RADAR: OTH, LoS and other factors/options

There is a problem were you can not see how many people voted in a poll if there is more than one option, so I am restarting the poll. Attached is the old poll if anyone is interested.

The thread on visual detection got me thinking...

So what do people think we should do with RADAR (or whatever long range detection system the robots are using)?
Should it be Line of Sight, Over the Horizon, or what?
Should ground clutter be an issue?
What information should it be able to tell?
Should we go with a fixed range, layered ranges, or a more realistic model?
Should there be automatic RADAR targeting? (I think yes.)
Should multiple RADAR instillations be able to work together to improve their coverage?
What else?

Well, real-life makes for boring gameplay, so I'll vote that we fall well short of replicating that. But I'd like radar/sonar to give slightly more information than unknown dot is here.

SupCom does layer type, so you know if it's a tank or building, but I think it'd be better to use size instead. But it'd have to be heavily quantised so that clever people can't infer what each unit is based on size (so we should have small, medium, large). A large-ish unit would be indistinguishable from a building if it was standing still (which makes sense).

Should the RADAR keep track of things that have been identified or moved (while they remain on RADAR) or should the player have to do some Stratego like work?

I'd say, if you know what it is/was, and haven't had it disappear into the depths of no-intel. coverage then you should remember what it was.

An interesting thing I'd like to add: movement traces.
When an enemy unit is out of visual range, but in radar range (the little gray blip) and moves within it it leaves a short visible trace. Helps you detect movement.
Maybe even make it a radar upgrade for T2 over T1.

What do you think? It would help you see enemy movement faster when you're zoomed out.

god please.. I want see every freaking shot on the mini map again.. at least for on planet

Interesting idea. It's a UI feature, so it shouldn't be dependent of a specific building, though.
I'd even go for all icons, including the visible ones, having such trails when zoomed out (toogleable, of course), to see faster what's going on.

Radar should be blocked by line of sight, including the planet curvature. It would make things more varied depending on the planet/asteroid size, which is a good thing IMHO. It means, for example, that flying radars would be more important for smaller maps.
This is also why you put radars on top of hills in Zero-K, and it opens ways to sneak units in a hilly terrain.

Previously identified radar dots should stay identified, this seems pretty obvious. Even further, identified buildings should stay visible even once out of radar range in the last state they were seen.

Good idea, but I'd also go for layers in addition : show if it's a land(ed), air, naval or orbital unit. You can see its altitude anyway, after all.

Good point. If you see a floating blip it's painfully obvious that it's an aircraft of some flavour. Things like that should be denoted with aircraft blips automagically.

One problem I have with this is there are a number of ways to make over the horizon radar (Groundwaves, Surface Wave, ionospheric reflection), and making it over the horizon could differentiate it more from vision which is more frequently blocked by terrain (though I do not know how visual detection is being implemented either).

Line of sight for radar sounds nice at first, but causes a lot of problem on spherical maps.

Even on a sphere with an diameter of 50km (which means a GIANT map, larger than the biggest supcom maps! 7853 km² compared to 6724 km² for 82km maps), the LoS of a 100 meter high radar dish would only be 2km. But 100 meters is already awful high and requires the tower to be placed on high terrain, also that's only the line of sight on absolute flat terrain. You would need 70(!) radar towers just to cover the equator (5.000 to cover the planet!). Ok, on a smaller map the number becomes lower, but you would still need 17 radar towers on a rather small planet with only 3km in diameter.

Only REAL planes would be able to offer a decent line of sight with that system, assuming a flight level of at least 2-3.000 meters. Problem with that? Lets look again at the small 3km planet, while you now need only 3 planes to see the whole equator, those planes would need to fly at an altitude which exceeds the atmosphere of the planet by far. Thats not awesome, thats just ridiculous. Planes can not be displayed at heights of more then 3x the height of the biggest unit or players will be unable to comprehend the real position of the unit.

As much as i liked line of sight in TA, it is unpractical for a large scale game. It would only work for pure unit vision, as their LoS is usually equal or similar to their weapon range (except for long range units). But it won't work for stationary intel towers as you would get blind spots next to your bases and it also doesn't work for scouts as their LoS is useless, considering how close to the ground they move. Even for orbital units, the LoS is still rather low (we can't just use realistic orbits which are multiple times larger than the diameter of the planet, a to scale solar system would have tiny planets with giant empty spaces).



