4 replies to this topic

[Stargazer86]

This is a pretty standard concept in many games. You're only able to see enemy units that your own units are capable of seeing, thus simulating the "Fog of War". Many genre of games use this, from RTS games like Starcraft and Company of Heroes to FPS games such as Brothers in Arms and Natural Selection.

In these games, the only way to obtain information on enemy unit composition, tactics, and whereabouts is to send out a scouting unit to gather these details. For example, in Starcraft, a player will often send one or two units around the map and into an opponents base to see what they're doing and to gauge how to counter it. This is what we had with light mechs before ECM. Without a mech scouting or spotting, your team would not be able to see where the enemy was or what mechs they had.

However, now that we have ECM, this concept is no longer present. Because ECM inhibits target communication between scouts and the rest of the team, you no longer gain the benefit of the information they obtain (Unless you have teamspeak, in which case it's likely relegated to providing grid coordinates and a guess at how many mechs there are.) Now, it's become a guessing game. I can't think of another game the forcefully blocks data sharing in this manner, It doesn't lead to fun gameplay when, despite properly sending out units to scout, you still get no useful info from it. Could anyone provide a good example of a game that enacts this same sort of mechanic?

Edited by Stargazer86, 06 December 2012 - 07:29 PM.

[Kaspirikay]

kinda like real life

[Stargazer86]

Kaspirikay, on 06 December 2012 - 07:31 PM, said:

kinda like real life

Real life =/= a game.

If you'd like the game to be like real life, allow everyone to use hacks. Because who plays fair in real war?

[Cache]

Stargazer86, on 06 December 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

Real life =/= a game.

True. But this is also kinda like BattleTech--a game where this sort of thing tends to happen.

[Vermaxx]

I didn't know ECM did anything to text chat.

The clear message I have gotten from this game is that 'you need to use voip.' They just haven't made that integral for you. The end goal is teams (whether prebuilt or not) who ALWAYS have access to voip, whether or not they use it.

You get all the same info as before with ECM if you are on a headset. You can still tell your team what you see, where, and how many.

Frankly I suspect text chat works too. The game has been missing lines of text recently (possibly due to ecm) but people still see what I typed even though I can't.