I've seen a few threads on how to improve scouting and the woes of trying to attack an enemy base without radar coverage, but I've not seen a thread about intel gathering units. In TA there was a radar plane which was immensely helpful if you had air superiority for aiding in the assault of an enemy base, and in FA there was a radar upgrade for your commander, I think also for sub-commanders but I forget now. I propose a T2 radar plane. Essentially a T1 radar with wings taped to it. It would make an amazing scout, and if you could hide it, or defend it from enemy interceptors a valuable support craft in any base assault. It could even be used to patrol your own borders to give you better radar range and more time to detect incoming enemies. If not a plane, then maybe a truck (I'd rather have both though). You could mix some in with an assault force to ensure they can see incoming enemies at their maximum attack range. I feel like this will be especially valuable when assaulting new planets where you have no base constructed yet. Or if your enemy has overwhelming air superiority. I'd like to end with a caveat though. Since we are promised radar satellites or something similar units like this might not be as useful. However one thing I loved about TA was the huge variety of units. This made you able to compose an army for any situation. So maybe your enemy has control of the orbital layer, but you need radar coverage on the other side of the planet for your immanent assault? They also built lots of artillery and bombers so a listening station is a no go... radar plane!
It would already help if regular scouts could produce any type of USEFUL intelligence. Right now they have to stumble upon the enemy in order to see anything at all which renders anything short of radar useless - unless you prefer the micro heavy way of cartographing every inch of the map by hand. But when they do, they even manage to read the part number on every single nut and bolt in range with a single glimpse.... (Just look for one of the many "graded intelligence" threads.) Semi-stationary (either slow or needs to be deployed) intelligence stations would be an interesting addition for sure, best combined with some passive countermeasures (like hiding from enemy radar) to prevent detection. It would become pointless again if you had to dodge enemy units all the time by hand.
I find the firefly a great scout. I generally build 5 of them and send them in random straight lines. I'm ok with the scouting at the moment.
Sure a firefly can find an enemy base, maybe even fly around it and get an idea of it's defenses, but it can't support your invading ground force. It doesn't solve the problems that I brought up in my first post either. I think Intel is lacking and I want more options.
A support unit generally cannot fight on its own, but gives a benefit to other combat units. Like a medic that can heal friendlies, or a paladin with an aura to buff damage. I would say that having radar coverage would be a "buff" as without it any units that can shoot farther than they can see (most units as the game sits) cannot fire at their full range, or turn to anticipate new targets as they come into range. Also it is a buff for the player as they can see the enemy base and incoming units before they actually engage your army. I don't think anybody will disagree that having radar coverage is an advantage over just LoS.
Why even bother with an intel unit? Any flying thing with vision is an effective scout. Radar doesn't stack and is trumped by visual detection. At the most all you will ever need is ONE, which is trumped in nearly every way by a single constructor building a radar.
All things considered, how likely do you think it is that a constructor will manage to build a radar in time, close enough to a base, and safe enough to be used in an attack?
i liked it how in Supreme Commander most units had a higher fire range than vision. So you always had an advantage if you took a land scout with you. Also, it often was helpful to have an air scout patroling, if the enemy was too lazy to send interceptors.
This way of thinking is OK now, but not great. However, what about when you invade an enemy planet and you don't have any radar coverage or a base to send builders out from? What about all water planets? We also have no idea how gas giants will work... will planes be allowed on them? Certainly building a radar station on a gas giant seems problematic at best. I Think that they can only add to the game and make it better, and on top of that they'd be very easy to implement.
