Brainstorming - Electronic Warfare

[splok]

It may have come across differently, but I only meant to mention direct buffing as a pretty minor portion of the ewar possibilities. I think it would be best implemented with a focus on communication and gathering/using intelligence. However, the more effective your equipment is at gathering and utilizing information, the more effective you are, creating de facto buffing, especially if it is something the equipment calculates automatically (such as increased or decreased sig radius).

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by Faille

my bad, was replying more the splok.

The submarine analogy is pretty good, though I want to avoid Eve's submarine like warfare.


Not sure if I've mentioned this already but I wanted to steal Eve's sig radius idea but expand it and make it much more dynamic. So crouching in trees would lower your sig radius and thus make you harder to hit, at the expense of being mostly mobile. Good for those ambushes but would want to get up and move fast.

Likewise you could have most armor plate effect sig radius a lot more and wearing weak armor that actually reduces it should be a viable strategy.

Yeah, I had mentioned using an expansion of EVE's signature-radius as the most elegant way to implement EWar in a way that wasn't counterintuitive. You should go farther than making simple mech characteristics and terrain exploitation to affect sig radius though. Sig Radius should also reflect the target's overall fire discipline, the strength and size of his weapons and what EWar modules he has fitted. You could make it so that staying in a full sprint all the time or so that spamming your weapons haphazardly is penalized by increasing your vulnerability, which it actually does in reality via muzzle flash and IR/Heat signature.

I kinda wish I had a Tabula Rasa beta account since it sounds like that's what they're doing ingame. If done well, I think that's a good proof-of-concept of a FPS-with-dice-rolls game.

The best way to seamlessly meld Ewar in this way is to implement a 'granular' sliding-scale targetting system that would reflect how strong certain weapons and guidance systems would be against a given target at a given time. You could display this current 'Lock Strength' indicator via the color of the reticle around each target, or the thickness or shape of the target box. There's a temptation to clutter the HUD by doing this but you don't need to overload the main HUD with all the critical information.

You could, for example, put a color coded indicator by each weapon HUD display (a la Mechwarrior4 weapon readiness HUD) that indicates how effective that weapon would be against that target when the targetting reticle is on top of it. In mechwarrior4 and EVE they already do this to a certain extent, greying or dimming a weapon if it was out of range or overheated etc. Simply expand on it to show how strong that weapon's guidance system is against that target's EWar countermeasures.

Any way you do it, the challenge is to find an elegant way to communicate relative EWar conditions between a target, the player's mech's weapons. And to communicate that information in a way that isn't a confusing barrier to entry but something that even newbies can pick up and start to exploit. Maybe they'll see that as they get closer, the laser-guided autocannons become more accurate while they see that regardless of how far they are drone-assisted missile tracking is always effective.

Originally Posted by Faille

I think we want to avoid healer syndrome as well. Making people play Ewar specialist roles because they are powerful and you can't live without them, rather then because they are fun.

I'm definitely against pigeonholing a player against a thankless role. For the same reason I'm unfavorable toward's a specialist 'enchanter' chassis, and not just because I think the analogy isn't very sound in a Mechwarrior context. Hell, I avoided comparing my "drone-tender" mech chassis as the 'pet class' that it could be interpretted as, because it's not if utility and EWar drones are implemented in such a way that they're just as or even more attractive than combat drones.

But I do think that there should be one or two chassis that are 'friendly' towards certain specialist builds than other chassis. If a player finds that he enjoys piloting a combat salvage ship, that should be an option. There are people who enjoy playing healers, and not all of them are caustic drama time-bombs, so letting them indulge their specialist support urges should be possible, but I agree, it shouldn't be so that those specialist services could be such a bottleneck that they impede everyone else's playstyle.

One of the big beefs I had with battletech was that any 100-ton mech was just like any other 100-ton mech. EVE did a great job injecting 'character' into each hull class... one ship class would have benefits for direct fire, another had a historical legacy for being fast while yet another was a traditional tank. A good middle ground expands on this without restricting player decisions. Basically you can make it so you can fit an LRM20 on that Hunchback, but give it a big bonus for keeping it's classic AC20.

