How to prevent player from IDing Side to quickly

[texag11]

Scenario - I've put 10 7m Sailboats (2 Venezuelan side, 8 "Civilian" side) near Roosevelt Roads and a US MPA with Radar on will almost instantly know those 2 are the "bad guys".

I'm trying to set up a scenario where the AI has several small boats parked near the players base (Puerto Rico) that are mixed in with true civilian ships and able to provide some level of intel to the AI side except my MPA are quickly able to ID them. This would give the USCG Cutters something to do for "harbor defense".

I could set up another side but I wanted to see if there is another way to do this.

[Gunner98]

This is always a bit of a tricky thing when you have observant players with good ISTAR. Here are a couple ideas:

-Have your two sides with very similar names: 'Civilian' and 'Civilian.' or something like that. It will only fool folks who aren't paying too much attention.
-Give your bad guy side some jamming capability
-equip craft on both sides with a similar radar, so some sailboats have navigation radar and some don't but it doesn't instantly allow the player to ID them based on emission
-Have the innocent guys doing things that are suspicious
-Keep them all on the same side and at the appropriate time, change sides to give the player a bit of a surprise
-random start placement helps

Just some thoughts

[texag11]

Thanks Gunner!

Your first suggestion was what I figured I would have to do but I wasn't sure if there was another way around it.

I had planned on giving them a couple MANPADS/RPGs for a bit of a surprise but I like the idea of jamming capability too, I hadn't thought of that one.

[Kushan04]

You can also put all the units on the same side and turn off collective responsibility. The entire Civilian side would see the US as hostile, but the US would only see the units that fired on it has hostile.

[Randomizer]

-Have your two sides with very similar names: 'Civilian' and 'Civilian.' or something like that. It will only fool folks who aren't paying too much attention.

You can also use a space after the Side name to give even less away so that "Civilian" is indistinguishable to the Player from "Civilian ", once you drop the quotation marks.

You can actually have multiple spaces after the side name, which allows a greater potential for deception by the AI. Lua scripts also remember spaces after the side name for scripting purposes.

Another trick could be to set the posture to Neutral and then trigger a Change of Posture event at a time or under conditions convenient to the AI. The change side script is also handy for this sort of thing.

-C

[AndrewJ]

ORIGINAL: Gunner98

This is always a bit of a tricky thing when you have observant players with good ISTAR. Here are a couple ideas:

-Have your two sides with very similar names: 'Civilian' and 'Civilian.' or something like that. It will only fool folks who aren't paying too much attention.
-Give your bad guy side some jamming capability
-equip craft on both sides with a similar radar, so some sailboats have navigation radar and some don't but it doesn't instantly allow the player to ID them based on emission
-Have the innocent guys doing things that are suspicious
-Keep them all on the same side and at the appropriate time, change sides to give the player a bit of a surprise
-random start placement helps

Just some thoughts

Darn near sank a civilian ferry in one of your PF series because it happened to be heading towards a coastal airbase when things kicked off.

[Gunner98]

Darn near sank a civilian ferry in one of your PF series

[8D]

[CHM]

ORIGINAL: AndrewJ

ORIGINAL: Gunner98

This is always a bit of a tricky thing when you have observant players with good ISTAR. Here are a couple ideas:

-Have your two sides with very similar names: 'Civilian' and 'Civilian.' or something like that. It will only fool folks who aren't paying too much attention.
-Give your bad guy side some jamming capability
-equip craft on both sides with a similar radar, so some sailboats have navigation radar and some don't but it doesn't instantly allow the player to ID them based on emission
-Have the innocent guys doing things that are suspicious
-Keep them all on the same side and at the appropriate time, change sides to give the player a bit of a surprise
-random start placement helps

Just some thoughts

Darn near sank a civilian ferry in one of your PF series because it happened to be heading towards a coastal airbase when things kicked off.

I went berserk during an early Indian Fury and wiped out some 'suspicious' fishing boats before checking my score. Ah.