Full/Extra fog of war

[Pumpkin]

What's the difference between "Full fog of war" and "extra fog of war"?

Full fog of war says:
"Your team must already have ships on a planet to see enemy ships on it, and you must scout planets to see who owns them."

Extra fog of war adds:
"Scouts must be present for the minimap to show enemies."

I tried both and I can't tell the difference. I need scouts to have the left-side planetary summary (quantity of ships by type and mark) with both.

[Radiant Phoenix]

The minimap is a separate thing that I use exactly never in real gameplay. I don't even remember the hotkey or button or whatever.

In some older versions, it was displayed in the upper-right like a standard RTS, but now it's an overlay.

[Pumpkin]

Oh, yeah, I think it's 'T' hotkey, right? Yeah, the gray overlay with dots of color that is barely larger than the full zoomed-out view and provide much less information... Oh, please, Chris/Keith, remove it or change it to a true feature... One day... When you'll be back to AI War (I mean, SBR is already great while unfinished, carry on... but come back, one day ; )

Sorry, I... "ramble". (Say what, wordreference? there is no word more precise than this? Well, maybe it's ok. Let use "ramble")

So the Extra fog of war isn't that fun... Folks, I bet we can come up with a good idea. Are you with me?
How can we make the extra fog of war more challenging?

There is three "vision" for ships: blind, normal and scout.
Some examples:
- blind: the RRebuilders traveling alone in hostile territory, the human resistance fighters provided by the rebelling human colony, some buildings...
- scout: all the scout ships, of course, plus the scout starships, the spirecraft version, all the golems (yep!) and... I guess it's all. Oh, one kind of younglings... commando? Maybe. The OCStation also provide scout coverage; we notice it when we loose one and the planetary summary disappears.
- normal: everything else.

All right, maybe a quick-and-dirty way of increasing (not really improving) the extra FoW would be to downgrate the normal vision to the blind vision: if you don't have a scout with your army, you're, well... blind. And if it's killed, you're good to fall back.
Sounds like planetary cloaker everywhere... Oh, wait, there is an AI that does it. Anyway, as I said, "quick-and-dirty". I'm sure we can refine this.

Damn! The normal "full" FoW hiding the planetary summary (list of ships and quantities) when no scout is really good: you're not blind, but your understanding of the battle may be wrong because you can't measure armies. You're good, Arcen, you're good...

While I'm thinking about it, I believe there is no many ways of making a new FoW. We can't downgrade the scout ability, because it's the higher intel gathering tool, we can't downgrade the blind ability because it's already the lowest intel gathering... So we can just modify the normal vision.

I was thinking about a sort of radius of vision around ships, like in a common RTS, and the scouts would have an "infinite" vision range. While it seems to solve the increased FoW, I think it would be too long to code for too few improvement.

Let's state that in another way. We need to hide some information when the player has no scout. Which informations are we able to hide?

Hey, rather than modifying the "combat" FoW (which is already good with the hiding of the planetary summary), maybe we can modify the "exploration" FoW. For example, once a planet is scouted, it displays the structures in it (guard posts, etc) both in the galaxy map and in the planet map (with the position of the structures). Proposal is: hide the structures if no scout (and no non-blind ship) is in!

Well, maybe it would be a bit harsh. To tamper that, there is my MkII proposal: if there is no ship/scout in a planet, but the planet has been scouted once, the galactic map display the major structures (GPosts, Barracks, Black Hole Machines, GravyDrills, etc) but the planetary view is empty, and we can't know where the structures are, or if there are other unlisted structures (wormhole GPosts, for example).

* * *

Well, maybe I did too much. Anyway, what do you think? More ideas? Criticisms of mine?
Come on! I'm sure we can make something interesting out of this abandoned feature!

[CaptainTaz]

While I don't think I'd use it, I think having a limited FOV sounds like an interesting idea.

[Traveller]

I don't see how this would significantly change strategies--except for maybe, maybe, in astro train games.  Scouting is important enough that you always want scouts, bare minimum, on every world bordering yours (so you can see imminent threat) and preferably deeper in so you can track the threatfleet.  You only lose your scouts if some loser is running around with tachyon trains, and that's bad enough as-is.

So besides that you have a lot of added micro.  You don't want to send your scouts in first because tachyon towers.  You don't want to send them in last because then your ships have less info in the meantime.  Selecting them is a pain.  Their run-and-hide behavior is an even bigger pain (you want it on when scouting alone, but if you might need to retreat, you'd need to pull your scouts with you).

[Radiant Phoenix]

Well, maybe it would be a bit harsh. To tamper that, there is my MkII proposal: if there is no ship/scout in a planet, but the planet has been scouted once, the galactic map display the major structures (GPosts, Barracks, Black Hole Machines, GravyDrills, etc) but the planetary view is empty, and we can't know where the structures are, or if there are other unlisted structures (wormhole GPosts, for example).

This is bad because it promotes micro: you can still screenshot as soon when your scout is there, then consult the screenshot.

Actually, I think that a change we should make is in the opposite direction: you should still have your old (outdated) scout intel when the scout dies, and old (outdated) ship positions when you lose vision.