As far as implementing C3 disruption ingame, I think there can be a non-intrusive way to do that without introducing extraneous complexity. Blocking/stopping communications is impractical, not just because SIGINT is boring irl and silly ingame, but because you can't control how people communicate outside the game anyway (vent or IRC).

You could abstract SIGINT and ELINT disruption by implementing disruptive effects for the ingame minimap: EWar drones could make fake 'pings' on the minimap... or maybe EWar mechs can disrupt IFF signals and clutter up their victim's minimap with hostile mechs. I'm sure there's a tons of ways to abstract the disruptive effects of active ECM without making it an all-consuming ingame occupation that will only lead to extreme specialization and class dependency.

[splok]

Originally Posted by Faille

Also, the problem with splitting up ewar resists is that it leads to ewar becoming powerful and far too hard to resists, depending on the number of variations we have. The Target has to try and guard against a variety of resists, while the attack has the option to specialise and that leads the potential that when specialised he might still be more powerful then a defending with the right resists, and no competition against defenders with the wrong resists.

There are a couple of issues with having a single resist or point of defense. This seems like it would create the opposite of the cleric syndrome where everyone is forced to defend against ewar to a certain degree. The drawbacks for this defense would need to be quite severe to encourage players to risk going undefended. Also, this just doesn't give the player many opportunities for choice, and if you want the ewar deep enough to really be a game unto itself, then there needs to be a broad spectrum of possibilities.


If designed appropriately, I don't think there would be a problem in having multiple resists because you would only need to defend systems that were crucial to your chosen method of play. Certain systems would logically very different means to accomplish their desired results, so the disruption of those systems would also logically require different means. If you relied on radar to spot your enemies, then you wouldn't care if your opponents used heat dispersion techniques. If you used thermal monitors, you wouldn't care if your opponents used radar jammers, etc. This specific example may not fall exactly under ewar (though it is applicable to CnC,) but its just an illustration that a variety of systems, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities, could present the player with a variety of options without forcing them into specific configuration.

[Faille]

I think I'm starting to get where you're coming from.

The ideal situation should put the onus on the attacker to pick the right attack to hurt the defender, not for the defender to guard against the right attack?

[splok]

Not that it should only be on the attacker exactly, just that everyone should have to make strategic choices about what advantages they want and what vulnerabilities they're willing to open themselves up to for those advantages. I guess my point is that if the only choice on either side is to either engage in ewar or not and to defend against ewar or not, it's not really going to make for a very interesting system.

I think that, ideally, the equipment selection should have enough breadth and depth that there would be a number of specific ways to accomplish a very general task.

Lets say I want to do more damage:

Maybe I could just simply use my resources on bigger weapons. Ok. There's nothing wrong with that. Bigger guns should certainly be more effective, all else being equal. Of course, in a modern setting, bigger guns don't always prevail. Their effectiveness can be lessened if their opponent has spent his resources on something as simple as a smoke screen or making his mech more agile. Of course, if the opponent has enough intellegence gathering ability, he might know exactly where the guy with the big gun is at, know that he has a big gun, and know before the guy with the big gun even knows its possible to know. Never being seen is a pretty great defense. There are plenty of ways to defeat a big gun (though most of those would be indirect method... meaning that it would be harder for the big gun to hit you, not that the big gun couldn't fire... so the big gun might favor only a very highly skilled player, who even then might have to rely on incredibly low percentage shots).

Maybe I could get a more accurate weapon. Given any particular weapon, it will always do more damage if it is more accurate. Even within this simple idea can lie a variety of choices. Depending on your choice of weapon, accuracy might be more or less important. The accuracy hurdle that a sniper rifle needs to reach to be an effective weapon is quite high. If you're off just a little, your weapon is highly ineffective. You gain massive range and the ability to fire from relative safety, but you must have a target in the open and you must be incredibly accurate. In contrast, a shotgun needs only a marginal amount of accuracy to be highly effective. The tradeoff, of course, is its requiring very close range. So, first, how much accuracy do I need? I could get added accuracy though higher quality weapons (which might be expensive or skill intensive, or just plain unavailable... and which would also be nontransferable to other weapons). I could get accuracy though training (which might take forever, or maybe I'm already maxed... but even if not, I have the opportunity cost to consider... i could be training other skills). I could get accuracy though any number of computer modules (each of which should have their own vulnerability based on their logical implementation). Maybe I have thermal sensors which can be hosed by people using flare decoys or heat suppressors. I could just use computer calibration which helps me aim by shots (which might be highly vulnerable to emp's). I could use radar (which can be jammed or spoofed). I could use guided munitions (which could be confused by interference or even hacked).

