I appreciate all the feedback I''ve gotten from everyone on my various ideas. I think this will be the last big presentation of an idea, and I''d like to get your opinions about it... The typical fog of war implementation (at least for most overhead RTS''s) seems to be : * The rest of the map is black until you explore it * If you send a unit out to explore, it completes the map for you * Any completed part of the map that you are not actively aware of grays out, still showing you the terrain and the last known buildings and permanent features Since the game I''d like to make focusses heavily on units and buildings keeping contact with each other, I thought about what it might be like to send a unit out to patrol and not get a report on what''s out there until the unit comes back into your range. Then everything the unit saw updates itself in the radar map, but is grayed out. The radar screen will be rather large, and will be the primary interface for the game (for the commander, anyway). You can highlight units and warp into them if need be. But that isn''t really the focus of this post. I''d like to know what you think about not having contact at ALL with your units when they are not in contact with your station. When you send them out, they disappear until contact is re-established. To expand the range of contact, you basically build radar towers of various sizes and ranges that act as relays and provide a circular area of awareness. All other buildings also provide relaying and circular awareness but not to the extent of the radar towers. On particular unit, the AWACS, can also act as a relay and provide a circular awareness area, like a movable radar tower. But it must be in range of one of your buildings in order to report anything to you. If you send units out to patrol and they never return, you don''t know what happened to them. If you want to send builders out to assemble a radar tower or anything else, the radar screen will provide feedback on where you can build the structure and what other buildings it is in range of to act as a relay for, so you don''t build it in the wrong place. This chain of awareness paradigm affects everything. In your squad lists, any unit not in your chain of awareness is grayed out, and you don''t know its status nor can you issue commands to it. If you issue a command to a whole squad, any unit of that squad not in range won''t receive the command until the rest of the squad contacts that unit (so squads work best if they stay together) In essence, whatever you see in your chain of awareness is aware of each other, and it is possible to have more than one chain of awareness if there is a break in the communication (a radar tower gets destroyed, etc.). You can''t warp into craft that aren''t in your chain of awareness, and you can''t warp into command centers that you are out of range from. Other players that are out there in the field are cut off from communication (their chat lines don''t work, voice communication if DirectPlay is used will turn off, as a future design). Etc. etc. I know this will be complicated to implement, and there will be a lot of memory management for units that are collecting reconaissance data for their return trip. But when I think about the psychology of truly going out there and having no contact at all with your base, especially in a multiplayer setting, there is that extra level of urgency of getting back alive. I think it''s worth doing. What do you think? Too complicated? Think it would be too difficult to play? If it is too difficult in your opinion, I could just make it an option in the game and make it a StarCraft style fog of war game, giving the player a choice. Any and all feedback is appreciated, and thanks for reading this much! - WaveRider

If you have sufficient technology to build radar towers, why wouldn''t you be able to stay in contact with your reconaissance units via radio? The chain of awareness idea is pretty good, but make sure to simulate information imperfections. Radio operators need to interpret messages correctly, so there will be slight detail losses if the communication is purely verbal. If awareness is chained (passed from one unit to another), then there should be some loss in the translation and reinterpretation there as well - unless your comms equipment is 100% digital audio-video.

Work out the inconsistencies.

Radio contact equates to being in the circular awareness areas of a building in the chain. If you're not visible on the radar, you aren't in contact.

I know it's not realistic, it's just the gaming dynamic I chose.

There will be limited forms of communication outside the range (like a flare that tells the base where a downed pilot is, but everyone can see it, etc.).

I hadn't considered imperfections of transmission. I do think that would trouble up the game a bit, just like wanting your AI to perform the duties you assign without any misunderstanding.

I could see scripted missions where you are only in a craft, and that could present an interesting story element, but I'm not to that point yet.


[edited by - Waverider on June 12, 2002 1:17:47 PM]

Personally, I dislike fog of war. It doesn''t add a great deal to the gameplay, and in a modern/futuristic style setting it is completely unrealistic. If you have the technology to build an AWACS plane then you have the technology to know exactly what the battlefield looks like before you even commit any troops.

Note that I am not saying you should necessarily be able to see exactly what your opponent is doing at all times. But you should know what the terrain looks like, and probably where most of his larger buildings are.

This won't exactly be a Falcon-style game with realistic duplicates of existing technology. It will be a fictional world with technology we are familiar with, but just enough to make a game out of it.

Playing StarCraft online, I found plenty of circumstances where not being aware of what's going on out there created a problem for me and taught me to send out occasional patrols. The problem in Starcraft thought was that once you sent out a patrol and it got shot down, you still knew exactly what was there and could plan to deal with it. The kind of fog of war in what I'd like to do will force you to do a little more work to guarantee a successful reconaissance (sp?). You patrol must successfully return. It adds a few more variables to the game play that I think would make it more interesting.

For instance - you send out 3 jets on patrol and they don't return. Where did they get shot down, and what shot them down? Did they manage to destroy anything? You just don't know. This might make a player more eager to expand out there to see what's there. Or the player might build a bigger patrol. Meanwhile the other player saw your jets coming (or maybe he didn't - maybe his far out patrol took them out - only one jet returns and he doesn't know why) and doesn't know what you're going to do in response to shooting them down.

