I've seen many suggestions for fake units or radar spoofers in the unit ideas thread. I think that most of the time such units are just annoyances for players because they can see through poor disguises but they have trouble communicating that to their units. This amounts to a mechanic which just causes players to fight against the unit AI. If fake units have less effective health than their real counterparts then players will spot a fake battle group as soon as they fire. But their units will not and in some situations will fire at the fake group even though the player knows it is wrong. The same is true of fake units which either cannot fire or deal no damage. Fake radar dots are particularly bad. Unless the dots are implemented particularly well it will look unnatural to a player and they will have a fairly good hunch that the units are fake. The ruse is clear as soon as the dots are scouted or fail to die under appropriate artillery fire. The dots can still sit at range and steal shots possibly wasting energy or leaving somewhere else open to attack by real units. Fake commanders can work because they do their job without firing or taking damage. Likewise fake energy structures can work.
I think instead of fake radar dots, straight-up fake units should be used. They offer more strategic flexibility, allowing you to actually bait and switch.
My Favorite Method for doing Radar Jamming deals less with the idea that you're tricking someone and more o that you're tempting him. For my system Jammers have a Radius and anything within that radius is hidden, either behind an Overlap(Static/White noise) or a solid mass of radar blips that radar can't see past. I will admit that this is functionally quite similar to Stealth but instead of the enemy being unaware with Jamming they know there is Jamming and maybe something else. It's use isn't as straight forward as Stealth but maybe with tweaking it cam make for a nice complement mechanic. Mike
if there us going to be fake buidling stuff the only thing i would probably end up using it for is making fake nuclear launch pad to freak out neighbors into wasting time rushing out anti nukes.
You can already create fake buildings on radar, just start a bunch of buildings but don't bother finishing them. Hopefully the enemy will think they're building and send a few units that way, or after a bit of time they may even think they're complete and be afraid to attack that spot.
i'm fully confident the staff at uber can take this as a challenge also i agree that fake structures could be great, especially fake anti-nukes are interesting. building entire fake bases could be funny
