Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%

@accidental_aeon said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

I oppose this change.

Scouting is already overpowered in FAF. Take a game like Age of Empires 2. There are no air scouts. If your opponent walls you can't even see what he is doing. You get only 1 scout for the early game and if you lose it then you are shit out of luck.

The only change I would make is to increase the water vision on t1 and t3 scouts. I sometimes fly a spy plane directly over a nuke sub/sub/commander and the plane doesn't even scout them. For some reason the water vision on scout planes is pathetic.

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If scouting is overpowered, then nerf scouts, not vision.

I think we've seen enough - we're picking this up. It won't be for the next release as it requires manually tweaking all the units in question. The only question now is: by how much should they be increased? We can talk about balancing units (like scouts) afterwards.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I'd suggest a blanket (absolute) change rather than a % based change - i.e. the issue I see is the lag between two units moving towards each other and this being picked up. This delay will be affected by the units' speed, rather than the visual range, hence the delay for the unit to show up once it is inside visual/intel range is the same whether you're talking about a unit with poor vision and intel or large intel/vision.

I also think it should cover buildings that give intel/vision, since they're also affected just to a lesser extent, with buildings getting half of the boost (since the building wont be moving, so the maximum potential distance a unit can move inside intel/visual before being spotted is reduced to just 1 unit's speed, instead of the combined speed of 2 units).

T1 tanks move between 3.4-3.7 speed while T1 mobile arti are <=2.9 speed. I'm assuming (without doing detailed testing to confirm) that there might be a lag of 1 second between a unit entering vision/radar and being picked up as such.

That would suggest an increase of around 6 might mean you almost always have visual/intel of a unit that you would expect to at current ranges. However it would also lead to lots of cases where you get visual/intel outside of the current range. I'd therefore go for half of this to strike a balance, i.e. a +3 increase to visual and intel of all mobile units, and then have structures having half this (so +1.5) benefit.

I also don't see a big issue with scouts or radar benefiting from such a blanket increase - in relative terms it'd effectively be a nerf by being an absolute increase to all units and hence meaning those units function slightly better without radar/land scouts than before.

I disagree on mostly all points on this. This is supcom which has its roots in ta, and shouldn't compare ourselves to a game like aoe2 which is a totally different game with a totally different lore. Back in those days you could see your enemies hours before you could shoot at them. Supcom has high tech weaponry that can shoot farther then they units can see. Playing ta you often got shot at and not seeing what was shooting at you.

If changing Intel is needed, this is not what needs to be done, if anything we need to reduce vision. If players want a balance like aoe2, they need to play that game (sorry harsh)

@veteranashe i enjoy ta and fa but they are very different especially in the area of intel. In my opinion we should not look to add back in issues from an old game. So your point is bad (sorry harsh).

I do think we need more vision to makeup for the fact that units take a bit longer to process enemy units incoming. Its specially an annoying experience when your t1 bomber can't see an engie that you scouted because there is a delay in when things "appear" in radar/game sometimes.

Overall would improve the experience as long as its a small tweak (5-15% more vision) because we dont want radars and scouts to become useless

FAF Website Developer

Even in top level games people hardly scout or look at what they scout. I have a hard time seeing how having more intel is going to hurt the game.

I support the proposed change. More unit vision range and especially T1 + T2 radar range is a good thing and should help reduce the absurd scout and t1 radar spam that we got so used to.

However, I can also see the argument about scouting being quite easy compared to other RTS games. Scout planes that can quickly fly over the map, are nearly impossible to intercept, and get full vision of an enemy's base or army are quite unique within the RTS community, and undoubtedly already very strong. So I would propose to exclude scout planes and some other high-visibility units (cruisers) from this change.

You should be rewarded by bringing scouts with your attack forces so that they can target enemies easier. Scouts are very cheap and good at their jobs. I really hope that vision range isn't buffed by more than 10%

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

@spikeynoob said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

@veteranashe i enjoy ta and fa but they are very different especially in the area of intel. In my opinion we should not look to add back in issues from an old game. So your point is bad (sorry harsh).

Hey it's not harsh and supcom corrects a big problem in ta with radar shown on screen and automatic radar targeting.

I'm still concerned about cybran stealth as well.

Maybe instead of vision give everything small radar?

@casternumerouno said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

Maybe instead of vision give everything small radar?

That would make all scouts and radars practically useless.


~ Stryker

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

We are literally speaking of radar that's just 1-3 clicks bigger than the view range so that the blip can show in around the time unit would enter the view range. Thinking that it will make radars and scouts useless is just laughable. Even more when we can compensate them with those 1-3 units of range.

Also it would require not buffing units that NEED radar to work, like hoplites, auroras etc. It's just one way to try skirting around the vision problem while also making sure that cybran ACU doesn't get utterly nerfed into oblivion.

No.

@melanol said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

No.

Thanks so much for this awesome contribution. You have truly added a lot to this conversation.

@casternumerouno said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

We are literally speaking of radar that's just 1-3 clicks bigger than the view range so that the blip can show in around the time unit would enter the view range.

Should've led with that instead, then. Now, that seems more reasonable...


~ Stryker

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Is anybody here not concerned about how this will impact stealth? I like the main idea, but we should be careful in its implementation.

Edit: Ok ye the radar idea could work.

Hmm. We should at least add this for ACU. I always hated how you can get gun on a giant death robot that can construct things in seconds, but somehow can not equip tech that existed before world war 2.

@chenbro101 said in Increase vision & radar ranges of all units by some 10-20%:

Is anybody here not concerned about how this will impact stealth? I like the main idea, but we should be careful in its implementation.

Radar doesn't pick up stealthed units. So, stealth remains unaffected by radar.
Vision, however, does counter stealth, so... that may be a problem.


~ Stryker

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Give the scouts an ability to fly at same speed as air fighters, except t2 sure. Switcher or support command that will limit their speed