Discussion about vision. (if at all)

This is not how jamming works IRL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception
A jammer creates so much "noise" that you can't distinguish individual signatures.

Even though a jammer worked like a stealth field in TA this isn't how it would work realistically.

I don't know if there is any equivalent to a "stealth field" in real life but PA will be sci-fi so you could easily justify a device that lowers the signature of nearby units without creating "noise".

You could have a jammer or beacon as you call it that hides nearby units with noise to make them undistinguishable and you could have stealth fields that hides or decreases their signature.
On creates noise. The other one doesn't.

What you are asking for, would require not to change the signatures or the sensor resolution, but the relation of the 3 thresholds to each other. I'm really not sure if that was such a good idea or if it would possibly cause a chaotic behavior. The third threshold, which defines when a ghost becomes tracked, is uncritical, but the first two could lead to unexpected side effects if the quotient is altered in limited areas.

If I may ask, how would this information be shown visually? Are distant units pixelated blobs that become clearer as they approach friendly units?

Okey. Lets say that the jammer decreases nearby units signature and produces alot of noise. That way we don't have to change the relation of the 3 thresholds if I understand it correctly.

"Producing noise" is not a valid action. The "unknown activity" event is calculated from cell size, sensor resolution and signature weight. What you are asking for, is to screw with the formula used to calculate this event.

There is only ONE valid move which creates an similar effect, and that is to add many small beacon (flares) in the area and to apply a stealth field at the same time. This is the only valid way to produce an effect which is close to what you call jamming.

What you described, adding artificial noise while avoiding (possibly false) identification of objects isn't even possible with real technology. On the contrary, if noise gets to high, every target system will actually find many false signatures in that noise, but valid signatures will still show up as such, in addition to the faked ones. Most jamming systems therefor rely on actually blinding the sensor so it can no longer take up any signals at all, but not all sensor technologies are vulnerable to such attacks, e.g. a very narrow bandpass can solve that issue for active technologies like radar or other TOF based technologies. In short: Jamming only works on cheap, low tech implementations of scanners.

You can't expect to jam a full size radar station from several miles except if using a highly focused beam of the correct wavelength, aimed precisely at the dish. If you tried that without a focused beam, you would need ridiculous amounts of power to cause the noise. You can't even jam communications reliably unless the communication relies on a SINGLE frequency you also need to know in first place. Dynamically shifting frequencies with a very narrow bandpass, and every attempt of jamming the signal with anything short of an massive EMP is futile.

Something like that, but they are not pixelated, but simply blurry. Just like you had seen something from the distance and now had been asked, to pin down the PRECISE location where you had seen the object. Thats just not possible, you don't have that information. Instead you get an whole area where it could have been, marked by some type of overlay whereby the borders of the area fade out.

Once the unit becomes a "ghost", it is also listed by a strategic icon on the map and possibly some blurry sensor distortion which can be distinguished from "unknown activity" by having an noticeable texture or color when zooming in (thats just one possibility, details are up to the artists), but you still get no hint at what the unit could be, it's just a generic image which roughly shows the size of the entity.

Once the unit becomes traceable, it is shown in full details. Maybe an animation when the unit forms from the previous distortion. Keep in mind, that you probably still can't "see" the unit in all details, it's just an computer reconstruction based on a database of known blueprints and a matching algorithm which extrapolates the pose and movement of the unit by comparing the sensor data to the expected signature of common poses. You as commander receive only the best approximation the system can give you based on the messy sensor data. (So much for lore.)

Realism is not what we are going to base the game on anyway.

Here are 4 different counter intelligence systems that would work in your system if I understand your idea correctly.
1. Stealth field. Decreases signature of nearby units without producing noise.
2. Beacon. Produces alot of false signatures.
3. Decoy. A unit that have high signature and could be pretend to be a more expensive and larger unit.
4. Jammer. Decreases signature of nearby units and produces alot of small fake signatures.

