 gunship? And according to this, a couple other units too (although one is a support ACU).

ah my bad. all the better!

Radar jamming would be great but I hope they don't make it like they did in supcom t3 radar just nullfies stealth

Thumbs up for jammers, scramblers and other stealth options.

Scrambler i think is awesome but jammer (like gap generator or something) im not so sure about...

There is no real problem with such bases, just scout them with fireflies, skitters, etc...
Back in the day my friends and me used to build Big Berthas under the cover of radar jammers closer to the enemy base - it was awesome.

I think a radar scrambler that makes all kinds of fake units is a great idea, as it could make your enemy think something is there when it's not. In order to keep it actually sane to use, it should be a cheap t1 structure that builds fast.

The real problem here is that radar makes the entire information dimension of the game way too cheap and easy to just solve.

Requiring players build a lot of radar jammers just to return us to the default "information is valuable" that would exist with no, or significantly less effective, land radar, wastes resources and thus time.

Having land targeting radar and jammers just makes players pay for land radar and jammers, returning us to the default state without radar. And consuming resources that cancel out slows the game down.

As I have said before, the game is better off without jammers and radar for land units, and just need vision to begin with. Radar is a very useful way to "cheat" the range of anti-air, to reveal the positions of planes and let long-range AA fire at them before your land vision can see them.

I say make radar only work on planes and space units. And design land warfare around the assumption that vision will be scarce, and that players will need to spread out scouts and intentionally get vision in order to fire at range.

*edited*. You say you couldn't tell appart no radar and jamming.

you say it just equates to slowing down the game.

*edited* this is a simulated projectile RTS. *edited* the more you simulate the better. All of this is directly linked to how real it feels, no matter how loosely you think it is.

*edited*

this is a great idea and feature. has successfully been done before and PA has had enough of feature-removing for one day.

Allow me to explain. Radar targeting has become a de facto standard feature since the existence of the radar targeting facility in TA which conferred the ability was (correctly) not a good idea.

What this means is that in SupCom, and now in PA, enemies you can detect on radar, you can shoot at. Another possible approach would be to change this rule, and simply not have radar targeting. But I suspect that's not going to happen.

Although it's easy to theorycraft about how much strategy might arise out of jamming this or that unit where the enemy thinks they have radar detection, in practice this is just fiction. In practice the cardinal and only truly important function of the radar jammer is to defeat enemy radar targeting.


Highly effective radar with long range is an incredible increase in your units' combat effectiveness. For long range units it multiplies their effective range by several times. And that's ignoring the huge but difficult-to-calculate value of determining where the enemy's forces are. Essentially, radar is mandatory, almost regardless of the price, because if your opponent builds it and you don't then you will lose. Therefore both players must build radar.

Radar jamming works in the same way, but by counteracting the enemy's radar targeting capability. Again, if you have radar targeting and the enemy does not, then your effective range is enormously superior and you will win easily. Your artillery works, and theirs doesn't. Therefore both players must build jamming to counteract the enemy's radar.

Which returns us to the default state of neither player having radar targeting. The difference is that both players had to build radar, and also radar jammers. Depending on the design, these could be cheap or expensive, but either way they cancel out. There might be situations where a player makes a mistake and fails to build radar, or fails to make enough energy to operate radar and jammers. But these are not strategically interesting possibilities, they are just unforced errors in mechanics.


You could make the argument that you could make radar cheap and jamming expensive. Such as by giving jamming a very short range, meaning you would need an extremely impractical number of them to jam everywhere. While this does stop the game from returning to a state without any radar (since there won't be jamming everywhere), it does so in an even more pathological way.

I predict artillery wars fought with radar jammers. Anything that leaves the shelter of a jammer is immediately obliterated by a tremendous number of enemy guns from long range, since it appears as a targetable blip at any distance. Obviously you keep your artillery beneath jamming to stop the enemy's artillery from destroying it.

The obvious response to this situation is more jamming (costing resources) to cover more area and allow more forces to move about, or units that the artillery cannot hit. Perhaps aircraft. Which, when it leaves your jamming field may face a similar problem.

The problem is the enormous and binary difference between a unit that can be targeted from any range and a unit that cannot be so targeted.

The best solution to this problem (in my opinion) would be to have radar stealth scouts or planes which don't need to be jammed to be invisible. In theory, these units would let you get vision on enemy forces so you can destroy them even if they are under jamming. Or, better yet, eliminate the jammer and then fire away.

But as I said earlier, this "solution" is just eliminating radar from the equation entirely and going back to regular vision. Even if most of the units in the game are not stealthy or jammers, if the game is almost entirely played with these units because of radar and radar jammers then radar has ceased to matter anyway. Even if both radar and jammers exist in the game.


Long story short, intelligence warfare and mind games are very, very interesting in strategy games. But in order to do these things, the game must have *limited information*. Like not knowing your opponent's hand in poker leads to skilfully misleading your opponent.

Big radar leads to a more chess-like game where all the pieces are known. That's not good since you cannot really deceive your opponent if all the pieces' positions and movements are common knowledge to both of you.

