Revealing Stealth

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    • Revealing Stealth

      I kind of feel like this could do with some work.

      In Call of War 1942, stealth units can only be revealed by units that are the same level as them, or higher. So if you've got level 5 submarines, your enemy would need to have his destroyers or naval bombers up to level 5 as well in order to spot them. It works pretty well, and I think it's something that feels a bit lacking when you play Conflict of Nations. It's annoying, for example, to have spent all the time and resources getting your Spec Ops levelled up, only for them to be spotted by a level 1 CRV that someone's had lying about doing nothing since Day 1, and he didn't even research or build it himself.

      How would people feel about having the same system introduced? It could either be a level-for-level or perhaps a tier-for-tier requirement.
    • Not a fan

      While it makes sense in some real-world ways, I don't think it's consistent with the rest of the game's universe.

      The time, distance and resource scales involved researching, producing, maneuvering, and fighting other units give me a gut feel that this would make things messier, instead of adding a good layer of escalating strategy & counter-strategy sophistication.

      I'm not the first person to comment that a 24x7 games like CoN might need fewer reasons for players to have to sleep with one eye open, instead of more reasons.

      Ima guess that player retention goes down in games like CoN the more often players get wiped out by invisible units or get wiped out in the middle of the night.

      KFG
    • Colonel Waffles wrote:

      I support this although it would be ineffective for Anti-air, as the AA only really get stealth detection at max level anyway
      Yeah. There's only one level of stealth aircraft, so it only needs one "reveal stealth" attribute at tier 2 or 3 for countering. The main purpose of it would be for Submarines and Spec Ops, where there is a more direct level-for-level comparison when it comes to units that can reveal them. However, not all unit types have the same number of levels, so I think that a tier-for-tier reveal ability would work better.

      So, a L1 CRV could reveal SpecOps units up to and including L2, but not L3 and above, because that's the next tier up. All submarine-detecting units would be able to spot BMSubs and AttSubs up to and including L3 (tier 1) as they do now, but if you wanted to be able to detect L4 (tier 2) and above, you'd have to upgrade Destroyers and Corvettes to L4, NPAs to L3 and ASWHs to L4. And so on.

      KFGauss wrote:

      Ima guess that player retention goes down in games like CoN the more often players get wiped out by invisible units or get wiped out in the middle of the night.
      Being frank, I don't think this is a very valid criticism. For a start, this mechanic does exist in CoN's sister game, Call of War: 1942. I've played both quite extensively, and the system works well in that game - that's why I'd like to see it ported over in some form. Secondly, players quit the game for all sorts of reasons as it is. They suffer one major setback, and that's it for a lot of CoN (and CoW) players. It doesn't matter if it's stealth units making surprise attacks, heavy bombers wiping out unit production, unexpected BM/ICBM strikes, amphibious assaults in unexpected places, whatever. You can't remove all these things from the game just to keep those people playing longer, or else you'd be left with a very boring, shallow game. And those people would quit anyway after losing any major battle. You just have to accept that, in a free-to-play game where players can join (nearly) as many rounds as they like simultaneously, you're going to have a high drop-out rate.

      You're right that it'd increase the resource burden on research, because players would need to keep CRVs/DD/NPAs etc up to date in order to guarantee they continue to do their job fully. But I think that's needed anyway - as I said before, it's not fair that a player can use a couple of CRVs that they got for free at the start to almost entirely neutralize the main threat from Spec Ops; or that cheap-as-chips L1 Corvettes can neutralise a large part of the threat from very expensive levelled-up submarines. The current system leaves SpOps and Subs in a position where they are not an appealing unit to upgrade, or even use at all, sometimes. Again, it's a waste of potential in the unit roster.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by WalterChang ().

    • not really that big of a fan; i also dont think that its gonna do much if anything at all to naval warfare; navy vs navy is already an armsrace of having the higher tier unit to begin with
      really doesnt add much beyond yet another tedious thing to look out for; units have hardcounters for a reason…
      I am The Baseline for opinions
    • Teburu wrote:

      not really that big of a fan; i also dont think that its gonna do much if anything at all to naval warfare; navy vs navy is already an armsrace of having the higher tier unit to begin with
      really doesnt add much beyond yet another tedious thing to look out for; units have hardcounters for a reason…
      What it does is allow stealth units to be utilized properly, and in more situations.

      As the game is now, you don't use submarines because of their stealth, because their stealth attribute effectively doesn't exist given how easy it is to counter. You use them for their firepower, so they might as well be a non-stealth ship. You can't use them to sneak through someone's defences and conduct recon or attack transports near their coast; nor can you surprise an enemy surface fleet with greater numbers or extra firepower than they expected. Stealth adds strategy to the game, and Submarines are, in effect, not a stealth unit as they are currently implemented.

      The point of Spec Ops (as far as I can tell) is to sneak around someone's territory to spot targets for planes, or to take out badly-protected support units like artillery or AA. Again, they can't do this because a L1 CRV, one of the cheapest units in the game, renders this ability useless.

      Stealth is not fully utilized in the game because of the absence of a mechanic that already exists in CoN's predecessor.
    • Extremely weak units that sneak around gathering intell - I can be convinced.

      Moderate strength units that can be stacked up and used to gut my country while I'm sleeping - I'm probably not going to ever be a fan.

      Switching gears - In the next paragraph I'm assuming that surface ships in CoN are loosely modelled on real-world ships *using active Sonars* to search for subs. CoN could explicitly offer analogs of real-world sub-hunting ships that use passive sonars, but it doesn't right now.