Gameplay differentiation.
1. In gameplay the stealth field would be the choice if you want to avoid all detection.
2. Beacon. Could be used to make you produce a lot of "noise" for a small cost.
3. Decoys could look like the real units even as they are being tracked. If they are cheap enough players can use them to pretend they have alot of units at one place while the actual units are somewhere else.
4. The jammer could be much more effective at decreasing the signature of nearby units but it comes at the cost of producing alot of smaller false signatures.

4. is only a combination of 1. and 2., it's not an unique mechanic. It's most likely a useless combination in normal play as using a decoy in one place and a stealth field in another location is way more effective. A beacon is best used for a bluff to scare an enemy off.

The point would be that the stealth field would be much more expensive or be unable to hide high signature units.

If you wanted to hide high signature units or big units you would be forced to use jammers.

You can't hide high signature units or large clusters of units, thats the whole point of the system. If you start to play aggressive, your cover will blow up, thats inevitable.

What you are suggesting, would almost be as bad as the shield concept of SupCom as you would be forced to use jamming devices for secondary bases in late game with no other options left and it would also encourage balling up all you units to get the maximum effect out of the jamming device - which is just what the system should prevent.

I don't see why you would be forced to use jamming devices for secondary bases.
Also a jamming device wouldn't hide big units as well as small units for example.
Jamming could decrease signature with 50% while a stealth field decrease signature less for larger units and more for smaller units.

Or maybe you were against stealth fields all the time?

Not at all, but i thought stealth fields should always decrease signature size by a certain percentage, both for large and for small units. However, this percentage may not be to high (more in the range of a 33% decrease at most for mass stealth, more only for individual stealth, maybe i should have specified that earlier) and there is no point in creating false signals at the same time.

Not to mention that "false signals" (not talking about decoys (which i originally entitled as beacons), but creating many small signatures) don't work very well anyway so they should be dropped as an idea, otherwise they would end up the same way as in SupCom where only a fool would fall for the fake army and a skilled player could even locate the original unit by observing the pattern...

The point of the false signals is that you would have a tradeoff between decreasing the signature even more but you make more noise making your activity more visible at long range.

At long distances I don't think you would be able to distinguish between a jammer and a real army. There simply isn't any pattern. At closer ranges you might be able to distinguish low resolution ghosts caused by the false signals generated by the jammer. These might be erratic and it might be fairly obvious that the enemy is using a jammer.
Among those erratic radar ghosts are also the real low signature units which position also jumps about but you don't know if there is an army in there or if the jammer is alone until you actually get higher resolution. Slowly, as you get higher resolution, the erratic radar ghosts stabilize and disappear next to the radar jammer and the ghosts of the real units stabilize and stops moving in an erratic way.

Edit:Although I guess it would be required that the jammer then distorts the actual position of the real unit.
You would also require to have some false signals that have a place and moves about.
I guess that makes it a little bit more complex than your initial idea stated.

You already have some kind of tradeoff, because running the stealth generator consumes energy, and quite a lot of that.

Adding additional signals makes it almost useless, and: Stealth does ONLY protect you from long range detection, it serves no purpose at short ranges since your large units will be ghosts at this range anyway and once they become tracked, they also stay. The purpose of stealth is only to prevent initial detection, but once you are detected, every player will probably send scouts in to investigate.

Thanks to the math behind that concept, a 33% stealth doesn't even mean that you are 33% less likely to be detected, but that an enemy scout needs to get closer (50% stealth means 50% less sensor range) to your base or units in order to pick up any signal at all. It's similar to the concept of omni radar and stealth generators in SupCom (which also forced your scouts to watch out more closely because omni range was far less than normal radar range), but with the huge difference that it still retains the dynamic visibility for groups and huge units. A 33% stealth boost can also help you keeping your base undetected while increasing density of buildings by 50% at the same time.

That was also the theory behind radar jammers in SupCom, and yet they produced an easily distinguishable pattern which would never (or rarely) occur in a real scenario.