Big jamming creates the possibility to eliminate radar. But if your opponent does the same, then you both are really back to the same situation you would have been if radar didn't exist, but have spent mining time paying for your jamming, and for the radar that the enemy is jamming, and vice versa.

no you're not goddamit!

haven't you read my posts above? https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unit-suggestion-radar-jammer.63075/#post-981355 haven't you ever tried playing FA? this actually resulted in very deep strategical play.

You only say this because the current situation of intel in PA is so ludicrously F---ed-up but, who's to say Uber won't eventually do a pass and Un-f--k it? https://forums.uberent.com/threads/differenciated-radar-blips.49424/

if scouting is only ever used to find a enemy and only in the beginning of the match and beyond that you only ever use orbital radar /w straight-up vision, no wonder jamming won't be interesting.

PA has to repair the situation of intel, be honest with me do you even ever use the unit? the actual scout unit?

I go fighter instead because the build time, cost, speed and intel difference are ALL not significant enough to warrant not taking aa capability with you along as a bonus.

other than that there's no need. what do I need to scout for? it never even stays on the radar anyways : There's No Point

If you build a radar and then jammers, and if the enemy does the same, yes, you have eliminated use of radars. They just cost alot of resources, aswell as radars. So just dont use them, save a lot of resources. But then the enemy could still use that "wothless and wasteful" radar to start spotting you. I believe that the jammers probably should be stationary, with short-medium range. Also expensive. You could spend the eco to make yourself "invisible", but trade it in for units, orbital etc. You could also just dont do anything, just go for a large army. But then you can be spotted on radar and all your moves may be countered in a effective way. You could also balance it, hiding the most important bits of land, such as mexes, artillery and other small remote bases. This adds some good strategy.

No, because radar completely makes the scout unnecessary by gathering the same intel and targeting capability from a safe distance, for less cost, and with less micro.

SupCom and FA had the same problem. They offered a variety of sexy scout units, from spy planes to invisible scout bots. But huge radar just makes them all unnecessary. And omni can't even be jammed. The omni sensor, true to its name, makes you pretty much omniscient.

SupCom and FA are fun games, but they are very poor examples of intel gameplay. Intel is too easy to acquire using structures, rendering actual scouts mostly superfluous.

Scouting should not be something you do once and then stop. Reconnaisance should be a continuous process, and having more vision of the map is a huge strategic advantage which you should also attempt to deny to the enemy. This creates a recon and counter-recon dimension to gameplay, where positioning your units to keep visual on certain geographic areas is key. Both to actually watch them, and also to intercept enemy scouts moving through those areas to stop them reaching other areas.

It is also important to keep in mind that players leak information by the movement of their forces, including recon. If you see the enemy deploying a lot of recon in positions leading to a likely base site, you might guess that there could be a base there. Or vice versa, perhaps by leaving an area completely unprotected from screening units you might better conceal your secret base's location.

If you wanted to test to see whether there is actually a secret base where you suspect, you could obviously send a scout. Perhaps a plane if you are in a hurry, or a spy satellite if you have one. But you could also attempt to trick the enemy into giving it away. Suppose you deliberately reveal that you are moving a force towards that location, and position a recon unit between an enemy army and a path that army would take to defend. If you spot the enemy army moving to defend the hypothetical "secret" base then you just made the enemy tip their hand that they have a secret base there. Unless they are faking being duped, of course.

Radar+jammers only create the possibility of "hiding" a base. You first construct a radar jammer and then build the base around it. But my point is that if there were no radar you could do this anyway without needing the jammer.

Chill man, chill. You're usually pretty composed, keep it that way, eh?

That is wrong. Scouting in Supcom FA is one of the keys to victory, it gives you much better overview of what's going on than radar does.

wrong again.

sigh ..... this could all be avoided by you playing or spectating some setons on FAF.

radar in FA is useless without going scouting to ID the units (that then stay on the map). Stuff like "where is the enemy commander" will forever remain a mystery unless you scout.

not only that but early scouts allow you to very clearly ID what strategy your opponent is going for (even if at that stage the unit ID do not stay on the map because of insufficient radar range) as every strategy has a long build-up and is easily identifiable from the start.

I have played a lot of SupCom and FA, and it's not really a productive argument to have anyway about who has played more. Arguments must stand on their own merit, and you have to describe any features you want to refer to, rather than say something is true because you think it is.


I think perhaps we are using different meanings of "scouting." You seem to be more concerned about specific units, such as the commander. Because radar as implemented in SupCom doesn't tell you which blip is the commander unless you get visual, "scouting" as you are using it means identifying which radar blip corresponds to which unit type, and that information is valuable.

But I am using the word "scouting" or "recon" to mean something quite different. Specifically, actually finding where the enemy's units are (and aren't), and getting targeting information for long-range weapons. Tasks which radar does very easily in SupCom. Although SupCom's radar isn't perfect, since it doesn't tell you what types they are, it is still a huge amount of information, since it tells you where enemy units are and allows you to shoot at them even if you don't know what type they are. Without radar to eliminate this dimension of gameplay you are going to have to use units to do these more fundamental recon tasks instead of radar.

