Sample siege/artillery Mechanic, Intelligence mechanic

An unfortunate trend in modern RTS games is an under-emphasis on siege, including artillery, and improper siege balance. What I've so far seen leads me to believe PA will follow suit, so here's my attempt to turn that around.

So far, we have seen five types of long-range siege weapons in PA: Mobile mortar, T1 stationary artillery, T2 stationary artillery, tactical missile launcher, and strategic missile launcher. Under the assumption that T2 stationary artillery and strategic missile launchers will be interplanetary/strategic weapons, that really only leaves us with 3 types of siege weapons. I propose adding a few more to mimic the following mechanic:

1- A generic heavy mobile artillery that must deploy to fire. Medium blast radius, damage, etc.
2- A mobile missile launcherthat fires a missile on a pre-programmed path. (Non-guided.) High damage, low blast radius, must deploy to fire. This weapon would be specialized versus structures, but also excel at destroying heavy mobile artillery (because heavy mobile artillery must deploy to fire.)
3- An anti-ballistics unit. (Either mobile, deployable, or stationary structure.) This unit uses a radar to spot incoming ballistics, can identify where they were fired from, and uses a laser to shoot them down. (That is, it can shoot down projectiles from the above units, but cannot identify the source of source of missiles.)
4- A plasma mortar. Rapid fire, low blast radius, low damage, but it's projectiles are already super-heated, so they cannot be shot down by the anti-ballistics laser weapon.

With the units above, you'd have a very strong, dynamic, and interesting siege mechanic. Forcing players to not just choose TWO build big guns, but also forcing them to choose WHICH ONES to build, adds an entirely new level to the mechanic.

For general bombardment: Use unit 1. To defend against unit 1, uses units 3 and 2 (or 2 and another intel source, or 3 and another strike unit). To defend against 2 and 3, use unit 4. To defend against 4, use 1.

Intelligence mechanics: Most games neglect intelligence completely, which should be a crime. Even the most complex games have it absurdly simplified, like Starcraft 2 and even Forged Alliance.

In FA, the concept was simple: There were essentially 2 types of intel: vision and radar. Radar produced a grey icon for any enemy unit in a simple radius from the radar unit. Vision did the same, but allowed the unit's type to be know as well. (Sonar was radar that worked under water, water vision likewise, and omni was radar that also worked in the water and could not be beaten with stealth.)

I recommend more complex mechanic by introducing different types and mechanics that make the game more closely resemble reality:

(First, program the game so that you don't have to either see a unit or not, but add grey area such that a unit was spotted at this location a few moments ago, and may or may not be there now, like a targeting point.)

1- Keep radar, but separate it into types similar to IRL:
--Air radars:
---Early Warning Radar(EW): Detects aircraft within a wide radius, and can detect approximate aircraft size and number, but cannot provide information precise enough for weapons targeting.
---Target tracking radar(TT): Shorter range than EW, but provides precise information for air defense weapons. Usually limited by by how many aircraft it can track simultaneously, around 20 or so.
--Ground radars
---Airborne ground-seeing radar (think JSTARS)
--Projectile Radars
---Counter-battery Radar: Can detect ballistics and determine approximately where they were fired from based upon calculations from the projectile's ballistic arch.


Although I could double the size of the list above, I think simply having more than a single type of radar would be an improvement, so that's my first goal.

I really like the sound of all those units as I'm a great fan of artillery but that would result in a lot of artillery units which may overwhelm the game. There are usually only a couple of massive guns so not to make the artillery too perfect and easier to defend against. Your units would block out any chance of Defence. I love these ideas and hope that they'd add them but I don't think they will

Perfection is when nothing more can be taken away.

You can add a billion trillion tweaks and potential systems that can accomplish any number of goals. All that matters for a feature is getting the desired outcome with as few steps as possible.

If there was a way to make radar imperfect, like say radar in Balance Annihilation in Spring (at least that's how I remember it last), where the radar blips shift around a significant degree to show the radar's inaccuracy, often leading to radar based attacks that would completely miss most of the time.

If then radar inaccuracy could be made a parameter, there's a lot more you'd be able to do.

Radar inaccuracy also somewhat reduces the effectiveness of long ranged units, which would require mobile or fixed targeting radar nearer the opponent to spot targets, or more expensive radar.

Slight correction, it was stated in the live stream that there are no tactical missile launchers (I believe this comment was made in reference to structures specifically though).

Wait, what was the smaller missile-launcher looking structure next to the strategic missile launcher?

Not sure maybe an anti-orbital or anti-nuke missile launcher? Very few of the units were actually specifically given confirmed roles (We know the biggest two missile/rocket structures were T1 & T2 orbital factories).

That is most likely the nuke defense. It's the classic counterpart to the launcher.

There is no doubt that SMD will be necessary as a reliable defense against nukes. Whether it will be expanded upon is unknown. It is possible to play around with both units- launcher and defense- such that they have additional uses and ways to be defeated.

Funkoff, I suggest if you haven't seen it yet, exterminans method of using signature and signal resolution for intelligence instead of all these different types of intel. It's smooth, simplified, and yet opens the field for a lot of complex interactions.

Air radar can be taken care of simply by having aircraft with a larger signature, thereby making them get detected much farther out than ground units. This also combines with target tracking idea in that air units will be able to be 'visible' much farther out than standard ground units.

Counter-battery radar could even dynamically increase the signature of the targeted artillery, making it much more easily detected without making the counter-battery unit a one-stop solution for pinpointing enemy artillery positions. Nearby artillery would quickly be detected and maybe even visible, but very long range artillery would simply be an indication of the area where the fire is coming from.

ALL this is accomplished by using the suggested mechanic from exterminans. No special units /buildings required.