Radar, Jamming, Stealth, Cloak in PA

Hi all, I’ve tried to search this forum for similar topic, but didn’t find results so i decided to make a new one, don’t crucify me if there is a topic already
This topic is meant to be a suggestion on given topics, and a starter for a discussion about radar, radar jamming, stealth and possibly cloaking. Unfortunately I didn’t play TA so I’m not sure how those mechanics worked there so any constructive reply on that matter is very welcome. Please don’t just write “Don’t want stealth” without any constructive arguments why you think that should be that way, there is a poll for that if you don’t want to go into discussion.

1. Radar

I am not sure how developers envisioned function of radar in this game (judging by those unit mock-ups there will be radar) and how will it function in correlation with satellites if all of this will make to the final game. Potential problem I am seeing here is spherical maps that are a core of gameplay in this game. So if you make radar range stick to the planets surface you can have a total coverage on a small planet, but if you make it realistic so that radar shoots a straight beams from its origin you could have it totally useless on those small planets.
My suggestion would be to have something in between those to “solutions”. So that a radar beam sticks to the surface in a fixed range, it could be something like Omni range in supreme commander where you could detect all (stealth and cloak), and beyond that range that a signal starts to slowly rise from surface in a straight line, it could still be viable for detecting aircraft but not land units that stay below that signal.
I made little illustration of my idea below.

I would also like radar to use that new interesting terrain. IMHO it could open a lot of interesting opportunities if max radar range rays couldn’t pass through mountains and cliffs. It would force you to try to place radar on elevated spots like in real world to increase coverage, and player could exploit heavy mountainous area to make a sneak attack on an enemy, or just a single mountain to get closer to enemies base. Same thing could be used by satellites if they will be used for radar purposes.



2. Radar jamming

I must say I kind of liked radar jamming the way it was in FA/Suppcomm. You would get a false reading of a much larger force from just one source, and you could use a few units with jammer to fake an large invasion from one side to make your enemy react on it while you prepare a main attack from other side, it was a cool feature for me and I liked making air strikes that way when I could lure my prays swarm of ASF’s so I could send my bombers from other side . I would personally like to see it again in PA, what are your thoughts, would you add or change something?

3. Stealth

Future warfare without radar stealth! I can’t really imagine it, but that might just be me. Same as radar jamming I also liked it a lot in Supcomm. It opened a lot of abilities and options. For example i liked building secret “listening posts” as Cybran when I would transport an engineer with mobile stealth field unit behind enemy line, on a remote location just to build stealth field generator and radar of my own so I could see what’s going on in my enemies base if he was lazy enough to build a few of those stealth gens in his base. There were countless ways you could use these units for a strategic strikes.

I understand that this approach is not possible in that way because we have one race of super bots In PA, and they have evolved to be as effective as possible, but it could be possible to add a few special units that use stealth for precision strikes, or my other idea was to give even more units capability of stealth in a way that you could choose to buy a more expensive version of a same unit in your factory that has a stealth generator and obviously uses energy to maintain active stealth. Price could be adjusted to make these units not cost effective for spamming, but you could invest a bit more for a stealth strike force for a specific strategic move. That way everybody could have the same ability of stealth, not like in FA mostly just one race, and players could choose if they want to use it or not, and everybody would still maintain static stealth field generators to hide their movement in base.

4. Cloak

Cloaking was nice, but a very rare feature in Supcomm because only few units had it and was only active while they were immobile. Mostly land scouts if I remember. I liked it that way and you could hide your little spies in some funny locations to scout for you and enemy couldn’t notice them if they remained stationary and out of omni range. Guys from Blackops mod experimented with clocking a bit more and they added a significant number of units that could generate cloak, and it was a lot of fun, but maybe a bit too powerful, you could stealth and cloak an entire forward position and enemy would have to fly his spy plane right above your units to detect them with its omni radar.
I think cloak could be a viable option in PA, but I would make so that only stationary units can maintain cloak, and that it uses a large (significant) amount of energy to maintain. That way players would have to consider a lot before using it restlessly, but could still be there as an option for someone who wants strategic positioning of a valuable unit for example. Clock could be used a bit more if satellites will be used as spy tools as a sort of counter.


I would like to hear thoughts of developers and other fans on this matter. Personally I would be disappointed if they would leave these cool features out of this very promising game. Counter intelligence rules . Looking forward to your suggestions and thoughts and hope this wasn’t too boring for you.

Omni should not the the map spanning unbreakable intel that it is in supcom. It should be a localized defense against cloaking.

