What about adding a strategic feature where your units does extra damage depending on where they hit the enemies. For example if your unit hit the enemy on the enemies front side they do default damage. But if they hit from the sides or back they do +1, +3 damage. This could add a tactical element where in battles you hide part of your army to engage from behind letting you be able to win a battle with less units than your opponent!
While it is a nice idea and been done before in several other things (mostly by relic), at the end of the day the major thing that it adds to the game is micro. you need to get all your units facing the right direction and dance them around riving in reverse while fireing. The idea is a lot more fun than it would be to play.
Your topic title is wrong, this is "Tactical damage", isn't it? Also I agree with yogurt312, something like that has no place in games like Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation. This would introduce the possibility to use extensive micro, so that your units always face the enemy with their front and never with their rear or side.
I wouldn't say it has no place, more that its place is purely hypothetical because any practical implimentation would be infeasable. After all not every unit can shoot backwards and turrets do have a speed which while not exactly the same are of similar underlying concept.
Well it could only be applied to bigger units. That would give low tier mobile units a slight edge versus large, costly, bulky units. If the extra dot products doesn't cost too much memory/CPU, it would be a nice thing to have for modders anyways.
Frankly, there is a way to make flanking more useful without the kind of complexity this suggestion has, Turret Turn rates. This allows for more varied unit design on top of having to concern yourself over the exact orientation of your units. Mike
What he said. Turret turn rates were a major limitation of some of the heavy units in TA. Bulldogs, for example, where useless as **** at fire-and-maneuver because the turret was so slow. Trying to move them around a lot would result in the turret tracking quite poorly.
