CounterIntel
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What if we had something like triangulation? A single radar wouldn't accurately give a contact's position but 3 radars in range of the contact would, and 2 would be more accurate than one.
I'd also throw out the idea of reducing radar & omni ranges, requiring us to build and maintain more of them.
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@thomashiatt said in CounterIntel:
I thought having good radar coverage, scouting, looking at what you scout, and processing this information in your mind to make strategic decisions were already pretty rare to encounter in the game. Probably shouldn't make it harder. Counterintel might add more depth for a handful of top players, but from an observer's perspective, it won't even be clear what is happening anyway.
How does this argument not extend to removing stealth and jamming beyond “it’s already there dude” then? If you want to argue stealth is a mechanical sub for shields, then there is still no real argument for why jamming should be on anything beyond the “has always been” card.
Beyond that, learning to get mass and dump it into tanks puts you at top 10% of this game already. Why did we make it harder by making it viable to skip tech levels, or rush tech, or do late transitions, and so on? Should have kept t3 balance where it was in order to keep the game in the simple t2 all in or t3 rush meta it was stuck at.
If the argument is that lots of players see t3 cuz lots of players play dual gap and astro, then this counter intel argument of “too much thinking” hardly applies. Also, the counterintel absolutely does add depth to observing the game just from the sheer fact it makes knowledge less concrete and therefore adds more inherent risk in what is usually just a “count the mass in this blob” situation. What causes a player to miscalculate isn’t the point, the fact they can miscalculate makes games more interesting and presents a new problem to solve.
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@snagglefox said in CounterIntel:
What if we had something like triangulation? A single radar wouldn't accurately give a contact's position but 3 radars in range of the contact would, and 2 would be more accurate than one.
I'd also throw out the idea of reducing radar & omni ranges, requiring us to build and maintain more of them.
I like the idea, but not possible. Also from a game design perspective it feels too complicated.
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I don’t think Supreme Commander has a very robust intel system honestly, upgraded mexes and factories can be seen through the fog of war, units can still be invisible for a moment at the edge of vision range, you can lock interceptors on transports (even stealthed) if they return to the fog of war, underwater vision isn’t really intuitive, etc. And that’s even before going into things like terrain topography blocking radar like in Spring engine games. Frankly I think technical issues would prevent most interesting ways to revamp intel.
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Biggest intel sadboy issue is losing intel on units when they get transferred to an ally
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@ftxcommando said in CounterIntel:
How does this argument not extend to removing stealth and jamming beyond “it’s already there dude” then? If you want to argue stealth is a mechanical sub for shields, then there is still no real argument for why jamming should be on anything beyond the “has always been” card.
The argument does extend to stealth, and I probably wouldn't have stealth in the game if it were my game. I interpret the game design as being pretty close to a perfect information game where you are supposed to be able to zoom out and see everything. Jamming is pretty irrelevant either way. Things are supposed to stay the way they are because that's what FAF is all about, preserving this video game.
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Many eons ago, I made a "faction diversity mod". One thing I diversified greatly was general faction themes. As an example, all Cybran units had lower vision range, but all units had radar (even Mantis) or radar better than what other factions had (such as on air scouts). Thus, Cybran stealth was toughest to deal with as Cybran. Aeon, oppositely, had no radar whatsoever, but all units had better vision range. I didnt like the suicide concept of the Mercy, so I changed it to act more like a flare, meaning it could linger near the front line for a couple minutes and provide almost soothsayer vision range.
I thought these ideas made matchups feel more different.
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Wouldn't cloak be the logical fourth faction mechanic as stealth/jamming and cloak/fake units seems like the obvious counterparts for radar to vision counter-intel.
To make it possible to “fight” against the only thing I could think of was that the units wouldn’t show radar signatures if in the fog of war. I wasn’t sure if it was actually possible to have an icon show up in visual range but no gray dot show up in the fog of war, but that would be a great solution and would make you curious if maybe you just missed the units before your scout went over them.
Also having them always show blips when in vision would make them uncounterable, so the blips would need to disappear once you have them on radar.
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Marking for comment later:
Seraphim has submergable “ships” for their special intelAeon doesn’t get any because hover wss the design discussion from sc vanilla (some pc gamer article discusses this domewhere$
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If Seraphim were to get 'Doppleganger' style units (or an ability on some of their units a 'la jamming), then Aeon could have some of their units provide a visual range debuff to enemy units in a small aoe from the projectile.
I am thinking the 'bright' projectiles, like those from fervors, direct fire navy, t2 gunships, t3 mobile arty
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for diversity reasons, what if aeon or seraphim had the opposites of radar jamming, for example, units that create a visual illusion of another unit but are broken with radar instead of the other way around, I know radar cover is pretty long range and cheap and wouldn't be as strong, but it would cause a problem for those just sending their units into enemy without intel cover because they don't need it in current situation, especially if it auto reset like toggling jamming does for jamming
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You really should read the responses before posting
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in the faf mission where we protect burke, there is a crystal that create fake air signature
Maybe we can use it.But adding jamming/stealth to all faction would make them more look alike instead of all having their own way to play
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How about an anti sensor field. Any buildings and units with radar get view range and/or radar reduced by x% when in this field.
Or a scramble field that returns scouted units to just being blips on radar.
By the way, if you wanted to buff jamming, adding this functionality to it could be the way to do it. -
Aeon ACU has a sight range upgrade that gives significant omni coverage. That is a faction-specific intel-related advantage. And it's probably underused. Maybe give Aeon T2 radars some useful (but not OP) amount of omni range. I'm talking about just barely enough range to be worth making on the front line against Cybran stealth. With that, Aeon would be the "anti-stealth" faction.
Give Seraphim ACU a second upgrade to gun range & speed, where shots add a radar jamming effect where they land. As long as the unit/building being shot is alive, it will have visibility that basically counteracts the jamming completely. When the ACU kills things, the jamming would have some meaningful effect.
And for the regen aura upgrades: when the ACU is shooting, it should create a temporary jamming field around the ACU. It only turns on when the ACU is shooting because otherwise that might make it too obvious where the ACU is. Presumably if the ACU is popping off shots, it's location doesn't need to be kept a secret.
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Give the UEF T3 Mobile Arty the "shellcam" that the Lobo has.
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Sounds like something that would be better suited to a mod and/or as some sort of featured gamemode (e.g. if the 4th matchmaker queue was used each week or month to showcase a particular mod/more unusual game option) than a change to the core FAF game, since it feels like a fundamental departure from the original FA and would make things significantly more complicated for newer players (and non-top-level players) who already will struggle just to scout/get intel.
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Literally jamming and stealth already exist, how is it a fundamental departure from anything. It’s extending a half baked feature to all the factions so that it becomes a new way for them to interact. Factory HQs are a fundamental departure.
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I'll throw a curve ball and say that we have gotten lazy, obtaining information is too easy via scouts, hardly ever you can do anything more tactical at t1 and by the time t2 or t3 rolls out it becomes (in most chases) utterly pointless.
The problem is mostly t1 air scout being too good of a scouting unit and jack of all trades when it comes to it, and it will probably stay that way.
Even if we add all proposed changes by some miracle, i would argue that it is all meaningless since one little scout can reveal the whole map with no setback to the player.
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remove ability to scout stuff while scout's wreck is falling and then it will already become much harder to scout
