to do with minimaps

posted on August 18th, 2011, 10:06 am

You know how by default you can see enemy stations when you scouted the area and aren't doing that now? well what I'm suggesting is for people to see stations AND ships at their last known position.you how in Star trek it says "thisistheir last know position;
- Ok then, Engage."
and I would think it would add more depth to the game
PS. they also say most of the tyme.
"AAARRRG, they're gone sir .no where in sensor rage .

posted on August 18th, 2011, 10:15 am

i like the idea too.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 10:19 am

Maybe it can be toggleable but default is with the option

posted on August 18th, 2011, 2:23 pm

Honestly I think this would mostly just confuse noobs.  If you think about it most good players NEVER stop moving their ships and never stop building new ones so the information of their fleet location and size will be obsolete after 1 minute.

Now, a way that this could be good would be if they 1. had a good animation change to indicate that it's just a "shadow" and 2. faded after about 30 seconds.  Then something like the old canaveral probe would look really cool when it saw the enemy fleet.  But I don't think the devs have time to invent a whole new animation/fade mechanic...yet.  Maybe someday though

posted on August 18th, 2011, 2:27 pm

I don't know, maybe the ships can just... disappear after some time without any animation.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 2:37 pm

Honestly I think this would mostly just confuse noobs.  If you think about it most good players NEVER stop moving their ships and never stop building new ones so the information of their fleet location and size will be obsolete after 1 minute.

i disagree, after a battle, once you have put all your attention into running away, you can get a rough count of how big their fleet was at the end. and as time goes on you add your knowledge into the equation to guess how many ships they have at present.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 3:29 pm

Right, but then if they were retreating their ships you get 2 possibilities:

1.  The battle stayed in mostly one place or your retreated.  Now the ghost of every ship that retreated is stacked on the edge of your vision.  It's hard to tell how many there were, but you can tell which way they went which will help you to learn how their ships are pathing home and uncover any hidden repair bases you didn't know about.  The problem with this is, I don't think players should get this info so easily.  Tracking your enemy's retreat lines is a part of scouting and strategy, and I like the ability to place forward repair yards whose only defense is the fact that the enemy hasn't detected them yet.

2. The battle went back and forth or your enemy retreated.  Since all the sensor ghosts are stacked in one place, a single scout moving around can easily wipe them all away.  The only time you will get a clean picture of the enemy fleet is when your seeing ship dies.  This introduces a new kind of micro, making sure your ships don't accidentally advance and wipe your intelligence data which I think is WAY too much to be thinking about during a battle.  The whole gathering and use of data is too sketchy and not enough fun.

So, an ability that gives you some information but not full vision would have to be used in places where you don't have vision.  Perhaps something like a radar dish that sweeps in a circle, showing you where the enemy is once every 30+ seconds when the line passes over them would be cool.  Or like the sensor station in SC2 where it knows something's there but doesn't show you what it is.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 4:09 pm

those are good concerns for some cases. especially battles that take place near your territory. but there are times when it would be useful. such as the battle happened away from territory, or when you retreated all your ships from the enemy territory and they didnt follow.

about giving away where yards are: you can already figure that out by watching which way their ships fly off when they give repair orders. or which way their fleet flies after a drawn battle.

radar ideas have also been suggested before, and i liked them. i liked the way total annihilation did it, with radar stations putting minimap dots for units in range, but not showing them on the main map or allowing auto firing.

i think that could work in fo as well, so a radar station would let you know of any uncloaked fleets coming towards you. would change raiding, some rebalancing might be needed.

posted on August 18th, 2011, 6:39 pm

Guys, with all due respect... You're very nice and intelligent people but I belive its time for you guys to learn to read.
Any problem about rescouting, false numbers and anything related dies off with this

I don't know, maybe the ships can just... disappear after some time without any animation.

If you like maybe we can have the ships a different colour the normal so noobs won't get confused.
And if the problem persists, we have this quote.

Maybe it can be toggleable but default is with the option

Second as a reply to this smart man.