But will radar planes really solve the problem? IMHO, they suffer the very same issue as radar towers. They are not optional, they are mandatory, although you only need a single exemplar of the unit. Scouting doesn't really work right now. Scouts give you little to none useful information due to the large planet surface and the tiny vision radius, while radar gives you perfect information on an much larger area. Adding radar planes makes the existing scouts even more pointless, even now it is more efficient to send an T1 engineer around the planet, spaming T1 radar towers rather than sending real scouts. Latter one is going to be shot anyway the moment he finds something. With radar planes you would only eliminate the radar tower spaming, but a tech rush would still be mandatory in order to get any type of useful intelligence. But again, only the actual rush. You only need a single unit from T2 and only a single exemplary of that, everything else can wait until your economy is stable enough. As bobucles said, you only need one. But radar isn't even trumped by vision, it's a perfect dropin-replacement if you have the skills to read the information. Even more so with snapping while constructing buildings and the fact that radar icons are elevated (and the fact that you see not only buildings, but all units) you can tell almost exactly what you are facing. And making your base cluttered on purpose just to make buildings indistinguishable from units on radar .... meh....
Vision alone isn't going to make a scout. Everything already has vision. Just grab the cheapest/fastest thing you got and send it in. Bam, it's now a scout. There are many traits that can be used to elevate a scout-esque unit above the rank and file. More direct counter-intel includes having stealth/cloak. Combat support includes defensive flares and weapon lures (drawing the heat off other units). Overall support includes traits like reclaim and/or repair (great for ground units). Scouts are also good platforms for powerful 1-shot abilities. A simple option is to have persistent vision after it dies. Another is to release chaff/fog when they die, shrouding your attack. All of a sudden, your cheap intel unit is now a powerful support. A suicide attack (Aka mercy) turns your cheap scout into a tac missile. There are certainly more options to try. I guess that depends on radar's range and cost. If radar is dirt cheap, then anyone can build one at any location with no hassle at all. Besides, it's not a bad idea to support an army with a few constructors, at least not yet. Asteroids, spy satellites, dropping units at random spots from orbit. Every planet is going to have invading woes, and it's not just with scouting roles. You can get very solid intel by hitting the planet with a giant rock. For example, the area that you just obliterated doesn't have any enemy units! It also allows other options such as seismic detection (for structures) or armageddon detection (to break cloaks). The latter would be a great way to flush out sneaky Commanders. Asteroids, satellites, and allow radar construction on water. It's not a heavy structure. Pure aqua worlds demand a lot of dev time as is, since any world can have any amount of land and sea. It would be a mistake to assume that land gets the majority of roles, especially since water has more layers to work with. Well, gas giants need an established way of warfare first. A good option seems to focus on battle between multiple moons, and to ease the difficulty of fighting between them. But that's a problem for another thread.
@exterminans and bobucles With the newest build scouts have a purpose again, now that there is a persistent "ghost" of the building they found gaining LoS on something is more helpful in some ways than gaining and then losing radar coverage. They are also the fastest and have the greatest LoS range of any unit, which makes sense, and also makes them the best at their role. I do agree that it would be cool if they had some kind of special ability on death, but that is not a discussion relevant to this thread. I think both of you are missing my point a little though. A radar unit is not only a replacement for a scout, it fills another valuable role by providing mobile radar coverage. A lot of times I find myself with an army built, and I already know the position of the enemy base (because I had previously scouted it), but I don't have radar coverage of their base. What do I do now? I have to send a constructor near enough to build a radar tower by their base so my mobile artillery can function and I have better intel on possible counter attacks. This is a slow and clunky solution though. Sometimes you're low on power so building another T2 radar is not very desirable, and the range on a T1 radar station is pretty low so you have to get uncomfortably close to a T2 base to build it, almost always resulting in your radar station and constructor being destroyed. Sometimes what you thought was a main base is really just a forward base and you need to press onward quickly to maintain your momentum, and you drive outside your radar coverage, crippling your army's effectiveness. It would be a lot nicer to just build a few radar trucks and lump them in with the army to ensure no matter where the battle takes you you're guaranteed radar coverage for your army. It would also lead to people trying to single out the radar trucks in an attacking army and killing them first to blind attackers so you wouldn't need just one. Radar planes would be useful the same way. Say you rushed air and want to finish the enemy commander with a bunch of T1 bombers. Time is of the essence here, and it is unlikely you'll be able to get radar coverage of the enemy base when you're just barely at T2. You can build just one T2 factory and get yourself a radar plane without needing to build T2 power first. Then send in a scout plane to get LoS on the commander backed up by the radar plane to keep track of him and your bombers will have their target acquired before their first pass. Yes a radar plane would make a good scout, a great scout actually. It fills the absent role of a T2 scout very well. The same goes for a radar truck. However it also gives benefits to a mobile attack force that a T1 scout cannot and that's where its real value comes in.
