Territory control and radars [fixed poll]

I don't know if your coding so much as ripping existing code out of one building and pasting it on another. But the modeling is already done... Use Mayama's(huh I swear chris made one too) mini radar as a relay. Bump the size up to building size and use it to download research.

 

I kinda prefer the 'no building in enemy territory' idea over the 'need radars ot build' idea, mostly because it basically does what spamming a few missile turrets around the place would do. if you like, you could change it to 'radars get anti-building missle launchers which bombard any buildings in their range, but are shot down by enemy radars' if you want something less forced/more cool looking. My problem with ninja buildings is mostly that it doesn't really make sense that you can waltz into enemy territory and plop down a rax and suddenly you have all the infantry ever spawning in. The idea of needing some sort of fight to occur before you do that seems better to me. If you win the fight that's well and good, but you should have to fight, not simply rely on poor information transfer which is a limitation of the game.

Yeah you don't really want to have bases replaced by radars, but I was thinking it'd be maybe a bit more involved than that. Upgrading the armor could add like a ring of barricades around it and maybe an armor shell over it? I can model that pretty easily, you'd just spawn the armored prop over the existing radar, so it'd be a bigger building. If you had a progression along the lines of radar > armored radar >armored radar with teleporter/spawn point > armored radar with teleporter/spawnpoint/armory crates > armored radar with teleporter/spawnpoint/armory crates + couple of L2 MLs on the outer hull then you wouldn't be adding too much functionality I don't think, and you could also make it much more expensive to upgrade a radar with all of that than to just place the buildings. A rax/radar/armory + some walls and turrets might cost about 1000-1500 if you place a lot of turrets and walls, and would take up a lot of space, a fully upgraded radar could cost say 2500-3000, but be much tougher and more compact. Maybe make it specifically resistant to artillery or something, and it could also potentially lock down a res node too. You wouldn't want to always use them, but they'd be worth putting on key points, and you could upgrade them over time from any ref. Upgrading refs into radars is a really good idea by the way.

The spotting buildings idea is also a good one, if you make it really telegraph the idea, I'd be entirely OK with that as a replacement for no building in enemy territory.

I think if the enemy places a rax/vf/major base building in range of your radar, you should get a really visible/audible warning and a special ping on the minimap. That would be OK with me, gives people a good chance to respond to an attack, doesn't base the ninja tactic entirely on communication being really hard ingame/the minimap being really tiny and shitty/not being able to see a giant fucking building unless you're close enough/manually call it out.

 

I'm kinda neutral about the ninja rax stuff. One one hand, it adds lots of dynamics to the game, but on the other hand requiring a fight for something as powerful as a spawnpoint next to the enemy base makes sense for such a big advantage. It is sometimes harder to get an apc to the enemy base than for a single player to sneak past. My real problem is that the radius of a radar's detection is just too huge for a no build zone.

Of course, my idea fixes all the problems. You should really think about adding it to the poll, since it's so smart. :p

 

I can't edit the poll, annoyingly.

The radius can be tweaked, but considering the cost of radars I don't think the detection radius is that over the top.

I mean, it'd cover just under a quarter of canyon if you placed it on the edge of a base, which is not that much, it's easily walking distance, and there are maps much bigger than canyon. You could make it a bit smaller, but I wouldn't make it much smaller.

 

If a no build zone was implemented, I'd make the current radius 3/5ths to 4/5ths the current size.

 

4/5ths sounds ok, 3/5ths might be pushing it but I might be being a little conservative in my radar range estimation.

 

I know that a radar dead-center next to the fountain in Homeland covers almost all the map, definitely to the midpoint of each side. Use that as a point of reference, if you will.

 

Hrr, I can't because homeland is a weird map, very dense, it's like saying a radar in the middle of atomic would cover the entire map, which it might well do, despite the fact that atomic isn't full with 64 players.

Empires maps mess with scale a bit, needs to be compared to a usual mostly open map I think.

 

Well if you look at the .txt file for it, then you'll know the information of the minimap, specifically the horizontal length of the map. The length is around 20000 units. If you place a radar near the middle, it almost touches the right side and goes past the left side because you can't place it dead center, and if you mentally shift it dead center, it would go slightly past the bounds of the map. Assuming that the radar is made with nice, round numbers, I'd wager that the radius of the radar's zone is 10000 units.

From there, you can figure how large it would cover for most other maps. To validate this, I'll see if I can estimate the size it would take on canyon. By taking the maximum x value for the size of the map and subtracting the lower x value, I find that the width of canyon is about 28000 units. So, a radar should cover about a third of the map's width. On canyon, the minimap lines up directly with the actual map and it has five grid widths, so it should cover about 1.67 grids width on the minimap. Placing the radar dead on vertical line on the minimap, it fully covers one and goes about .66 through the other.

So the radius covered by a radar is 10000 units. With that bit of knowledge, it's pretty straightforward to find how much of a map it'll cover.

Is that a good reference point, or is a tad too abstract?

A much faster and easier way would be to just run the map locally and place a radar though.

 

Well, for one thing, if the radius covered was 10000, then the radar would cover a circle 20000 units in diameter, or, nearly all the playable area of canyon except the corners, which would be more than 1.6 grid squares in width.

And they aren't that powerful, so check your numbers again.

 

Canyon, according to the .txt file, is a tad over 28000 units in width. When I was referring to the width, the diameter is 2.33 grids on the minimap and the radius is 1.66.

Look, I even took screenshots.



So, actually the distance covered in one direction would be closer to 25/14ths grid lengths. Which is the number of grids multiplied by the radius of the radar divided by the width of the map in total, or (5*10000)/28000. I just called it 5/3rds earlier because it's easier to calculate and good enough for a sanity check.

From those screenshots, three radars would cover the whole map easily with some overlap. One hypothetical radar dead center would cover a good portion of the map, 10000^2*pi/((12926+15486)*(15360+13056)), which comes to almost 40% (area of the radar's coverage divided by total area of the map)

 

I know, but it's all for reference. Most players know about how big Canyon is in game. If you tell me to walk 10000 units or the distance of a radar to do something, I'd be entirely lost. If, however, you told me to walk about the distance from the NF base to the A3 or C4 refinery on Canyon, I'd have a pretty good idea because I can imagine how large that distance is in game, even if we weren't playing Canyon, simply because I've ran that distance more than enough times on Canyon.

The net effect is that the radius of the radar is from NF's base on Canyon to the A3 refinery, which is easy to visualize.

 

Normally I don't watch players until they disappear. If they're almost that far away from me already, then they're way too far for me to care or even notice.

 

Well you could use the same model but put different logos on it etc, but imo territory buildings should be medium costprice but you have to upgrade it with shit tons to make it good etc etc.

Making a radar the territory building would just be to pricy.

changing the radar costs would just totally imba the game

 

No it isn't, that's just the default, VIPER uses like 8-9000 and I think EPIC uses 12000. No-one uses the default there.

 

or maybe make the radar detect range much smaller, lower the cost, use a smaller model, like the one that Mayama made.

 

lowering the cost? Would be stupid imo, research gunna be free sometime soon, so imo you'd get midgame to fast. Early game is fun to play lets not ruin that.