1.  The battle stayed in mostly one place or your retreated.  Now the ghost of every ship that retreated is stacked on the edge of your vision.  It's hard to tell how many there were, but you can tell which way they went which will help you to learn how their ships are pathing home and uncover any hidden repair bases you didn't know about.  The problem with this is, I don't think players should get this info so easily.  Tracking your enemy's retreat lines is a part of scouting and strategy, and I like the ability to place forward repair yards whose only defense is the fact that the enemy hasn't detected them yet.

But then you can turn this off on small maps, and on big maps it gives a new strategy. you can actually lead your enemy by making the think you're going some-place you're not; like we saw happen so many times in history.

everything else on this quote requires this resolve

I don't know, maybe the ships can just... disappear after some time without any animation.

.

i think that could work in fo as well, so a radar station would let you know of any uncloaked fleets coming towards you. would change raiding, some rebalancing might be needed.

more like annihilate it. this basically means that if an uncloaked race comes to raid; he'll have a very nice welcoming party that will turn minor raiding into game-changing battles. I am not for that. anyway... we only saw evidence that they used in a few Star Trek episode, and even that, the one that was actually really used for military was owned by the dominion, WHICH ALREADY HAVE ONE. So... no. toggleable at best

[Tryptic]

posted on August 18th, 2011, 11:01 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on August 18th, 2011, 11:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm really glad to be called nice and intelligent, and I hope I don't reverse that opinion by saying this. 

I'm sorry we didn't say it clearly, but Myles and I did read those posts.  The reason we didn't reply is because they don't solve the problem at all.

The problem is that the sensor ghosts would only be created when ships LEAVE your vision, which means their placement would be erratic and confusing, not to mention ugly.  It would be difficult to get a clear view of your enemy's fleet, but more importantly it wouldn't be better than what we have right now.

Imagine a small fleet chasing a ship.  The ship is faster, so it pulls ahead and manages to get out of sight, now that player has a set of sensor ghosts spread out over a small stretch of space.  Then the ship has to turn to get around an obstacle, the enemies come back into range.  It pulls away again, another set of ghosts is made.  It doesn't matter if they only last for 30 seconds, they still don't tell him anything he didn't already know and the information they do offer is incorrect.

Also Fleet Ops ships sometimes drift before they explode, and while they aren't selectable, the game engine still thinks they're there.  So you could get sensor ghosts of ships that almost got away, but in fact the real ship died.

As for radar ruining raiding... I don't know.  On the one hand, I think it could be done so that everything worked fine.  On the other hand, that could take a lot of work that might be better spent elsewhere.  Radar in Total Annihilation was awesome, especially when you got to the point of loading radar jammers into air transports and hovering them over your armies

There are several ways to balance radar mechanics.  One is the obvious, the fact that it costs money to build the sensor station in the first place and that money could have been used for ships instead.  The way TA eventually balanced it was by making radar cost resources every second (which worked for that resource system but wouldn't work for Fleet Ops)  If I recall correctly, at the top of the tech tree was a building that cost 1000 energy/second but modified your units' AI so that they could fire at enemies just by having them on radar.  Man that was awesome.    I have fond memories of shooting down enemy construction aircraft with my buzzsaw rapid-fire artillery cannon. 

posted on August 19th, 2011, 6:56 am

Yes but sensors can also detect registry #s so what happens if the sensor ghost disappears if they detect the ships with the same registry. even Rom and Dom ships have names. (even if dom names are like "Scout 3") I'm pretty sure that by this time they managed to know Borg ships one from the other by now.(after all borg also have name. "Sphere 35467" )

posted on August 19th, 2011, 10:11 am

There are several ways to balance radar mechanics.  One is the obvious, the fact that it costs money to build the sensor station in the first place and that money could have been used for ships instead.  The way TA eventually balanced it was by making radar cost resources every second (which worked for that resource system but wouldn't work for Fleet Ops)  If I recall correctly, at the top of the tech tree was a building that cost 1000 energy/second but modified your units' AI so that they could fire at enemies just by having them on radar.  Man that was awesome.    I have fond memories of shooting down enemy construction aircraft with my buzzsaw rapid-fire artillery cannon. 

