So you often hear about increasing the micro potential of FAF and tinkering with things like unit abilities (my good friend the loya) but I sorta feel like that’s a dead end. I think FAF would do a lot better to dig deeper into the macro aspect and to me the easiest way to do that would to make intel itself more of a battlefield.
We already have the initial seeds of this system with stealth. Units under stealth do not show up under intel and require direct vision. Jamming in theory fits it but PERSONALLY I still say the only productive jamming unit is thunderhead. UEF either needs cheap units (like scouts) which can be put into unit mixes to mess with lazy scouting and blip counting or it needs jamming on spammable units. Similar to stealth this enforces having to get direct vision on the enemy and punishes lazy scouting.
So the big question would then be about what to do with Aeon and Seraphim. My initial thought was to turn the uef/cybran situation on its head and have direct vision be where Aeon and Seraphim could get benefits. I’m not sure how exactly you would make it work, but if anyone ever played the old Dune RTS games there were units that could “produce” copies of units for basically zero cost but they could shoot and would die to 1 shot.
While having cheap copies shoot would be horrible for balance (my good friend snipers), having phantom units that make armies look way scarier would still be a sick counterintelligence ability. Have 10 fake obsidians that cost 5 mass each and maybe cost 5 energy each to run(?) sitting with your ACU to make people worried about a push.
To make it possible to “fight” against the only thing I could think of was that the units wouldn’t show radar signatures if in the fog of war. I wasn’t sure if it was actually possible to have an icon show up in visual range but no gray dot show up in the fog of war, but that would be a great solution and would make you curious if maybe you just missed the units before your scout went over them.
I don’t know of another idea so I wouldn’t even care if both sera and aeon would have the system, it would also benefit their snipers/gcs/ilshies and could act as oc scarecrows for sera t2 stage.
All in all, kinda get tired of the lazy scouting meta and think this would be a really interesting way to introduce some new gameplay element to FAF that could be experimental without directly destroying the unit balance itself.