      Real world submarines are sneaky, but they can't change physics. A drunken fisherman using a fish-finding Sonar can spot a submarine that's within their fish-finding Sonar's range. Similarly, an old cheap corvette with a military Sonar can find subs, and it will have a greater submarine-detection range than the drunken fisherman will. If an old (or a new) Corvette is using active Sonar while patrolling an area, it can find big metal submarines, no matter how new and quiet those submarines are. What the Dorado folks have to balance is the amount of area they want us to imagine the in-game Corvette is patrolling vs the speeds submarines can use to drive around the Corvette, and they (sort-of) have to combine that with forcing ocean-going units to stick to the paths connecting ocean province centers). That trade-off isn't affected much by how quiet the submarine is.

      So... I didn't write this to claim that Con is or isn't approximating real world anti-submarine warfare accurately or inaccurately. That rabbit hole is dark and deep, has no end, and isn't my point. I wrote it just to emphasize that making appeals to how the real world works has its limits. Another example of that would be that after the change you suggest, I could build a zillion low-tech units cheaply early in the game, and then do some fixed-price researching to convert *all* of those super-cheap units into expensive high-tech units, regardless of how many I own. Where is the realism in that???

      About players who try CoN and then drop out quickly or after a while - Yes, there are many reasons for those dropouts. That doesn't mean Dorado should create another. *If* some fraction of the player population they are targeting would be discouraged by the change you suggested, I'm sure Dorado will take that into consideration. I think I would dislike the change. I don't know if I'm smack in the middle of Dorado's target market or if I'm way out on the edge of it.

      KFG
    • KFGauss wrote:

      Real world submarines are sneaky, but they can't change physics. A drunken fisherman using a fish-finding Sonar can spot a submarine that's within their fish-finding Sonar's range. Similarly, an old cheap corvette with a military Sonar can find subs, and it will have a greater submarine-detection range than the drunken fisherman will. If an old (or a new) Corvette is using active Sonar while patrolling an area, it can find big metal submarines, no matter how new and quiet those submarines are. What the Dorado folks have to balance is the amount of area they want us to imagine the in-game Corvette is patrolling vs the speeds submarines can use to drive around the Corvette, and they (sort-of) have to combine that with forcing ocean-going units to stick to the paths connecting ocean province centers). That trade-off isn't affected much by how quiet the submarine is.
      This I accept. Perhaps the sonar range of low-level units could be nerfed a bit in order to increase submarines' stealth utility? (That would give players a proper reason to upgrade their Corvettes as well.)

      KFGauss wrote:

      Moderate strength units that can be stacked up and used to gut my country while I'm sleeping - I'm probably not going to ever be a fan.
      The idea of this is that you would have to upgrade your CRVs in order to maintain your security against this threat. The SpecOps user has invested time and resources into upgrading his units; why should the defender not also have to do that?

      KFGauss wrote:

      I wrote it just to emphasize that making appeals to how the real world works has its limits. Another example of that would be that after the change you suggest, I could build a zillion low-tech units cheaply early in the game, and then do some fixed-price researching to convert *all* of those super-cheap units into expensive high-tech units, regardless of how many I own. Where is the realism in that???
      I don't think I tried to justify the suggestion in terms of realism. I might even be in favour of ignoring real-world physics, as you pointed out, in order to allow high-level Submarines to avoid Sonar detection from low-level units. The point about getting free upgrades on your existing units wouldn't be something this change would create - it's already there, and affects all units. I'm actually in favour of having manual upgrading of units for a resource cost when you unlock new levels of research (most people on this forum apparently aren't, though!).


      KFGauss wrote:

      there are many reasons for those dropouts. That doesn't mean Dorado should create another. *If* some fraction of the player population they are targeting would be discouraged by the change you suggested, I'm sure Dorado will take that into consideration. I think I would dislike the change.
      Finally, you don't need to make hypothetical assumptions about whether or not you would like this system - you can try it yourself!
      callofwar.com/
      It's essentially the same game as CoN, but set in WW2.
      My opinion is that it works better than CoN's system from a gameplay perspective. I would judge that CoW's player retention is certainly no worse than CoN's - maybe even a bit better. I don't believe it's got anything to do with this particular feature, though.
    • WalterChang wrote:

      . . .
      Finally, you don't need to make hypothetical assumptions about whether or not you would like this system - you can try it yourself!
      callofwar.com/
      It's essentially the same game as CoN, but set in WW2.
      My opinion is that it works better than CoN's system from a gameplay perspective. I would judge that CoW's player retention is certainly no worse than CoN's - maybe even a bit better. I don't believe it's got anything to do with this particular feature, though.
      WC - I understand.

      However, at this point in my current project at my job, I can't afford to invest the frequent time-chunks I need when I join a CoN game and then play well enough to enjoy the result.

      And, that's at the root of my reaction (see previous posts). I want fewer stealthy units roaming around, not more.

      Also, I certainly can't afford the time to try out a new game. So instead I have to rely opinions that come from my decades of off-and-on wargaming experience.

      Regardless, the cliché is true: YMMV. My opinion is just one data point.

      Dorado's 8) opinion is more important than mine :S - Work on convincing them, not me! :D

      KFG

      The post was edited 1 time, last by KFGauss ().

    • Well, I'd say the point of the forum, especially suggestions, is for players to discuss ideas in a place where the devs can read them. I wasn't specifically trying to convince you with this! I was just addressing the points that you made. Suggestions work better if people respond with criticism and put them through their paces - so thanks for that.

      All the best with your job!