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Original post by Chocolate Milk For my vision it would be counterproductive to let the player interfere with their dispatch via communication blocking. Although it certainly sounds fun as a player to engage in communication blocking for self preservation, I'd require the player to experience the intensity of dealing with the adds directly, either through evasion or combat, rather than reward him for preemptively neutralizing it. I wouldn't even want it as an optional playstyle because I can't let one playstyle turn my main focus of the game into an experience of fault/shame/punishment. Even so, the player who wishes to avoid combat would still find evasion to be as important of a tactic as combat.

I understand strategic thinking might not fit in your game, but I'm not sure why you think this kind of element would constitute fault/shame/punishment. Those are something I'd normally associate with excessive difficulty and/or fundamentally unfair things (like police in GTA spawning in physically impossible ways behind your back, but not in front of you).

When the enemy has weak spots like communication, their other difficulty could be made correspondingly higher. So depending on the difficulty tuning, you could have roughly the same amount of action, but more tension through another (orthogonal) type of challenge. If the player can just barely defeat five enemies straight up, it's hardly less intense when there are 20 enemies in total, and the player must make the right calls to avoid fighting 10 of them, to evade/delay/distract five, and beat the remaining five.

The strategic part need not always be calm pre-fight planning. Say you run into a squad of enemies you weren't expecting. Both sides open fire and take cover. Now do you take the risk of immediately rushing in and try to wipe them out before they can call for help / coordinate an attack / ... , or fight more carefully and whittle them down while accepting that more enemy might come, or do you try to break contact? And if you want to break contact, should you first try to take out their communications so they can't tell other enemies which direction you were last seen going?

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Original post by Stroppy Katamari Quote: Original post by Chocolate Milk For my vision it would be counterproductive to let the player interfere with their dispatch via communication blocking. Although it certainly sounds fun as a player to engage in communication blocking for self preservation, I'd require the player to experience the intensity of dealing with the adds directly, either through evasion or combat, rather than reward him for preemptively neutralizing it. I wouldn't even want it as an optional playstyle because I can't let one playstyle turn my main focus of the game into an experience of fault/shame/punishment. Even so, the player who wishes to avoid combat would still find evasion to be as important of a tactic as combat. I understand strategic thinking might not fit in your game, but I'm not sure why you think this kind of element would constitute fault/shame/punishment. Those are something I'd normally associate with excessive difficulty and/or fundamentally unfair things (like police in GTA spawning in physically impossible ways behind your back, but not in front of you). When the enemy has weak spots like communication, their other difficulty could be made correspondingly higher. So depending on the difficulty tuning, you could have roughly the same amount of action, but more tension through another (orthogonal) type of challenge. If the player can just barely defeat five enemies straight up, it's hardly less intense when there are 20 enemies in total, and the player must make the right calls to avoid fighting 10 of them, to evade/delay/distract five, and beat the remaining five. The strategic part need not always be calm pre-fight planning. Say you run into a squad of enemies you weren't expecting. Both sides open fire and take cover. Now do you take the risk of immediately rushing in and try to wipe them out before they can call for help / coordinate an attack / ... , or fight more carefully and whittle them down while accepting that more enemy might come, or do you try to break contact? And if you want to break contact, should you first try to take out their communications so they can't tell other enemies which direction you were last seen going?

There'd also be security cameras to shoot, right? If I put stuff like this into the picture I'd probably have a simple 1-click item that took care of it. Like, an EMP pulse with a 30 meter radius that lasts 20 seconds. Reinforcements would still come, just not as many. That would be the shooter's approach. Another approach would be to have technology that locates all coms devices in view so the player can neutralize them or their user. That would be the silent-tactical approach and would focus only on sequential elimination of the prime targets rather than spending time gathering intel on their location. I say silent because it would require silencers so the dude indoors with a headset doesn't immediately get on the radio... he'd just come outside to investigate. If I really wanted to get into this diversion of combat I'd throw in a spy approach where you rely on stealth and daggers. This would lead to the creation of class mechanics, and an enemy that is fun and balanced for all class types. A bit of a detraction from my main focus, but sometihng I wouldn't turn down if it could be done right.

Pseudokai: Reinforcements also give you a chance to act quickly, hide, and find a strategy to wipe them out. Hopefully, of course, reinforcements will eventually stop coming in from the same door and opt for their own strategy, which adds more of a thrill to the game.

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Original post by Stroppy Katamari What I'd really like would be that the enemy had an explicit system of command and communication, not an inexplicable "global awareness" like in GTA. Squad and platoon leaders you can kill, putting all under their command in chaos for a moment until someone takes charge again. Radios and phone lines you can destroy, so the enemy won't know in advance you are coming, or can't send timely reinforcements to a unit you are taking apart. Normal enemy grunts wouldn't need to be very dangerous, as the danger would come from the fact that the enemy would try to do all sorts of pincer movements and e.g. trap you between two whole infantry squads...

As cool as that does all sound, actually balancing would be very hard. How many games have you played where the designer has put something cool in, but it is much simpler just to shoot the enemy than try and do what you are meant to. On the other hand, if it was impossible to do it without knocking out the phone lines etc. it would become a necessary task that you just had to do first. Even the perfect balance has its complications - there is no fun if the game explicitly says, "Why not take out their phones" but it probably won't occur to most players to do it without such prompt.

Keep in mind that it is entirely reasonable that the backup would know where to go if you shoot the radio or the cameras. You can monitor the signal from both such that you know when the signal stops and something is up. You can also have tracking tags on your men, so if the radio gets shot, they send investigatory backup to the local of the team that had the radio, via the tracking tags on the team. Heck you could even have life sign monitors on the team such that the backup group knows when men start dropping.

