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Thermal vision is generally superior to Nightvision and Standard vision on most maps in most situations. The game looks neat in Standard, but I find I'm spending most of my time in Thermal, simply to get the quickest sense of whether I have a clean shot, or if there are enemies at distance, possibly using ECM.
Proposal:
Part A:
Make all visual modes feel like a valid tactic, with advantages:
- Thermal is fine. Maybe it has more X-ray power than it needs. Heat trails and seeing who's cooking is useful. Consider environmental heat, so if someone enters an area that has just had a major firefight, that region might have some elevated ambient temperatures in some areas.
- Standard needs improving. This might be less the case if mechs stood out more distinctly from their environments, particularly at range, but that might entail a heavier graphics burden to handle more dynamic shadows, light, environments getting distured, etc. Instead: consider having standard allow for more heads up display visual information. I don't know that I want a HUD to outline enemy mechs that I can't see due to snow haze or whatnot, but I do want something more, such as when trying to spot enemies across expanses in Forest Colony. Otherwise I'm stuck reverting to Thermal.
- Nightvision feels like it needs something. Perhaps just having it benefit in the same way as tweaks to Standard would solve it. Or perhaps nightvision could simply be more about edge detection and outlining, including buildings and the like. Not "wireframe mode" but maybe a little in that direction.
ECM is feeling better balanced these days, but in the interest of suggesting something radically different while the game's still in its formative period:
- ECM could be less about jamming, and more about interfering with with a pilot's clairity to make a clean shot.
- ECM's current function to screw with the minimap radar would stay the same.
- ECM's current function to jam certain kinds of lock-on abilities would generally be changed to making it take longer for the systems to acquire a lock. Thus, ECM would be much weaker in this regard.
- ECM would gain functionality in interferring with visionmodes and HUD.
How ECM might interfere with vision modes:
- Anti-Thermal: Heat masking. An ECM-equiped mech might be able to reduce the level of their own aparant heat output. Alternatively, they might cause their general area to radiate higher background heat, thus making themselves and all other mechs in the area stand out less. A side effect would be that the presense of ECM used for this purpose would be apparent just from viewing the terrain, even if the mechs are not visible.
- Anti-HUD / Standard: Everything augmenting vision could be plausibly interferred with. So if Standard vision gets target outlining, highlighting, etc, that would go away. Further, right now, there are little colored triangles over mechs identifying friends and foes. Those, too, could potentially go away, or maybe flicker in and out of existence, or require targeting reticulre over a mech, etc. Making those less obvious or not available would make it harder to tell when a mech is near. Removing allied IFF tags would be more controversial, as while it would be awesome for ECM, it would allow people to exploit deliberately team killing while claiming that ECM kept them from knowing.
- Other forms of obscurement could be implemented for other visual/detection modes.
- Ghost HUD signaling. An alternative to stripping away HUD information and the IFF triangles highlighting mechs at close range, would be for the ECM unit to trick opponent's mechs into thinking there were lots of mechs of various sorts, poping in and out of existence, all around the confused mech. This ECM effect would be implemented in game by adding and removing many unit markers continuously on a pilot's map, as well as having triangles appear and disappear on the HUD (out in space in the same area where one sees mechs, pointing to nothing. A jammed computer might think there were 18 mechs phasing in and out of the area, instead of 2. This would be a distraction, as a player would be on the lookout for actual mechs appearing. It would also add visual clutter, interferring but in no way preventing shots from direct fire weapons. As I understand it, that would be compatible with the direction of the TT rules, which would be a nice bonus.
