Lines of sight, spotting, & scouting

Assuming that k&c is going to have any kind of fog of war, and doesn't have too much "magic radars", getting a simple-yet-powerful scouting and spotting system in place is fundamental.



in tak, the basic birds, gargoyle, and zohn bat are excellent scouts and spotters, but only show their true potential and use when guarding a group of units in formation. 20 basic melee & 20 ranged units will get obliterated by an equal force that has 5-10 scouts guarding them and giving them badly-needed spotting information.



However, manually doing the above is tedious at best, which made me think a bit about the whole scouting/los system. What, if at all could be a reasonable replacement for radar without requiring magic?



A Building that trains and deploys flying creatures to scout out the land, the enemy, and that can be attached to units/squads giving them an increased line of sight.



The medieval race would have something along the lines of a hawkiary (hawk aviary -> big cage for hawks)which starts out with a basic supply of 10 hawks. These can then be used to initiate circular patrols around the hawkiary, flying around the building at predefined radii, each radius requiring more hawks.



i.e. the first circular patrol would require 3; 2nd circular patrol would require 5; 3rd 7hawks; 4th 11hawks. Prime numbers basically.



By building multiple Hawkiaries you can increase the "Pool" of hawks, and assign them to circular patrol around other hawkiaries, hence being able to create a large circular area with intermittent line of sight.



That's one thing you can do with them. Another is to give out general scouting orders by using the hawk building, like in the traditional method of building any flying scout and giving it a move order. Except here you can scout out multiple areas from a single building.



The third option is to tie a hawk to a unit/squad, which will then fly around that unit in a curcular path, increasing the line of sight around that unit.



To summarize, the hawkiary has three purposes: Replacing the radar, centralised scouting building, centralized guard-spotting building. This building would be upgradable (T1, T2, T3?) increasing the amount of hawks it can hold.



All of this requires a special command overlay to manage all of these hawks, though. Or if that is too much, you could reduce it down to a few buttons on the building and some flags on units being guarded by a hawk.



i.e. a brand new hawkiary has 0 hawks in circular patrol, but has a [+] and [-] button to increase/decrease the number of hawks that will start a circular patrol around it. Scout orders requires a single button. unit-guard would also require a single button, but how do you undo the unit-guard order? *shrug*



I say dedicated strategic zoom overlay.|||sir, I like your idears.|||Pretty nice idea!

Especially since radar ain't gonna make no sense at all in a game like K&C..|||I liked the attaching scouts to units idea. However, it would have to be coded so that group selecting/moving would still have the scout helping that unit, or else it wouldn't be worth telling a scout to assist.



I dont' really like the aviary idea though. The idea of radar in supcom was that you could only get an idea of what a unit was, (air or land or sea) but had to see it to actually know what it was (heavy, light, etc). I think manual scouting will work just fine.|||Manual scouting is still fine, but you'd have to have units to do that, and the point is to not require to use any units whatsoever to perform the scouting, or having to have dozens of them lying around.



The best way you can think about this is to compare it to the GLA radar van in Zero hour. The number of aviaries you have determines how many simultaneous scouting missions you can perform and the birds can obviously be shot down.



downed birds will slowly respawn, making scouting a crucial part of the game, but one that can leave you blind against a well prepared enemy.



those birds can then be assigned to other units to help them spot enemies, in much the same way USA vehicles in Generals can build small airborn uavs to help themselves. This would be a similar system except the birds can be distributed and managed from a single building and/or strategic zoom.|||Concept For Aviary. Big cage, yes. Good exercise to get back into 3dmax regardless. Having seen a bit of the Empire's style, albeit bits and pieces mainly concept art, the style is very wrong and i know how i'm going to rework this. :)

|||If they used this idea i would be happy, really good.
And the model looks nice too. |||Can you say steampunk Roman tower aviary?
Birds and other flying creatures are bred and trained in this vast space. foliage and birds not included. Doubles as a big line-of-sight building.