the cost per second worked well in ta cos of the energy resource being really easy to get. it probably wouldn't work here. as spending dil per second would probably be weird. maybe have a special for some units that takes some dil/sup and buys a fixed time of minimap dots for a long range.

in the top of the tech tree building was the targeting facility, and it was absolutely useless, it cost so much resources and time to build, and on top of that you needed a fusion reactor dedicated just to powering it. and it gave you practically nothing in return.

to get guardians and missile forests firing at their full range you could just use cheap air scouts, like the peeper/fink. mobile missile units (lets be frank, sams) could rarely hit air scouts. 1 targeting facility cost the same as hundreds (probably even thousands) of air scouts.

and for long range artillery, the buzzsaw and vulcan were sadly useless, the vulcan couldnt hit anything after 40 kills cos of its bug, and both of them cost way too much and were useless in a real fight, as your opponent could build 50 bombers with the same money and flatten your buzzsaw just before complete. plus they had shittier range, you couldnt even hit people on other islands on some maps. the (far more useful) bertha and timmy could be radar targeted well enough by clicking on the minimap dots to fire anyway, so no need for the silly targeting facility.

buzzsaws were purely for fun games, but when they get vet ranks they were incredibly accurate, and hitting conairs is definitely believable. you could hit moving jeffys with a ranked buzzsaw, it would lead the target perfectly.

posted on August 19th, 2011, 5:46 pm

---Fleet Ops first---
If you think about it, the game already has some mechanics like this.  The Feds have canaveral sensor synergy and sensor nebs, with the limitation being that they can't use it very often and it has to be microed.  This does somewhat defeat the purpose of radar, which is to allow you to pay attention to other things because you know you'll be warned if the enemy is coming.

As for sensor ghosts, I can see how it would work great if the game tagged individual ships and only allowed one ghost per real ship.  Unfortunately this is way beyond the current ability of the game engine and would take a ton of work to set up.

I'm in favor of having something like it, but I think that the effect should be linked to something other than vision.  If you could launch a probe or a sensor sweep somewhere where you don't have vision, you'd get a pretty layout of the enemy's fleet that you could use, instead of a jumble of ghosts stacked in one place.

---TA time---
Oh yeah the targeting facility was terrible for playing the game.  I just mean that as a gameplay mechanic it was years ahead of its time and was part of what inspired me to learn more about making video games.  Same with the RFAs, they weren't practical they were just freaking awesome.

My friend and I used to experiment with the vulcan and buzzsaw in long AI games.  By positioning his aircraft properly, we could get my RFA to fire at it and hit bases at 3 times its maximum range.

Damn, I wish Supreme Commander had gotten the kind of love that TA got.  It had so much potential before the great travesty that was SupCom2.

-----Stop.




---Hammer time---

posted on August 19th, 2011, 6:31 pm

i dont think supcom(s) could ever live up to ta, i dont think any game could, seeing as ta left such a strong memory in the minds of gamers. our expectations are just so high. the bar is so high that it would take something truly phenomenal to top it. supcom 1 wasnt a bad game, it was a good game, it's just in the shadow of its big brother we all have fond memories of.

there were so many of those awesome tricks in ta, such as shooting arty beyond it range, offscreening, jeffy bombing etc, the game was rich both in intended gameplay, and in unintended gameplay (which was really lucky for the game).

posted on August 27th, 2011, 5:19 pm

I think it would be best with a green arrow showing the ship's direction of movement when last seen (a green circular arrow for mining miners) and a dark yellow line of text under the dot showing the ship's center saying "Last seen: (time here)"
Also, togglable so that I don't hav to deal with it if I don't want to. Definitely should disappear after less than a minute or so, with a button on the minimap to change how long they disappear after (possibly make miners excluded from disappearing automatically, since they usually just keep mining the same moon until attakked.)