Draft of an idea for a change to sensing

[Steve Walmsley]

But I would imagine it would be much the same as detecting active sensor strength/sensitivity you currently have to do in the game, so same mechanic. Given enough time you will identify them all and find them. If you get closer your chances just increase.

To be honest it should not be that more micro intensive than the current model. You would not require to get closer, you just would increase the chances to detect something earlier if you do.

Yes, but everyone would have to close on every contact to ensure there were not more ships to be discovered before committing to action. Its the same principle. A lot more scouting needed, which is fun at first but gets a lot more tedious over time.

But they would not have to close, just follow the contacts and everything will be detected eventually. Would it not be practically the same as detecting sensor sensitivity/range is now?

Sure you will not know exactly when everything is detected, but that would be the point though... uncertainty.

Personally, I would be sending in a stealthy or fast scout to check any hostile contact as closely as possible before committing any force to battle, just in case I get surprised, or more likely build recon drones and fire them in sequence so I could ensure I minimized my chance of missing something. I would do that for every new contact and if required I would design a class specifically for that role. I would end up with the same information I have now and with no increased danger of surprise to my main force, but I would have to micromanage the scouts/drones.

For a change in sensors to work, it has to add meaningful decisions for the player. It can't just be extra work to get the same information as before.

[nuclearslurpee]

For a change in sensors to work, it has to add meaningful decisions for the player. It can't just be extra work to get the same information as before.

Can we sticky this quote, maybe add it as a site header in bold red 72-point font?

[Kiero]

For a change in sensors to work, it has to add meaningful decisions for the player. It can't just be extra work to get the same information as before.

Can we sticky this quote, maybe add it as a site header in bold red 72-point font?

I'll second that!

[BwenGun]

Might be a stupid idea, but how hard would it be to implement a semi-automated recon drone launcher? I.e. a component that you fill with your recon drones that when activated automatically launches drones to unknown contacts within a set radius of the ship, but can be left off to save on drones or to be stealthy. That way there's the ability to have fuzzy contacts to change-up the strategic/tactical elements of encounters but you can also just build in a way to check those contacts with a slight increase to ship building cost and supply.

[Jorgen_CAB]

But I would imagine it would be much the same as detecting active sensor strength/sensitivity you currently have to do in the game, so same mechanic. Given enough time you will identify them all and find them. If you get closer your chances just increase.

To be honest it should not be that more micro intensive than the current model. You would not require to get closer, you just would increase the chances to detect something earlier if you do.

Yes, but everyone would have to close on every contact to ensure there were not more ships to be discovered before committing to action. Its the same principle. A lot more scouting needed, which is fun at first but gets a lot more tedious over time.

But they would not have to close, just follow the contacts and everything will be detected eventually. Would it not be practically the same as detecting sensor sensitivity/range is now?

Sure you will not know exactly when everything is detected, but that would be the point though... uncertainty.

Personally, I would be sending in a stealthy or fast scout to check any hostile contact as closely as possible before committing any force to battle, just in case I get surprised, or more likely build recon drones and fire them in sequence so I could ensure I minimized my chance of missing something. I would do that for every new contact and if required I would design a class specifically for that role. I would end up with the same information I have now and with no increased danger of surprise to my main force, but I would have to micromanage the scouts/drones.

For a change in sensors to work, it has to add meaningful decisions for the player. It can't just be extra work to get the same information as before.

In general I do agree with that statement, any new feature need to be meaningful and lead to meaningful decisions. What you describe is pretty much how things go in my multi species campaign anyway as there fleets tend to be allot more decentralised for fear of loosing in the sensor war. In a more "competitive" environment the fact that it is so easy to find everything in one spot actually have the effect you need to split the forces so they are not all detected at once from a single small scout who manages to slip through the net.

Against the AI it of course is not really much of an issue I grant you that. So, in essence micromanagement of fleets are already necessary to some degree in some settings. The AI will pretty much never ever find my main force due to me micromanaging scouting already. Most of it can be managed through the escort system though.

The game might also benefit from some order where a ship or fleet would scout randomly around a specific point. Maybe an order where said task-group/ship would patrol randomly from a specific point and a range from that point. It would make scouting much easier in general.