You can see how deep and intertwined this could get. The trick in an mmo is to get it structured where guilds don't just say, "ok, we need one person on each system." and then everyone is hosed. However, I think this can be addressed in three ways.

First, make each method pretty specialized. That's not to say that if you do any sort of ewar that you can't possibly do anything else, but make it take considerable resources. If you want to be the solopwnmobile with 15 rocketlaunchers strapped to your face, then you're probably not going to be able to strap on much in the way of ewar offence or defence. Also, one person shouldn't be able to be the totalEWARmobile either.

Second, make the range somewhat limited. One person shouldn't be able to affect an entire battlefield. If I have a setup that completely trumps yours, then I should be able to render whatever it is that I'm effecting pretty damned useless. I shouldn't be able to do that to everyone though. My effectiveness should have a very limited number of targets or a very limited physical range. They should probably be variable to maximize my decision making opportunity, but as my effective range or number of targets gets bigger, my effectiveness should decrease dramatically.

And third. much of this should affect the user and his team as well. How can I expect to communicate with my own team if I'm spewing as much interference as I can possible manage for a mile on either side of me?

(Sorry if this was a really long answer to a question that you didn't really ask hehe.)

[Big W Powah!]

Just me $.02, but I always saw E-Warfare as being your running around, do a thousand things, make them easy to kill witihout much firepower kinda skillset. I think an E-War mech should have bite if set up right. I saw it as setting up huge stationary rocket launchers (at costs, however, they're easy to see, easy to find, easy to blow up, and the lot) then going to the enemy, targetting them with a laser, and having to have a person operate the rocket launchers to fire them (or remote fireing, at the highest levels maybe). This gives the e-war mechs SOMETHING damaging, probably wtih a pretty huge bite, to make them a bit more fun, and promotes team-work.

I also see them as being the ultimate disrupters. Targetted EMP pulses and what not to destroy enemy targetting/video feeds. Perhaps even disrupting any "electronic" weapons. Something along the lines of lasers and stuff would be vulnerable to EMP. The strongest pulses would even cause that part to be damage until repaired, instead of temporarily affected.

This could also be extended into radar jamming, essencially a "cloaking" device, through the ability to jam enemy radar. You could even have a specialization within the E-war mechanic that would also "hacking" enemy mechs though attaching a probe into their data-stream systems. This would bring up a screen where the player would literally type things in, activating programs (think the movie hackers) and stuff, allowing them to send "false" transmission or something along those lines. perhaps even powering down the mech.

Obviously this hacking would make the player immobile and very vulnerable (probably oblivious to the surrounding areas), but would be very powerful.

that, and I think it'd be fun.

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by Big W Powah!

Just me $.02, but I always saw E-Warfare as being your running around, do a thousand things, make them easy to kill witihout much firepower kinda skillset. I think an E-War mech should have bite if set up right. I saw it as setting up huge stationary rocket launchers (at costs, however, they're easy to see, easy to find, easy to blow up, and the lot) then going to the enemy, targetting them with a laser, and having to have a person operate the rocket launchers to fire them (or remote fireing, at the highest levels maybe). This gives the e-war mechs SOMETHING damaging, probably wtih a pretty huge bite, to make them a bit more fun, and promotes team-work.

That was my favorite option for an offensive angle for EWar mechs. It's an organic integration of the EWar occupation into normal gameplay. Likewise I think it would have additional depth by allowing TEAM mechs armed with extremely long ranged weaponry (high-energy mass drivers or MLRS launchers) to 'slave' their artillery weapons to a team artillery pool that would fire on command by their team's EWar mech, who would be illuminating targets from way beyond visual range.

That's just one of many potential DPS options for an EWar occupation ingame. However, the temptation to say that "Oh but that will make EWar a mission-critical bottleneck profession" is natural, but remember we're only talking about EWar in this thread. There's no reason to think that the team can't think of REALLY cool things for other support roles that can be as complex and engaging as stuff mentioned here.