Scouting with units using vision is simply not as significant in games like SupCom as it is in games like vanilla TA, or other games with no radar or much weaker radar. In SupCom, radar does most of the scouting for you; you can fire at targets using radar. And you can identify enemy positions and movements using radar. In SupCom radar is cheap, and radar towers have immense range compared to map sizes. Therefore, radar is extremely powerful in SupCom (especially the Omni) and scouting with units thus is less important.


I should be more specific, as I have been referring to "radar" as a shorthand when to be more specific I am talking about the huge range radar that has become the norm, and only for land units.

Short range radar, such as the UEF land scout, I have absolutely no problem with as a mechanic. But in SupCom, the radar tower is a much better choice than actually using these kinds of units. For example, the scout costs 12 mass, takes factory time, requires micromanagement, and has to get within 45 distance units to detect an enemy (~6,400 square units). By contrast, the T2 radar only costs 180 mass and gives 200 range of radar detection (~126,000 square units). And it won't be destroyed at that distance. Omni is even worse. It has 600 radar range (~1,131,000 square units), for only 2400 mass. Omni's range is so great that it doesn't even make sense to build it on smaller maps since T2 already covers the entire map.


Huge range, targeting-capable land radar leads to undesirable near-perfect-information long-range standoffs, where almost every unit always engages at maximum range. Where both sides know each others' force strengths with a fair degree of precision. Where it's very, very hard to do anything actually deceptive, except ninja an experimental or a lot of gunships or other quite trivial "strategy."

More limited unit vision at shorter ranges makes normal battles between conventional units a lot more interesting, and demands a lot more analysis and critical thinking of players. Many units might have longer attack ranges than they have vision range. In order to use these long-range units, you have to think about ways to get vision of where the enemy is going to be, such as by creating a front line of other units, or loosely deploying scouts. Denying the enemy vision of your forces protects you from long-range fire, so screening a large army with armed recon to stop enemy scouts from getting visual allows you to advance close to enemy long-range weapons without being shelled to oblivion.

And the opportunity for mind games and fancy plays is much greater when players have less information. With a lot of information on enemy numbers and positioning, deathballs are a lot more appealing to overwhelm an enemy force of known size with larger numbers. You can be reasonably sure your army is going to win from superior numbers. And you can be reasonably sure about counterattacks and raiding parties being detected out on the map without needing to commit units to scout for them. You can react to enemies moving towards you as they arise.

But with little information, a deathball of all your forces leaves a lot of fog of war out on the map, and you leave yourself vulnerable to raiding parties you can't see. You might commit your deathball, believing you will crush the enemy's main army, only to discover it was a feint, and their real army is actually attacking your main base as soon as they saw your main army was away. Or, the reverse, tricking the enemy into retreating with a large army by being aggressive with a small force pretending to be bigger than it actually is. The enemy doesn't necessarily know there isn't a giant conga line of tanks behind that attack. Deception, recon as insurance, force movements as leaking information, and intentionally feeding misleading information to the enemy through your deployment and movement are all made possibly by players having less information about the map.

Intel about where enemy forces are, and the ability to shoot at them, are each far more important than just knowing what type their individual units are.

Radar in SupCom is obviously not "useless." In fact it is so powerful, and it is so obvious that you must build it, that failing to build radar is one of the canonical noob mistakes.

so you recognise current intel's state couldn't even be called "intel" and it deserves a major revamp?

Yes, we definitely agree that the current state of PA's intel and recon game is essentially nonexistent, and in need of a complete overhaul.

I think where we disagree is what to do about that problem. You propose radar jammers. I don't think radar jammers will fix the problem. If they're cheap/long-range, then you might as well just remove radar (and removing radar could actually work). And if jammers are expensive/short range, then most of the map would still be radar-revealed, except where players decide they must pay for a jammer to stop radar-targeting; bases and large blobs, probably.

I would rather just nerf the heck out of radar, to the point that it hardly even functions in the same way as these static structures that give you immense range radar. Perhaps by shrinking radar massively and putting it on cheap mobile units. Not long range and on stationary structures.

Jammers make stealth cost resources. If they're expensive then you need to use them to cover enough value in stuff to justify the cost. It shouldn't be big bases and big armies that get stealth; most of the map should be in the fog of war, especially small scouting and raiding groups.

Therefore, lowering the threshold for stealth is better. Such as eliminating long-range radar detecting land units and structures. A single scout in the field would be stealthy by virtue of there not being that many enemies around to see it. Big bases and armies would be harder to hide.


Ideally, make radar only work for detecting air and space units. To find and shoot at land units and structures you should need vision. If that's a no-go, then at least shrink radar ranges immensely and put radar on mobile units. That would be much better than static structures with huge detection ranges which can be countered by jammers.

You could have a MEDIUM range on the jammer, to make it cover moderate large areas, make it as expensive as a T2 radar and make it T2. The jammer-technology feels like T2. And if we would only nerf the radar, make it only spot motion, and not stationary building/units. Small animations as turret/artillery rotation would not be spotted, but they would maybe blink when firing(heat-scan).