The Case for Removing Radar

Usually heavier units' blips tend to move slower, so it's good to have a way to make a unit emulate another unit's speed to misdirect the enemy, in spring you can do this with a formation move (ctrl+move) then cancel the move commands on units you don't want to move. Such misdirection is impossible in a optical vision only system.

I played TA modded to always have radar targeting (I stuck it on the radar for free) and it didn't impact the gameplay much. It made Punisher creeps a lot less micro-intensive and mobile arty actually useful, but that was about it.

TA's radar ranges are pretty short on big maps. There are always big areas that you can't see into. It's nothing like omni or an adv radar satellite. Without stealth and huge detection ranges it'd be difficult to know where anything was at all.

5000 years into the future we have no radar. /sarcasm. Hmmm, no.

Orbital radar might be seriously overpowered but we might get planet so large that it's essential. Just add an option to disable it (special in smaller games).

Doing everthing with scouts would be a pain in the *** to micro.

Artillery is way way waaaaaaaay to accurate. In my opinion it should shoot in a big high bow not a relatively strait shot. (How else is it to accidentaly shoot a plain out of the sky?) Artillary shells need more fly time and maybe a minimum range.

I think orbital radar should give only a small circle line of sight (if any) and the rest radar.

Pic1: Radar Jammer would be nice artillary wouldn't be able to target you. Still force fire with inaccurate artillary is still a good option.
Pic2: I think it would be pretty cool if objects would interfere with radar. If it's possible to implement.
Pic3: Building radars on flat mountains to get more range. Map controle, tactical decision making.
Pic4: T1 radar smal range but very accurate. T2 large range but at the price of a weakness. T1 viable late game. Or let T2 only see moving enemies.

In 5000 years, radar jamming will be applied to every unit so radar doesn't work.

Anti-jammering/stealth techs evolve through time, too.

Yerp...

Lore-wise, I tend to think of it in terms of Planetside: nanolathes let you build lots of things cheaply, but the tradeoff is they aren't very accurate so your ability to make electronics is roughly along the lines of 1950s era tech: big wires. Possibly vacuum tubes.

This is why Planetside and PA/TA can mass produce tanks, but those tanks are all dumb-fire, like World War 2 tanks. The nanolathes just can't deal with the level of detail needed to create modern electronics.

Although, incidentally, jamming is not the same thing as stealth. Emitting a jamming signal may screw up the radar but you'll be that much more obvious to other detection methods.

Yea i do not like this idea...Radar was always important in these types of games & having to scout constantly ala Starcraft is too much micro & takes away from actual battles & the fun stuff. But there is one radar that I do not like and thats the adv radar that basically clears the entire map for you to see everything...What do you guys think? I was hoping Uber had a radar jammer/stealth radar building so there is a way to still do sneak attacks & hide from the enemy if they have adv radar...

Lore can be used to justify anything. It can justify extremely advanced radar that sees everything, and it can justify extremely advanced ubiquitous stealth tech that makes radar useless. This means we should decide which is better based on how it plays.

And the arguments in favor of radar in this thread are extremely thin to the point of being nonexistent. I have yet to see one argument in favor of radar that takes a step beyond "but... it's radar..." and just assumes it is good for gameplay because it has been mandatory to construct in so many games. The fact that it was such an obvious choice to always build it should indicate that something is amiss.

Using many scouts on a large map is not at all like scouting in Starcraft. Scouting in Starcraft is sending a unit into the enemy base, and all units in Starcraft require a constant stream of APM to use effectively. Especially when used alone. Scouting a large map, where both sides have large armies including many recon units, would play completely differently. Especially if scouts would be intelligent enough to try and keep a safe distance from the enemy. Something that everyone seems to be forgetting is that there will be a lot of units and structures in play in a PA game, and that means you will have a lot of eyeballs on the map.

The same people who think long-range radar is good also tend to think the game benefits from radar jammers that make radar not actually work. This seems to smack of 'more stuff = more options' syndrome, which is shoddy design. Adding more stuff for its own sake does not necessarily improve the game.

