Friendly Fire

Hi,

Friendly Fire is a very interesting point imo, and if I recall correctly it wasnt discussed before here.

When I take SupCom FA there was quite often friendly fire, but actually it wasnt a "fixed rule". A new player couldnt tell from a easy point "this unit has friendly fire" and "this unit has no friendly fire". E.g. most artillery units had friendly fire, but the t1 had not. Why? of course it was a gameplay decision.

Also t2 Point defenses wouldnt hit own buildings/units, but would hit teammates' buildings or acus (it happened more than once to me that an allied ACU died in my PD or I died in an allied PD!)

What should this be in PA? Of course asteroid smashing and nukes and such need friendly fire. But what about the Commanders Gun? What about regular piercing bot shots without AoE? What should be the rule?

The problem is also, what if an army of 40 bots fights another army of 40 bots? friendly fire would easily make 50% of the damage xD

Physics engine all the way. If you get hit, you get hit.

This.

No better way to promote flanking, and use of the map.

[PS:] Not that I want it, but I'd settle for own units. Because in PUG team games, you're going to have a **** player who nukes his mates.

No friendly fire at all. Friendly fire opens up a ton of griefing possibilities and does really nothing to improve the game. I don't think anybody would like to lose a base or a game because his ally had a derp moment. Besides, FF limits the value of mobile artillery in army compositions a lot.

PA will be an RTS on a huge scale with massive armies on both sites. FF might work in a small scale RTS but I don't see how it would help PA to be a better game.

+1
BUT the Units need to be intelligent enough to aim careful enough. So they wont shoot at an allied unit just because there is an enemy behind it.

This was discussed before & elsewhere. Friendly fire is good, just make sure units are smart enough not to shoot each other (or allies for that matter).

But FF would mean that somebody can take his Commander, move into the base of an ally and self-destruct, killing that base and probably ending the match. Or you could 'attack ground' in the middle of his army.

I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a good thing.

For once, this is possible in any other RTS I can think of (SC2 allows force-friendly fire, abilities with AOE generally do damage to friendlies. C&C3, C&C Generals and probably every other title from the series has friendly fire when it comes to artillery or super weapons).

I admit this is not the strongest argument, especially since PA is so different from most other RTS games. However, without FF you would have things like "defensive nukes" where you nuke your own base (or that of a teammate) as a defensive action to take out an attacking army without the risk for additional casualties.

Also, in my opinion, intentional team killing is not an argument against FF. If you want to hurt your teammate, there are certainly other ways that are about as effective. Pulling back your own army in a battle, giving intel to the enemy team (or do you think chatting across teams is also a bad thing?) or just quitting the game a few minutes in would most likely have a similar effect, even though not quite as rapidly.


When it comes to artillery: Artillery should be used as a way of softening an army up before it reaches your main army, not as a means to do area damage to an army that is in melee range to your own. I'm aware that PA is not supposed to be a micro-intensive game, but some rudimentary level of tactical finesse should still give you an advantage.

That is the part that you fix with a report option and a permaban to the offender, not by removing friendly fire, which is actually a very interesting part of the game. Also, commanders that detonate but don't harm allies is going to be really weird.

(and probably exploitable if you launch an attack with your allies com and your tanks, since killing the com will kill the enemy army but not yours)

Likewise; being able to deploy nukes in the middle of a firefight that only blow up enemy tanks but not yours will be weird and exploitable.

Friendly fire all the way, for everything.

It gives unit formations and real world tactics profound importance. You can't just send blobs against everything. You can't just bombard where your guys are without thinking of casualties versus benefit.

Anyone determined to grief his team will find a way to do it regardless; disconnecting, building useless crap, going completely idle, etc..

My experience with FF has been dominated by Planetside 2 and I'm sick of it. I can't tell you how often I have been teamkilled by a badly thrown grenade or run over by a tank. :x

I can see how it would be wierd to have one army survive a nuclear explosion while everybody else dies though...

I don't really care as long as your units are treated no differently to your allies units. That is just ridiculously inconsistent.

Friendly fire for everything just doesn't work - send 1 scout into enemy base, watch said base blow itself up. Or, as someone earlier said, FF casualties would be huge in any standard skirmish between two armies.

IMO, TA had a better system than SupCom in this regard - weapons wouldn't explode when they hit a friendly unit, but when they did explode, every units that was in range took damage (and in TA, pretty much every weapon had AOE, even lasers, and the weapon explosing were to scale with the units instead of being tiny). This meant if your unit was right up against an enemy or wreckage, and it fired, it would take damage (but less than the unit it hit, as the damage tappered off towards the edges). The result is you still have to watch out for your own artillery, and can't be too blasé about the way your units rush into a fight, but still only take splash damage as opposed to losing your entire front line when your rear units fire. This should apply to allies too.

There's your problem.

Line of fire checks like what Spring has would fix this.

Either way, don't confuse problems with features.

Definately think that friendly units shooting each other is just poor implementation.

Unless you happen to think that mindless units are a feature. ;p

But that doesn't help with artillery that has firing randomness or any kind of AOE, so the problem is still just as easy to abuse, not to mention it's an unnecessary performance hit. It also makes battles very hard to judge if only a portion of your forces are able to bring their guns to bear at any one time.

intelligent line of fire check, this sounds cool, but this could need a lot of calculations.
imagine your shooting on a moving target. the system calculates where the moving target and the projectile will meet, if the target stays at same speed.
this isnt that hard. but now it is not enough just to simply check, if an allied unit is in this line of fire, but you also have to check if an allied unit will be in any spot of the line of fire at the same time with the projectile. Calculating this for many units and many possible movement speeds might be not so easy.

I'd guess this can be broken down to a simplified version without too much of an accuracy loss. Sure units would sometimes end up with damaging allies, but a bit of inaccuracy is tolarable, imho. This would definitely be a very important thing for balancing, since some kinds of weapon are more prone to friendly fire than others.

Spring's line of fire check isnt even *that* thorough, as to predict *all* instances of friendly fire. It prevents 99% of them, which is enough to not be obnoxious.

I think a lot of you are coming up with oddball scenarioes which almost never happen in a real game.