[suggestion] 3 Level Fog of War?

Here's hoping that the orbital sats (I think you can see 2 types in the unit preview renders, they look like helicopter blades) are like moving radar.

Trying something new is cool, but if you cant do it better, you shouldn do something new

I agree that we need 3 level fog. its way to hard to scout a sphere, when you cant see where you scouted.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Some people want to get "traditional balanced game" in alpha/beta, but actually alpha testing isn't about balance. Uber already built unique solutions for networking, procedural maps and UI. They already trying to find solution for mini maps. Let them try make game not like many others!

If they decide stick to traditional FoW conception it's hurt game badly.

Yes and no. I agree wholeheartedly that now is a perfect time to try out all sorts of options to see which work and which do not. I would love to have raytraced LoS for all units (units have an "infinite" vision range limited only by obstructions, not by distance), however it will definitely cost them time and development resource to try those things out, and they may have a massive negative impact on game performance.

What I want, and what is best for the game (especially, what is best to implement to ensure that the beta and release timescales are met) can be 2 entirely seperate things. I fully support Uber deviating from the norm to experiment here, but I also understand that time is finite, and they only have a certain number of devs; getting the game working properly is IMO more important than trying to implement loads of never-before-seen stuff but not managing to finish them on time.

The real beauty of PA, though, is Uber's commitment to making it easily and accessibly modifiable from the start. I firmly suspect that regardless of how they implement unit LoS, we should have enough access to replace it with our own, so if we wanted to create a "proper line of sight" mod we could. Once we get the info about modding server-side, it's one thing I might consider doing myself, if I knew anything at all about raytracing calculations and 3d engine innards

Hehe, I read a book on graphics theory once, and raycasting actually gave me a headache

I like the Raytracing idea but I fear that it might be very glitchy unless a large number of rays is used and in fact, I believe this would be pretty much impossible to handle for the computer once there are thousands of units obstructing each other's view, plus explosions and debris and damaged structures and whatnot. Maybe if you counted unit "blobs" as one entity but still I think it would cause a lot of hassle. Especially since you can easily find out the "range" of sight that any unit would have using the raytracing method and applying it as a fix number. I doubt that there will be a lot of instances where a unit can actually "see through a wall", except with very high range units, in whose case their sightlines are determined by a radar which, rightfully, can "see through walls".

I still stand behind my 3 level suggestion, and think that redarkening over time is awesome, for 2 reasons:

Simplicity. It might not be beautiful or awe inspiring or revolutionary, but it works, without being overly complex

The second reason is pretty much around when multiple planets get involved. Remembering where and when you sent 10 scout units on 5 planets could get interesting.......