Now what about radar itself? There was always one thing which disturbed me about radar in TA an SupCom. It would be able to tell even large groups of tiny units apart but it couldn't tell a giant experimental unit apart from a T1 scout. I would actually expect radar to not give me the precise number of far away units, but only the "mass" of the detected crowd as it would appear on a real radar. I can tell if something is there, i can tell how huge the crowd is and i can tell if it moves. But unless it gets really close, i can't tell how many units or which unit type.

The closer a unit comes, the more information you get: First is size and telling distinct units apart, as well as movement level, the larger the unit the longer the range on which units can be identified. The smaller a unit is, the longer it takes until you can tell it apart from the blurry cloud. At a distinct distance, the units get identified which makes strategical icons appear, even further and you get a "visual", extrapolated from the radar. The actual "visual range" is the range at which EVERY unit is fully identified and every action (including firing and turning) can be visualized.

If an unit is small enough, it can even sneak through the radar undetected, this makes small, lightweight T1 units quite dangerous as they bypass long range intel. Not by special abilities, but by using the game mechanics. Thats just how stealth should work.

I know this is probably not going to be popular at first glance, but

I do not want radar for land units.

I want Radar to see Air.

I want Sonar that can see ships and submersibles. Sonar seeing hover (if there is hover) is hazy to me.

I want structures once spotted to remain on my mini map.

I think that satellites should have good LOS.

We may very well come up with very good reasons to include land and structures in with radar or maybe a tremor dection system, but I personally think land-radar ruins strategic depth and element of surprise.

Unless you have radar jammers.

Having size be detected lets us have stealth units that lie about their size which could be interesting.

Also, the question about units detecting radar makes me think active radar towers should be displayed on the map to the enemy if a unit gets within range. It would help make strategy more interesting, do you try and hide your new outpost by remaining blind or do you announce yourself and get warning of enemies approaching.

Or, hide your new outpost and use scouts scattered around to warn of intruders?

Ok, you convinced me. No LoS for radar.

What you describe about radar giving more and more info about the unit, and bigger units detected from further away is pretty much what I'd like to see for visual range.
In fact, we could have that : visual range and radar working the same way, but radar can see across landscape.
I'm not sure about radar being able to fully identify an unit or not, though.

About the other options in the poll:
"Units should be able to detect if they are detected by RADAR and indicate this somehow."
Not sure, but that could be fun. I hope Uber will experiment with that, and at least let the possibility open for modders (though it may be possible with scripts anyway)

"RADAR should be able to identify the location of ballistic weapons that fire into its range"
Yes! And not just radar. A detected ballistic projectile should give you the position of the firing platform, precisely or not. You can already find the approximate position, by moving the camera and see the curve of the projectile. But doing so is an awful micro, something that the UI should give you instead.

Which should NOT, i repeat NOT, be SupCom's implementation (which sucked and was possibly maybe useful for pulling some decoy fire before you got into vision range now and then). Mainly because of how lazy/time-pressed GPG engineers were in working on them: it just generated a bunch of extra radar blips with same type, exact same movement, and random offsets from the original unit.

supcom system worked very well and they should do something like that

I reset the poll as it was not keeping tally of the number of voters. See 1st post for more information, and the old poll results.

It might have been useful to obscure specific quantities by overloading the brain of the player seeing them after a point, but that's all I can think of. Radar jamming kind of falls flat on it's face when it's trivial to tell that something is radar jamming and you get a good idea of which is the real unit in a bunch of icons...

What would you have a RADAR jamming unit do? The options I can think of are:
make itself hard or impossible to detect with RADAR
make other units hard or impossible to detect with RADAR
make both itself and other units hard to detect with RADAR
make units seem different they really are on RADAR (different speed/direction, size, or?)
make units that do not exist appear on RADAR
make units RADAR signatures displaced from their actual location

The "total votes : x" is in fact indicating how many boxes were ticked? How strange...

For the radar, I'd go for stealth (personal and field) reducing your effective size. So a big unit would become detectable like a medium or small, a small unit would be almost undetectable with radar. I'd see cloak work similarly for visual, too. It could be balanced by having stealth fields decreasing by a set number your size, and/or bringing everyone to a (smaller) set size...
I also like the SupCom-style jammers, who create a bunch of fake units. But the implementation in SupCom was quite brocken, each fake unit should be treated like a real one, with its own pathfinding and such. Ideally, they would also be visible to the jamming player. Even more ideally, they would indicate if there were disproved (similarly to how buildings should indicate if they were detected I defended somewhere else).