I know a lot of players would like technologies we are familiar with to be incorporated. Do you think they'd have a beef with not having access to the technology that we know we have today, and have it work the same way ours does?


[edited by - Waverider on June 12, 2002 1:29:53 PM]

I don't think it will be fun. All you are doing is making scouting harder, and therefore fewer people will get any benefit from doing it. I am guessing they'll just play defensively until their base gets so big they can't help but bump into their opponent.

Some problems:

AI: Lets say you set a whole shedload of waypoints for your jet. Then it wanders off and after the first waypoint, hits heavy resistance. Does it retreat, does it blindly carry on trying to fly its course, does it fight back.. what? The player has no way to guide it, so it is all up to the AI.

Losing units: what happens if you accidentally send a unit out of radar coverage, and don't set a waypoint for it to come back? will it just sit there until you expand your coverage? What if it just happens to be your last unit that can build radars?

Extra Micromanagement: Anything which adds micromanagement unnecessarily is bad in my opinion.

[edited by - Sandman on June 12, 2002 1:46:34 PM]

All good points.

Consider that both players have the same problems.

Scouting and patrolling will be important I think because if you don't do it, you aren't putting any controls on how the other player expands. If you sit in your base the whole game, the other player expands freely (as you do) until you encounter each other on land. Some players would find advantage to patrols. A squad of jets on patrol could take out builders as they are trying to assemble radar towers, for example. There is more purpose for sending out units than just to scout. Search and destroy and expansion are two other possibilities.

Falcon 3.0 allowed you to set up behaviors for jets on their patrols. This game could be the same way, telling the scouts to focus more heavily on successful reconaissance than search and destroy. That would guide the units to evade, retreat, attack or whatever. It all depends on how detailed you want to be as a commander. You don't HAVE to play that way if you don't want, but it could be there for you if you desire.

And not setting up a complete waypoint loop is just a mistake that needs correction. I can design the interface to make it easier to check the waypoint loop before it registers the command to the units.

I'm also wondering that given these difficulties, what players will do to effectively handle it. Is it more work than it should be, or will all that pass over once the players get the hang of it? Heck, I don't even know how I'd handle it.


[edited by - Waverider on June 12, 2002 1:58:19 PM]

Like Sandman (and I think Dauntless, too), I intensely dislike micromanagemtn. Your scouting paradigm is inconsistent with the tenets of modern warfare, and micromanagement is a bitch. Scouts should be "delegatable" units - assign them to patrol an area and report in regularly. If they spot anything unusual or come under attack, they should hav enough intelligence to report immediately and take evasive action (they should not independently consider the offensive).

Requiring players to handle every little detail takes away from their overall sense of strategy. Autonomous units should feed them with intel so they can make judicious decisions and wage a war, not fight a battle.

This isn''t really a simulation about modern warfare, though. It''s just a fictional world with a limited set of technologies to present a gaming dynamic.

If I wanted to simulate modern warfare I would have the player depend on satellites that he didn''t launch for reconaissance and provide commands to launch cruise missiles from ships he didn''t place, and send jets on sorties that last for 4 hours. That doesn''t seem like much fun to me.

The design of the game is also around a skirmish style model, not a full campaign. So this game really is about fighting battles, not waging wars.

I do understand the concern about micromanagement, but I guess there''s a line to draw between what is micromangement and what is fulfilling and necessary work that the player has to perform to complete the task at hand. I assume it will all become more clear if and when I produce a beta. If it works and people like it, then I guess it isn''t micromanagement. There may be a problem with the fact that the player that goes through more detailed planning will most likely come out the victor. But it seems that''s true for most overhead RTS''s out there now.

How about this for an interesting alternative:

Comm centers have an infinite range, (or at least a very large range) but true line of sight. You can communicate with any friendly unit within the line of sight of any of your comm center.

However, any unit which is communicating can also be detected by your opponent''s comm centers, provided that unit is within line of sight. If you want to get really clever, you could make it so that enemy units are only detected if they are within the line of sight of three separate comm centers, as these would be needed to triangulate the unit''s position.

This has a few interesting effects:

1. Hills become strategically important as locations to build your comm centers, as these give you the best coverage. Taking out an important comm center can also give you a tremendous advantage, as your opponent may find a whole load of his units are now out of contact.

2. Valleys and other such features can also be important, as they are likely to block coverage. However, bear in mind that they might block your coverage just as well as they block your opponent''s.

3. Stealth missions could be acheived by telling a unit to keep radio silence. By doing so, you lose the ability to tell the unit what to do, as well as losing the ability to see what it can see, but your opponent cannot pick it up with his comm centers either. You can break radio silence at any time, provided the unit is within your coverage area. Radio silence is also broken automatically when the unit is under attack by the enemy (not a lot of point in keeping it then is there?)

4. You could have some interesting units which scramble enemy radio signals, making blackout areas in which he cannot communicate with his opponent. Your AWACS type unit would also be useful, but it would be easily visible to your opponent.