A game with cheap long-range radar targeting that also has jammers is a very different environment from a game with neither, although how different depends on the cost and effectiveness of both devices. If jammers are cheap and have a huge area of effect, you have basically eliminated radar from existence, except that now you have to pay to build jammers. If radar is cheap and jammers are expensive then you have mostly universal radar targeting, unless a player wants to pay a lot of resources to stop the enemy from being able to radar target at huge range. Moreover, this ties any kind of stealthy play to the jammers, and attaches a cost in the form of the jammer to executing any kind of stealthy action.

With no radar and no jammers, you don't need to build jammers to hide units. Any units can hide in the fog of war, and you can make stealthy maneuvers and play mind games without an arbitrary cost by always needing jammers. And even if you got a system that was perfectly tuned in terms of radar and jammer effectiveness and costs, you really just bring players right back to square one of needing to scout and being able to hide in the fog of war. Except now there are a lot of additional costs of both sides constructing radar and jammers to cancel out the radar.

It seems fairly obvious that it is a simpler and better solution to just remove long-range radar from the equation than it is to try to fine-tune radar+jammers create the kind of scouting gameplay, stealthy maneuvers, and mind games players want to utilize.

I agreed take out all kind radars, who needs it in a sphere planet ,thats so easy to see or find all without scouts or radar or jamers.
Plz take out any kind scouts too,makes this game too easy.

No one need or want to see in a rts game, the enemy force.

In future we showld think in take out all economy too ,just stay with 1 acu 3 or 4 engeniers,i think its enouth to fight vs all the reviews that are coming to talk about PA.

Oh sry my mistake this is not simcity!

Here in Portugal and some other europe countrys next month a magazine will talk about Planetary anhilation,so hurry up release the game.

I like simcity......

You think static radar towers with huge range doesn't tend to lead to playing SupCom like it is SimCity instead of having dynamic battles between armies in the field?

Lacking information about the field means you have to actually put units out there, and ideally spread them out. Your opponent is in the same position and will also put units out in the field. As a result we have a war in the field instead of SimBase with long-range weapons where you can detect and fire upon anything that gets within miles of your base.

If you make people use vision, actual troops as well as recon both become much more important, and artillery and air support both become much more interesting since you have to scout for targets, and so does the enemy.

Long-range radar leads to playing an RTS like you play SimCity. Forcing players to use troops makes them actually put boots on the field.

I totaly agreed with you,Uber plz take out all short and long radar they kill this game.

ledarsi : the problem your experiencing is by playing on large scale planets...Right now they tend to be extremely boring bc people just turtle defenses & any attacks on the base are pointless..Almost every game on a scale4 and up is an arty/catapult/holkin war then orbital war & ALWAYS ends in a nuke war..very boring. However, if you play on scale 2, sum 3 mostly you will notice a huge difference in gameplay where many more battles take place & less turtling bc you just dont have the time nor space to do it.

Really?

On most of the larger maps I just build a huge unit train to devour the map.

Building artillery on the large maps seems counter-intuitive.

Nukes make sense tho.

igncom1 a unit train....lol thats prob the worst thing to build a line of units all streaming to the enemy base. They will all be dead b4 they even reach the holkin/catapult. By the time you reach your enemy he can build laser defense ect. In order to take over a well defended base with actual ground forces you need a HUGE army & to build that your enemy will prob have a nuke much faster & with much less of a headache. The only unit in this game worthy of base cracking is a hornet.

I don't run right it, I use scouts to know where to amass.

And even then, if you have more territory being nukes doesn't mean anything, because you just spread out and take the whole map.

Thats you view about PA ....

This is my view about Sup2..

The problem your experiencing is by playing Sup2...Right now they tend to be extremely boring bc people just turtle defenses & any attacks on the base are pointless..Almost every game on a scale4 and up is an arty/catapult/holkin war then orbital war & ALWAYS ends in a nuke war..very boring. However, if you play on scale 2, sum 3 mostly you will notice a huge difference in gameplay where many more battles take place & less turtling bc you just dont have the time nor space to do it.

And ppl dont want i put PA has a Sup2 expansion....

I do believe that Nanolathe has also envisioned something similar to this (with the help of Liquius, I think) with the 'fuzzy' radar idea.

Edit: It appears that a large number of people are for the simple idea of removing radar, and argue that it is a good idea because it is simple. Why should we stick with simple? To re-balance the game is not simple, let's do it right and do it the complex way.

You can set unit limit in Springlobby, so playing BA/Zero-K/NOTA without radar is quite simple, why not test it before talk about it?