Or... cloaking shouldn't be the magic invisibility cloak that it was in Supcom. The TA cloak was expensive, restrictive, and very fragile. Anything that went wrong could reveal a unit instantly.

You no longer need omni as a cloak breaker, because everything in the game can do the job.

I just hope there will be nothing like anti-Jamming and other anti-anti stuff in PA...

Standard vision already counters radar stealth/jamming devices, so omni radar doesn't help there. Any level of scouting can take care of sneaky action.

The only real value of omni was to deal with perma cloak, a feature unique to Supcom. Use the TA cloak, and there's no reason to have omni at all. You just have radar, vision, and units that haven't yet screwed up their cloak. The latter is nice because it can be tweaked to be as strong or as weak as any individual unit type needs. You get all the benefits of a complex counter-intel system, without having to make a complex system.

My opinions on this stuff:

While I am no intelligence specialist, and have no idea how radar works, I'm assuming it is either cyclical, or pulse-based. I'm also assuming long-range radar has a slower sweep/ping rate than short range radar, and is also less accurate. It'd be really cool if this was reflected in PA; radar blips wobbling around a little to indicate inaccuracies in radar, or visible radar pings or blips that reveal units on a periodic basis. This would also allow stressless simulation of LoS radar.

Omni should not be a hard counter to any and all stealth operations. It should shield your territory from ambushes and stealth strikes, and that's it.

Cloak should be a cheap-to-build, energy-intensive, and fragile thing. Damage and firing weapon systems would break a cloak fir a few seconds at the least. There should also be ambush units that cloak while stationary.

There should be dedicated intelligence war units, like the Deceiver from the Cybran Army.

Omni was terrible in SupCom. At a stroke it completely destroyed the entire intelligence game by giving every player total knowledge for very little cost.

In my opinion it would be better to simply have visual contact function as effective omni by not having units able to defeat short-range eyeball type sensors. Sensors reaching beyond visual range might be counterable, such as radar countered by radar stealth. Certain units might be permanently radar stealthed, no manual toggle required like TA cloaking.

Solid intel should be extremely difficult to come by. And it makes sense for all units to give a small amount of highly reliable intel about their immediate surroundings. Eliminating invisibility entirely simply makes the short vision range perfectly reliable. And instead of using cloaking to defeat vision, units use stealth to defeat longer-range sensors.

As long as units can't have both you don't really need omni because vision defeats stealth and radar defeats cloak.

From my side, i really am interested on how radar visualisation/results will be implemented.

There is no minimap to represent range, no minimap to put point on it.
So i suppose the indication will be placed directly on the terrain.
I'm really waiting forward to see how this will be done !

More on topic, i favor the use of radar and jammers, but don't really see the point of cloacking if it is implemented like in SupComm (or even TA)(cloak was available only to very few units, thus not usable on large scale. The Uber Team as stated that they would like to avoid micro as much as possible, so the two seems not very compatible).

However, if it is usable on many unit, why not ?

But i fear that we will fall in a "rock / paper / scisors" meta with that :
- cloacked units must be countered by radar coverage
- jamming must be countered by visual
- visual must be countered by cloacking

(now, put a jamming cloackable unit, and welcome in Hell :twisted: )

man... rock paper scissors balance is not a bad thing - there's a difference between something being RPS like the SupCom T1Tank>T1Artillery>T1PD>T1Tank balance and something being totally contrived like the Feedback ability in StarCraft II when used against Thors. The former occurs through natural characteristics while the latter is a function of interaction specific damage. And it's not like contrived mechanics are always bad either, in SupCom the commander explosion did 50000 damage to units, 2500 to other commanders and 500 to buildings. That's interaction specific and yes it's contrived and yes it also made for superior gameplay.

500 to buildings

indeed, Overcharge also functions similarly being gimped vs buildings and other commanders

Code:

{
            AboveWaterTargetsOnly = true,
            CollideFriendly = false,
            Damage = 0,
            DamageFriendly = true,
            DamageRadius = 0,

     ****DamageType = 'Normal',****
     ****DisplayName = 'Death Nuke',****

            FireOnDeath = true,
            FiringTolerance = 2,
            Label = 'DeathWeapon',
            MaxRadius = 1,
            MuzzleSalvoDelay = 0,
            MuzzleSalvoSize = 1,
            MuzzleVelocity = 0,

