"Ignore EMCON while under attack" - Default ON or OFF?
Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2014 10:02 am
A little intro may be necessary here.
One of the things that really annoyed us as both players and scen designers during the "good times" with Harpoon 2/3, was that the AI was not smart enough to keep a silent EMCON profile _and_ also activate its sensors when the hide-and-seek was over and incoming threats where detected. Essentially, you had to choose between a "what is EMCON?" force that radiated like a Christmas tree (thus opening itself up to ESM detection, localization and kinetic/electronic attacks) or a silent force that would happily eat up missiles without ever activating its fire control sensors and responding.
Frankly, that sucked.
So when we were putting together Command, we wanted a more EMCON-savvy AI, both for the player's virtual subordinates and the enemy.
What we did is: Ships, facilities and their parent groups (if any) obey their EMCON postures _unless_ they determine themselves to be under attack - in which case they activate all their sensors and defend themselves. Once the threat is over, they revert to their directed EMCON status.
This behavior has been used in a number of included scenarios with good success, leading to forces that realistically managed their electronic emissions while also handling themselves under attack.
Unfortunately, this behavior meant that many players found their units suddenly emitting at circumstances that they, for whatever reason, would have preferred a silent approach (example: fb.asp?m=3535991). Even though we repeatedly explained why this behavior was triggered (example: fb.asp?m=3537089), the perception created (and in some cases deliberately propagated by certain persons of shady motives) was that "Command's AI has a serious flaw: sometimes units spontaneously light up their radars and sonars even when the player directs them not to".
To fix this "problem" for the new public release, we took this behavior, which hitherto was hard-coded on the AI, and moved it to a new configurable doctrine setting ("Ignore EMCON while under attack"). In addition, we set this doctrine setting to "OFF" by default (at least in B517).
However, this creates a new problem. In existing scenarios, units that have been instructed to maintain EMCON silence (with the expectation, from the part of the scen author, that they will override this and defend themselves when necessary) are now practically naked to atacks. Scen authors must go back to their existing works and set each unit's doctrine to re-enable this behavior. And likewise, for any new scenario, scen authors (and also players)
must remember to explicitly enable this behavior for any unit / group they want to. It is likely a big hassle.
We could avoid this problem by setting the doctrine option to "ON" by default (ie. keep the pre-B517 behavior by default). This however would mean that players not familiar with this behavior and why it works this way (99% of them) would still enquire on this. The false perception would remain.
So this poses an "interesting" dilemma.
What do you think the default setting should be? And do you have an alternative idea that avoids this problem altogether?
Let's hear it.
One of the things that really annoyed us as both players and scen designers during the "good times" with Harpoon 2/3, was that the AI was not smart enough to keep a silent EMCON profile _and_ also activate its sensors when the hide-and-seek was over and incoming threats where detected. Essentially, you had to choose between a "what is EMCON?" force that radiated like a Christmas tree (thus opening itself up to ESM detection, localization and kinetic/electronic attacks) or a silent force that would happily eat up missiles without ever activating its fire control sensors and responding.
Frankly, that sucked.
So when we were putting together Command, we wanted a more EMCON-savvy AI, both for the player's virtual subordinates and the enemy.
What we did is: Ships, facilities and their parent groups (if any) obey their EMCON postures _unless_ they determine themselves to be under attack - in which case they activate all their sensors and defend themselves. Once the threat is over, they revert to their directed EMCON status.
This behavior has been used in a number of included scenarios with good success, leading to forces that realistically managed their electronic emissions while also handling themselves under attack.
Unfortunately, this behavior meant that many players found their units suddenly emitting at circumstances that they, for whatever reason, would have preferred a silent approach (example: fb.asp?m=3535991). Even though we repeatedly explained why this behavior was triggered (example: fb.asp?m=3537089), the perception created (and in some cases deliberately propagated by certain persons of shady motives) was that "Command's AI has a serious flaw: sometimes units spontaneously light up their radars and sonars even when the player directs them not to".
To fix this "problem" for the new public release, we took this behavior, which hitherto was hard-coded on the AI, and moved it to a new configurable doctrine setting ("Ignore EMCON while under attack"). In addition, we set this doctrine setting to "OFF" by default (at least in B517).
However, this creates a new problem. In existing scenarios, units that have been instructed to maintain EMCON silence (with the expectation, from the part of the scen author, that they will override this and defend themselves when necessary) are now practically naked to atacks. Scen authors must go back to their existing works and set each unit's doctrine to re-enable this behavior. And likewise, for any new scenario, scen authors (and also players)
must remember to explicitly enable this behavior for any unit / group they want to. It is likely a big hassle.
We could avoid this problem by setting the doctrine option to "ON" by default (ie. keep the pre-B517 behavior by default). This however would mean that players not familiar with this behavior and why it works this way (99% of them) would still enquire on this. The false perception would remain.
So this poses an "interesting" dilemma.
What do you think the default setting should be? And do you have an alternative idea that avoids this problem altogether?
Let's hear it.