The Key is to make ingame information channels as complex and rich as possible: Don't just make stealth about being visible or not, make it so that gameplay circumstances and player decisions affect variable grades of visibility. Don't just make it so a target is locked or not, make it so that player decisions, cooperation and skill affect whether or not they can lock and how effectively their weapons are guided ingame. Essentially, get rid of boolean effects that deny players of gameplay decisions, not just because it's not fun, but because there's a ton of potential gameplay depth by doing so.

Originally Posted by splok

There are a couple of issues with having a single resist or point of defense. This seems like it would create the opposite of the cleric syndrome where everyone is forced to defend against ewar to a certain degree. The drawbacks for this defense would need to be quite severe to encourage players to risk going undefended. Also, this just doesn't give the player many opportunities for choice, and if you want the ewar deep enough to really be a game unto itself, then there needs to be a broad spectrum of possibilities.

I've never been a fan of categorized resists. Even when games integrated them into intelligent categories it's always seemed boring and forced. Often resist decisions came down to how much you wanted to compromise other fun aspects of gameplay: how much damage do you wanna do or how much support are you able to bring. It doesn't matter if you relabel Thermic/EM/Exp into Mitigation/Evasion/Magic, it still feels gimmicky and it ends up depriving player choice more than expanding the game's depth. I'll say again that I absolutely love EVE's gameplay, but let's face it, the fact that your performance is decided the moment you close that fitting window gets pretty lame.

The bulk of the decisions that affect the outcome of a battle should happen DURING the battle. Not in the dressing room.

That's not to say that I don't think resists shouldn't be in a mech game. I don't think that at all. Maybe categorize damage-type/resists as something more appropriate like armor penetration/evasion/energy, but I think the team has to be careful not to allow damage-type/resist decisions to dominate a player's decisions at any point in the game because that reduces the game's overall depth. Maybe they can make it so that intelligent team builds perform better than the sum of their parts. Or maybe make it so that a patient, calculating player can always find a vulnerability even in the most solid turtle build. Whatever.

[splok]

Well, I can agree that you certainly don't want resists to be the entire game, but I'm not sure how you could do without them unless you take any sort of passive defensive system out of the game entirely. Balancing their effectiveness where they are desired but not required is probably the best idea, but that cuts deep into the balancing of the weapons systems too (not to say that it's not possible, just that weapon and defense effectiveness have to mesh appropriately).

This statement really gets a big "hmm" from me though:

The bulk of the decisions that affect the outcome of a battle should happen DURING the battle. Not in the dressing room.

Your choices and personal ability in battle should be important, but if your choice of gear isn't also important, you might as well be playing an fps or an rts.

However, that is a really good question... What is this game intended to be? Should people just be able to pick from a set of gear and battle it out like a bigass counterstrike with mechs? Or is it actually going to be more rpg'ish? I think both mechanics are valid, but for any deeper design discussions, I think it might be helpful to have the foundation laid out.

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by splok

However, that is a really good question... What is this game intended to be? Should people just be able to pick from a set of gear and battle it out like a bigass counterstrike with mechs? Or is it actually going to be more rpg'ish? I think both mechanics are valid, but for any deeper design discussions, I think it might be helpful to have the foundation laid out.

Well, it turns out the team has already arrived at something of a project scope. Fattyfat discussed some of the agreed details here. It includes a definite 'shoot and roll dice' mechanic that basically shuts down the FPS angle. I agree with the RPG mechanic myself, there's still enough real-time decision making to make the combat engaging and it allows for much more depth than an FPS analog. It wasn't updated in the public wiki though (in fact the public wiki only mentions the mech setting as a 'possibility'), it's likely still being discussed in private.

Unfortunately, it kinda sounds like they have come to a conclusion about mech customization. They're going for something like a 'unibody' approach with each static mech chassis getting innate bonuses that would distinguish them from each other--kinda like EVE ships. Shame too, it basically shuts down the core Battletech mechanic of mech customization. Screemfeeder mentioned the reason was because of memory clutter with surface/mesh refs for each player; likely an engine issue.