Thats just what wouldn't happen. Radar is great when distinguishing buildings from units (since buildings align which each other while units don't) and it works perfectly when identifying air. But sniping the mobile radar which is moving in the back row? Just won't happen, you would actually need real vision on it. Radar is pointless versus unit formations (except for aircraft). And spending a lot of attendance just on spotting ALL the scouts, so you can break the ridiculous synergy between radar, tanks and artillery? Just to notice that somebody DID build a T2 radar why you were busy and sniping the mobile radars got pointless? Or to miss just a single one? That sounds like a lot of micro-wars, spending a lot of time zoomed in and encourages deathballs even more, since you are more likely to successfully hide your mobile radar in a large crowd (which had already been amplified a lot by the fact that direct fire units can shoot through allied units, but back row units can't be hit themselves.). The way radar and vision work right now, it will always leave a bitter taste, no matter what you try. You need way to few scouts, there is too much information given away for free at the edge of detection, but too little for close targets, range of intelligence is (except for T2 radar) too low, but you can't increase it either without rendering dedicated intelligence gathering units redundant and intelligence suffers way to much from diminishing returns. Having 2 units with a similar function is already to much since a single unit already achieves the best effect possible. These are issues which can't be solved just by tweaking parameters on the system currently used, the system is broken by design. Just think back to SupCom, scouting was one of the least flexible, most micro focused things in the whole game (except for micro artillery dodging). You knew your enemies start location, sending in a few bombers as scouts was obligatory (why bother with a real scout if vision is all you need and it's going to be destroyed anyway), all you really did was establishing a T2 or T3 radar as fast as possible so you could eliminate the need for scouting as fast as possible. Afterwards the game behaved as if there was no fog of war. You still had to gain vision infrequently when new grey dots appeared and you suspected them to be experimental / factory, but aiming for full radar coverage was something every player aimed on since the lack of radar coverage would have left you with NO information at all. Is it really necessary to lock yourself in with such an inflexible system? Mobile radar (or to be more specific: Any type of short range radar or scout) could be of much greater use with alternate systems where the amount of information is graded by distance, and the speed of information gathering by the amount of scouting units. Having long range intelligence (like from the T2 radar tower or the upcoming T3 radar satellite) should never leave you completely blind ANYWHERE, but it shouldn't give you complete information on distant targets either. Revealing factories and game finisher grade buildings? Great! Revealing small units or even the commander? Not so great... Spicing your army with additional scouts should provide them additional targets (or FASTER lock on), but the army should never turn completely blind just because their local scouts have been destroyed. And even more: They should be functional in the first place without additional scouts. Not necessarily able to snipe the enemy commander (because it shouldn't even show up on long range radar), but at least capable of targeting large, possibly game changing / ending structures. Letting them work at reduced efficiency only is fine. Rendering them completely useless without scouts isn't. We are not playing World of Tanks where scouting is a full-time job for 1-2 players who do nothing but providing vision and hiding in bushes...
I don't really see an issue with the current mechanic. The numbers, ranges (and units) etc could use a tweak (and a mobile radar is needed), but I don't think the mechanic itself is inherently broken. Anything more complicated is likely to be information overload in a game that is already pushing the boundaries of RTS awareness (multiple planets and all). Also, we don't yet know how orbital satellites will interact with the intelligence system, so that's something to consider.