When we are talking about sensors... one thing I really think we need is for ships to be able to activate sensors separately from each other. It is way too common I want to have different types of sensors on ships and don't want to activate the high resolution ones just the low resolution ones. Currently I have nearly entirely ditched all high resolution sensors to parasites for these reasons.

[Steve Walmsley]

When we are talking about sensors... one thing I really think we need is for ships to be able to activate sensors separately from each other. It is way too common I want to have different types of sensors on ships and don't want to activate the high resolution ones just the low resolution ones. Currently I have nearly entirely ditched all high resolution sensors to parasites for these reasons.

Yes, I will sort this out at some point. The UI might be messy for all individual sensors, but a quick fix would be some sort of fleet flag for low power only.

[nuclearslurpee]

When we are talking about sensors... one thing I really think we need is for ships to be able to activate sensors separately from each other. It is way too common I want to have different types of sensors on ships and don't want to activate the high resolution ones just the low resolution ones. Currently I have nearly entirely ditched all high resolution sensors to parasites for these reasons.

Yes, I will sort this out at some point. The UI might be messy for all individual sensors, but a quick fix would be some sort of fleet flag for low power only.

Possible implementation:

• Split current fleet order to activate sensors into three options: "Activate single sensor", "Activate sensor type", "Activate all sensors" or similar.
• "Activate single sensor" provides a list of all sensors in the fleet in the third (rightmost) pane of the orders tab, and the player can select one to activate. This could be a rather long list for large fleets but a little bit of scrolling on occasion will not kill too many of us. This listing should probably be sorted by ship, as I expect the most common use case will be activating a sensor on a specific vessel.
• "Activate sensor type" provides a list of each sensor component type in the fleet in the third (rightmost) pane of the orders tab, without duplicate entries. For example, if my fleet has four CAs with AN/SPS-1 long-range sensors and eight DEs with AN/SPW-2 missile warning sensors, the list will contain only two entries, AN/SPS-1 and AN/SPW-2. I would probably use this option the most.
• "Activate all sensors" functions in the same way as the current fleet order.

This may not cover every use case a player can come up with but it should be flexible enough for most needs and work well enough with the existing UI. The potential of a long scrolling list with the first option could be concerning, but we already deal with such things in other cases such as transporting ground units so I don't think it's a major problem here.

One possible weakness in this implementation is that it doesn't always work well when a fleet has many sensors of similar purpose (either different designs or from different tech levels), but I think that won't be an issue in practice.

By the way, a nice addition to complement this order would be to add a target "Own Fleet" or similar at the top of the targets list in the orders tab. I often find myself wanting a fleet to do something at its current position, so it would be nice to have a shortcut in cases where "current position" takes longer than 2 seconds to figure out the target for. It complements the above neatly since the "Active Sensors On/Off" button would not work with the new orders, so some other way to use them at the current position is desirable.

[Droll]

One possible weakness in this implementation is that it doesn't always work well when a fleet has many sensors of similar purpose (either different designs or from different tech levels), but I think that won't be an issue in practice.

I think something similar to unit/missile series would resolve this. Allow the user to designate Sensor Series so we can put sensors under our own categories such as Missile Sensor, Fighter Sensor, Capital Sensor etc. Then you can have the activation button be for each sensor series instead of by sensor model. As it's user defined it could be as granular as you wanted.

[Michael Sandy]

How about this:
If you have a sensor lock on something, the range of all sensors against that sensor lock is boosted by 50%.  If you have an idea of where to look, you should have an advantage in the range that you can detect something.

It makes it more serious if you blunder into range of something, because you could just go a little further out and thus be undetected again.

Only if a sub-pulse goes by without detection do you lose that sensor lock advantage.

It also means that ships with very noisy engines with huge thermals could be localized with actives further out, because their opponent would have a general idea of where they are on thermal sensors.

[xenoscepter]

I wouldn't mind some uncertainty between sensors of various resolutions.

Say have it work that a sensor has some uncertainty that the target is not larger than what it's designed to detect, so the need for some lower resolution sensors for more accurate target IDs would add some extra depth to ship design.

And the trade-off is that more sensors means bigger EM sig and thus EM passives would pick you up from further, so it's not always a clear optimum to have said layered Actives.

The option to turn them off or on separately wouldn't add extra nuance, since you'd be forced to either leave that sensor off and it's dead weight, or turn it on and risk being detected more readily.