Originally Posted by splok

I'm not sure how you could do without them unless you take any sort of passive defensive system out of the game entirely. Balancing their effectiveness where they are desired but not required is probably the best idea, but that cuts deep into the balancing of the weapons systems too....

Your choices and personal ability in battle should be important, but if your choice of gear isn't also important, you might as well be playing an fps or an rts.

I wouldn't get rid of resist mechanics, I would definitely adjust them to the point where survivability requirements don't remove gameplay options. It's not fun having your access to content and playstyle decisions dictated by artificial (and unimaginative) systems that you as a player have no tactical or gameplay recourse against except to acquire different equipment. Designers could just as easily use a different cockblock that demands just as much total time/effort but without constraining player choices.

I'd hate to turn this into a resist/survivability thread, I actually think EWar is an important foil for the resist crutch. I think that resist/survivability would merit its own thread. There's a ton of ways I can think of right now where you can make a 'resist' system feel organic to other survivability and weapon decisions but not to the point where someone feels like they need to refit their mech within 2 seconds of the battle. Suffice it to say I _DO_ think you can and SHOULD make it so that choice of gear--and even quality of gear--should be important while making it so that players with a more astute grasp of their mech design or have mastered the nuances of the game can overcome large equipment discrepancies.

[splok]

Maybe it's just arguing semantics at this point then. I would think that with a variety of possible attack types, a variety of defenses, and a variety of counter-measures, you would end up with a huge variety of choices in how you configure and play your mech (of course, this is assuming that resources on a mech are limited enough that your equipment has to be pretty focused... so one person couldn't be a walking ewar machine, covering all ewar attack bases at once... or that one person couldn't defend against everything at once... and that even attempting to do such things would cause what you can do to be highly reduce in effectiveness and basically making any other actions impossible). Of course, if equipment means anything at all, how you equip your mech will always limit your options while playing, but if you configure your mech to suit how you want to play, not the other way around, I don't see a problem. Limiting things to a single or low number of resists would seem to lend itself much more to this problem than a large variety of choices would, I would think.

Of course, this assumes that we want a ton of player choice. I'm assuming that we would be building a game that the members of this board would want to play and not a game for the mass market (who would undoubtedly be paralyzed by a myriad of choices.) I realize that for various reasons, this may not be a completely safe assumption.

[Faille]

I like the idea of hacking, but how about if it was used as like a charm. So you hack into an enemy mech and gain control of it, the downside being that you effectively leave your own mech and take control of the target mech.

Would need to balance it right, with adequate downsides. for example, you lose control of your own mech, leaving it vulnerable, and maybe a cooldown before you regain control of your own mech after the hacking is ended.

Ideally, I'd want it to be more situational, just a well times hack to turn the tide of battle, and not like EQ's enchanters keeping perma charmed pets.

[Big W Powah!]

Originally Posted by Faille

I like the idea of hacking, but how about if it was used as like a charm. So you hack into an enemy mech and gain control of it, the downside being that you effectively leave your own mech and take control of the target mech.

Would need to balance it right, with adequate downsides. for example, you lose control of your own mech, leaving it vulnerable, and maybe a cooldown before you regain control of your own mech after the hacking is ended.

Ideally, I'd want it to be more situational, just a well times hack to turn the tide of battle, and not like EQ's enchanters keeping perma charmed pets.

All valid points, and I outlined the vulnerability. You'd be focusing your attention on a computer screen and keyboard in game. Actually having to type and continue to issue text commands (think you're going to command line, as opposed to the GUI of normal mech control, I suppose) to keep control of this mech, it is going to be very difficult, with password cracks (randomly generated, not player generated) and you have to laucnh your own programs to crack these (of which, you'd by more powerful versions of)....The big downside, aside from being vulnerable, is this is being transmitted to you--making ti easy for people to find you as soon as one of their e-war mechs scanned your probe, and tranced the transmission.


It could be a charm, it could just be debuffs/immobilizing, or it could have the potential for both through which hacking programs you buy/find/code yourself (through in game means, mind you)

and as for the time it takes to regain control, that could be the time that the controls are switching. The screen is re-routing to outside cameras, the keyboard is being replaced by your nromal control console, etc..