EMP could take out all of that at once, such that the tracking tags can't relay the location, but they will still know something is very ip because every one's signal just cut out.

(BTW, EMP lasts far longer than 20 seconds and is often permanent, repair/replace worthy damage.)

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Original post by thk123 Quote: Original post by Stroppy Katamari What I'd really like would be that the enemy had an explicit system of command and communication, not an inexplicable "global awareness" like in GTA. Squad and platoon leaders you can kill, putting all under their command in chaos for a moment until someone takes charge again. Radios and phone lines you can destroy, so the enemy won't know in advance you are coming, or can't send timely reinforcements to a unit you are taking apart. Normal enemy grunts wouldn't need to be very dangerous, as the danger would come from the fact that the enemy would try to do all sorts of pincer movements and e.g. trap you between two whole infantry squads... As cool as that does all sound, actually balancing would be very hard. How many games have you played where the designer has put something cool in, but it is much simpler just to shoot the enemy than try and do what you are meant to. On the other hand, if it was impossible to do it without knocking out the phone lines etc. it would become a necessary task that you just had to do first.

Only when there was only one right way. In which case, why have enemy communication and command mechanics at all? Level design has to set up situations where the "best choice" is not obvious. See my earlier example (after running unexpectedly into enemy) of such a tactical choice.

Ideally, different players would be effective through different tactics at least some of the time. After all, the players are not equally good at sniping, assault, disengaging, predicting enemy movements, sneaking, quick thinking, and so on.

If the game allows you to attempt to disengage and escape from an enemy that is too strong for you to beat, for whatever reason (maybe you made a bad tactical decision) then it's possible to challenge the player a bit more than otherwise.

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Even the perfect balance has its complications - there is no fun if the game explicitly says, "Why not take out their phones" but it probably won't occur to most players to do it without such prompt.

After the game has presented the mechanics to the player in a tutorial or (equivalent) integral part of the game, why would they not think of it? That's like asserting Crysis players would not remember to use the cloak without prompting.

It would be far from feasible to try to accurately model the entire enemy presence in a given region. As has been said, even ignoring technical limitations you'd have a nightmare of a time balancing the responses to that they seem reasonable and strategically sound. I spent three drunken hours one night camping the bottom of a rappelling line in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, shooting a gun in the air then picking off the terrorists as their "mount rope" animation cycled.

It would be better to have a sort of spawn policy, dependent on the locality. Response time and magnitude would depend on what happened and where. If an enemy fires a flare, a chopper will arrive shortly with a few riflemen, a medic, a mechanic and a communications officer on it, in order to evaluate the situation and either deal with it or radio for a more appropriate response. If an enemy gets to a radio and reports the situation accurately, then a more focussed and effective response will be forthcoming. If you blow up a checkpoint that can be seen with binoculars from a nearby command post, you can expect a heavy response, whereas a similar attack three miles past the far ridge won't be detected until the plume of smoke gets noticed.

So have enemies spawn and add as appropriate, and model only the part of the world that the player can actively see. If you set up a timed demolition charge, then sneak over to the place where the "reinforcements" would likely come from, then you can watch some of your enemies depart to investigate, then deal with the rest. If you are at ground zero when it blows, then you get an add that presumably came from that location.

Unless you're going with the "finite enemy presence" angle, then there's no need to model both sides of the operation. It can simply be assumed that the population of the area has been reinforced by the time you get there.

Right. Elegance in the simulation is critical.

The best way to think of it is not in the scope of unit AI, but rather, the army AI. It's a virtual entity that defines the behavior and simulation, its not troops.

Awareness isn't really a good thing.

I remember Oblivion's Guards.

They were this omnipotent force that made playing the game as a bad guy ZERO FUN WHATSOEVER.

I'd also prefer wiping out a bunch of people's underground lair and then being able to use it as my own hideout instead of having to fight them off every single time I go there.
That'd be lame.

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Original post by Stroppy Katamari Quote: Original post by thk123 Quote: Original post by Stroppy Katamari What I'd really like would be that the enemy had an explicit system of command and communication, not an inexplicable "global awareness" like in GTA. Squad and platoon leaders you can kill, putting all under their command in chaos for a moment until someone takes charge again. Radios and phone lines you can destroy, so the enemy won't know in advance you are coming, or can't send timely reinforcements to a unit you are taking apart. Normal enemy grunts wouldn't need to be very dangerous, as the danger would come from the fact that the enemy would try to do all sorts of pincer movements and e.g. trap you between two whole infantry squads... As cool as that does all sound, actually balancing would be very hard. How many games have you played where the designer has put something cool in, but it is much simpler just to shoot the enemy than try and do what you are meant to. On the other hand, if it was impossible to do it without knocking out the phone lines etc. it would become a necessary task that you just had to do first. Only when there was only one right way. In which case, why have enemy communication and command mechanics at all? Level design has to set up situations where the "best choice" is not obvious. See my earlier example (after running unexpectedly into enemy) of such a tactical choice. Ideally, different players would be effective through different tactics at least some of the time. After all, the players are not equally good at sniping, assault, disengaging, predicting enemy movements, sneaking, quick thinking, and so on.

However, for that to work, you must first create a game in which the player expects to be able do to anything that they can think of. If a game does not explicitly state that X is possible, most people won't run up to the telephone box and hitting it on the off chance that this game allows you to do that.