     ****NukeInnerRingDamage = 3500,****

            NukeInnerRingRadius = 30,
            NukeInnerRingTicks = 24,
            NukeInnerRingTotalTime = 0,
            NukeOuterRingDamage = 500,
            NukeOuterRingRadius = 40,
            NukeOuterRingTicks = 20,
            NukeOuterRingTotalTime = 0,
            ProjectileId = '/effects/Entities/UEFNukeEffectController01/UEFNukeEffectController01_proj.bp',
            RackBones = {
                {
                    MuzzleBones = {
                        0,
                    },
                    RackBone = 0,
                },
            },
            RackRecoilDistance = 0,
            RateOfFire = 1,
            TargetCheckInterval = 9999999,
            TargetRestrictDisallow = 'UNTARGETABLE',
            Turreted = false,
            WeaponCategory = 'Death',
        },

A cloak without stealth is completely useless. A single radar detector will obliterate any advantage of cloaked units, and is available literally seconds into the game. It is a system that does not scale past a single detector, which is awful for a game using thousands of units.

Radar targeting was terrible in TA, so Comms could not be hit by radar weapons in any reasonable capacity. The TA cloak effectively rendered the Comm perfectly invisible, as long as it had power and didn't do anything stupid. Weaker units had much harsher restrictions like a large detection ring and high energy requirements, making their cloak systems much more limited.

The best part is that TA cloak scales extremely well, because the downsides are an integrated weakness of the cloak system, and not something the enemy has to counter. His ability to catch cloaked units depends mostly on the quality of his patrols. It's a perfectly cromulent system that allows a powerful but fragile method to hide your units.

More Intell, more Strat.

bmb, please stop spreading your falsehoods. First, as Mike correctly told you in the previous thread you were so eager and persistently tireless in your pursuit to derail, you are looking at the wrong code, you should be looking in the Projectiles code. Second, you already admitted as to not using the most up to date version of the game (Beta.3603) and were still using v.3599.

Please stop trying to derail this thread... your antics are becoming tiresome.

Additionally, if you're determined to try and argue with me then please take it up in a PM.

Best thing to do is to post a release note.

3603 is a "beta patch", so it can be understandable that he don't use it.
(but once you know all the fixes present in it, it's almost a crime to ignore it ;-) ).

Code:

Cybran Engineering Stations: T1 cost increased to 500M 2500E from 450M 2250E. T2 build rate decreased to 25 from 30. T3 build rate decreased to 35 from 45.

Patch notes presented in non causal order?(FYI that means before -> after)
Why would you do this?

Odd preferences is really the only excuse

As one of those Blackops guys that was mentioned...
Personally I would be a little disappointed if they didn't have full intel systems though I agree they would need to make some adjustments over what SupCom used.

Radar & Stealth interactions where fine though I would have loved to see some form of shadowing effect, though code intensive is an understatement for things like that... at least with how SupCom had intel coded.

Jamming could have been alot better because when a unit rotated it rotated the projected blips the same. Made it too easy to realize it was a jammer and figure out where the central point of the field was. Though I like the concept, if anything to pull slow tracking artillary off target from the actual attack force.

Omni was an issue that drove alot of people nuts because it was a full intel hard counter with a massive range. Blackops made a balance change that cut SupCom's Omni range to about 1/3rd, just enough to decloak someone before the could actually fire on your firebases but not long enough to negate stealth based strategies unless you had the energy eco to spam the towers. It actually made omni tolerable since the target was usually well within visual range anyway as far as Stealth/Jamming was concerned.

Cloaks are fun plain and simple. Out of the several mechanics we tried to make cloaks more usable in SupCom, without getting them too ridiculous, was one that deactivated the cloak for a couple of seconds every time the unit opened fire. At least all but the heavier turrets could aim and shoot back, at least once, before the cloak re-engaged. I am not a fan of the idea of "cloak only works when immobile/idle" systems because there isn't much a point in them unless its on an unarmed scout. You can't really do ambush tactics with them unless you just stockpile them somewhere and wait for an enemy run into them like a minefield. Though I sorta like the idea of a dynamic power drain for when the unit is moving.

@nanolathe & bmb: Cause I couldn't resist... the piece of supcom code he should be looking at is the "armordefinition.lua" file which is what designated the various weapon vs armor type damage %s. Though while the game does have Light, Normal, Commander, & Structure armor types, the only ones that have variables set are Structure & Commander to reduce the damage coming from Overcharge & Deathnuke damage types. The rest of the games armor system is unused code since all other weapons deal "normal" damage at a 1.0 ratio regardless of listed armor type...