[Faille]

Realistically, we're probably not going to be able to do anything approaching what you're describing. Of course you're more then welcome to join in and do it yourself 8)

One thing I did want for hack/charm is a countdown for it to activate. So you start hacking someone and it takes 30 seconds to get through, possibly variable with skills / components, but they also get the message they are being hacked, so they can run away, try and kill the person hacking them, warn then party, or any number of other counter measures.

[Faille]

Also in general, any drawback which can be circumvented isn't worth bothering with. Blocking chat when most people are using vent or can use IRC is pointless and more annoying then anything. When EQ had blind it wasn't quite in that stage since not many people used those things. No a days is a different story. Just something to keep in mind.

[Ahnkosis]

Originally Posted by splok

Well, I can agree that you certainly don't want resists to be the entire game, but I'm not sure how you could do without them unless you take any sort of passive defensive system out of the game entirely. Balancing their effectiveness where they are desired but not required is probably the best idea, but that cuts deep into the balancing of the weapons systems too (not to say that it's not possible, just that weapon and defense effectiveness have to mesh appropriately).

This statement really gets a big "hmm" from me though:

Your choices and personal ability in battle should be important, but if your choice of gear isn't also important, you might as well be playing an fps or an rts.

However, that is a really good question... What is this game intended to be? Should people just be able to pick from a set of gear and battle it out like a bigass counterstrike with mechs? Or is it actually going to be more rpg'ish? I think both mechanics are valid, but for any deeper design discussions, I think it might be helpful to have the foundation laid out.

I agree that the whole ability in battle and gear decisions are important, but you can alter the 'standard' system used by many games to be more flexible.

For example, if you think in terms of a generic fantasy game for a minute (since I'm a little unfamiliar with EWar)

Say you have offensive and defensive supplemental abilities based on a few different numbers:

Fire
Ice
Poison
Disease
Magic

So say your standard (gearless) character has the following attributes:

Total Atk Points: 75
Fire Atk: 5 (Max 10)
Ice Atk: 5 (Max 10)
Poison Atk: 5 (Max 10)
Disease Atk: 5 (Max 10)
Magic Atk: 5 (Max 10)

Total Def Points: 75
Fire Def: 5 (Max 10)
Ice Def: 5 (Max 10)
Poison Def: 5 (Max 10)
Disease Def: 5 (Max 10)
Magic Def: 5 (Max 10)

So...what do these numbers mean? Well, instead of having static attributes, you have a point total that you assign between your various atk and def values. The point costs are incremental, so going from 5 to 6 costs 6 points, 6 to 7 costs 7 points, etc. The Max value listed is the value that you cannot exceed no matter how many points you place into it.

Gear will do one of several things for these supplemental values:

Increase OR Decrease the total atk and/or def points. (+atk, +def, +atk/-def, -atk/-def, among others)
Increase, Decrease, or Set at an Absolute Value the point Maximums (+1 Fire Atk Max, +2 Fire Atk Max/-1 Poison Def Max, Fire Atk Max 5, etc.)
Provide single increases to certain values (Fire, Poison, etc)

Why is this different? It is different, because this is a system that you should be able to adjust on the fly. Even though your GEAR is set, your resist values can fluctuate during the course of a battle. For example.

You're rolling with 10 Fire Def. (Using 55 of your 75 points) Your other defenses are weak by comparison, leaving you vulnerable to other types of attack. You get ambushed by the enemy, who attacks with a predictable Fire based attack. Your high Fire Def resists much of the damage.

Your enemy adjusts his attack strategy...rearranging his ATK points to focus more on a Disease based attack (even though his primary weapon is Fire) to try and land some damage.

You don't adjust your resists yet, starting your attack.

The enemy disease based attack lands, causing a decent amount of damage.

You rearrange your defenses to reflect a higher disease resistance, knowing that your enemys adjustment cooldown is in effect (making it so you can't constantly adjust your attack, but often enough to occur a few times during the course of a battle)

His friend joins the battle and assaults you with a Fire based attack, knowing from his friend that you switched your defenses to defend against disease based attacks.

You get incinerated.

A system like this might be able to add complexity and strategy to a game without becoming too cumbersome or unwieldy.

Also, this would still make gear important, but smart and tactical people would still be able to shine on the battlefield.