Thats the main issue indeed. Making the units jump deliberately seems counterintuitive, especially because that means you would have to make every ghost jump, even if not jammed. You would probably see a lot of jumping buildings and analyzing the structure of a base or large unit formations could become quite a strain for your eyes.

You can't even say that ghosts stabilize the further you get towards tracking range because that range varies for every combination of signature and sensor resolution and you DON'T want to give away the information which unit it is, something you could extrapolate with ease be observing the frequency and amplitude of the jumps in comparison to the sensor coverage at that location. And it goes even further: The server is NOT going to send you shivering ghosts, for the simple reason that it consumes to much bandwidth. And if the server tells your client the actual position, there is no point in trying to hide that information clientside, it would probably the first "feature" to be removed by a user made mod.

Thats an understatement, the simulation of jamming for any type of mobile unit is futile as it is almost impossible to implement properly within such a system. You would have to degrade the quality of the sensor data by an vast amount only to create an indistinguishable jamming method whereby you sacrifice usability and efficiency while you add only a minor, rarely usable feature.

Agreed with all exterminans says above.

In addition, what strategic purpose are we trying to achieve with 'jamming'?

Make the enemy think there are units where there aren't? Covered by using decoys (small units with large signatures.
Make a base harder to target / identify? Covered by a stealth field that reduces signature.

So what role does a jammer play? I don't think it's required here.

Well Jammers allow 1 unit costing 4, to look like 20.

Having to actually build and move decoys would be tedious, and kinda pointless when you might as well have build a bunch of actual combat units or scouts.

Wouldn't say that, a decoy might cost only a fraction of what a real unit of that size would cost, since it's basically just a large, empty hull in bright colors. So imagine you build 5 decoys in your kbot-factory in a few seconds and 5 heavy tanks in your vehicle factory over the course of several minutes, send your decoys in from one side together with an scout to confirm enemy movement, wait until your enemy sends out his troups to intercept and launch an attack from a different vector with your real units. (Numbers in this example are out of scale.)

The 5 decoys are much more likely to behave in a believable way (proper path finding, credible movement speed, spacing between units) than a jamming device consisting of only a single unit with computer generated signals would look like.

It's all about imitating the original unit as close as possible, and real units are just better suited for this task than an half baked, unisized jammer.

Well jammers are much better at providing enough radar targets (Works best for planes) that the real ones become indistinguishable.

Making automatic targeting unreliable.

Confusing players however is near to impossible, and crating decoy units with the simple purpose to do this won't change much and players will just come to expect them and scouting renders them completely inert.

Better to simply use cheap infantry k-bots or scouts who can actually do something should the ruse fail, after all this isn't a game about being conservative with your economy, and building decoy units just takes time from more important things....like building actual units.

Jammers allow players to crate radar decoys for the cost of power, and are completely automated, so really if you want your decoy formations then why not just create jammers that create radar formations that flow in the terrain?

Yes. I think it will be impossible to confuse players any more than trying to understand the system in the first place.

It sounds like I'll need military training to even get started on understanding my display!

i am trying to wrap my head around the whole radar system being proposed. I don't quite understand the use of such a rather complex system.


One aspect of Supcom radar however has always annoyed the HELL out of me: the "detected unit" icon (grey box).

Essentially regardless of what unit it is, it always has that icon. Whether it's a Galactic Colussus or a T1 tank, it's the same icon.

I am not certain to what degree this is similar to the radar idea:

-Enemy units detected on radar have an icon that "guesses" the type of unit. IE, a T1 aircraft has a different icon from a T2 aircraft, which is different from T1 land or T2 land etc etc etc.

-Stealth reduces this signature. So T2 bombers can very well appear as T1 bombers. T1 bombers would not have stealth.

-There is a difference between Ground and Air radar. (if you can even call it radar then). Air radar has a MUCH greater range than ground radar. This is mostly because of the whole unit speed thing.

-If needed, the concept of a Cloak can be introduced as something that removes units entirely from T1 radar. (Shows up reduced on T2)

i have the feeling my thread beeing hijacked :lol: