Mod Idea: hide reclaim under fog of war

[armacham01]

Problem: you can hold ctrl-shift to see all the reclaim on the map, which gives you information about where your opponent is reclaiming. Which is a kind of free intel and there is no in-game reason that makes sense for it.

Solution 1: never allow players to see reclaim under fog of war

Problem with that: But that's not good because at the start of a map, players should be able to see where the reclaim is so they can plan accordingly

Solution 2: Before minute 3, show all reclaim. After minute 3, only show reclaim that is not under fog of war

Problem with that: after a battle, you fly an air scout over a reclaim field. you can see the reclaim. but as soon as your scout flies away, you would stop seeing the reclaim. it's good for players to learn where reclaim is even if they're not literally watching the scout as it passes overhead.

This is not actually a huge problem and this might actually be the best solution.

Solution 3: show reclaim to players even after it has been reclaimed. only remove reclaim from the map when there is fog of war. So you can see where reclaim ought to be, and if you scout it and see it's no longer there, you learn that your opponent has scouted it

Problem with that: i guess it would require, for every single piece of reclaim in the game, that the game engine tracks which players have seen it. And maybe it needs to track this not just as a binary thing (seen vs. unseen) but it woul dneed to track the amount of reclaim as an integer. "The last time Player 1 saw this wreck, it had 1500 mass, but now it has only 500 mass because Player 2 has started reclaiming it" It would also require the game to keep track of dead units even after they have been reclaimed which is sort of akin to a memory leak if someone is not scouting.

is that going to put too much strain on the engine? Is that technically feasible?

Would we need to add some sort of "garbage collection" where if there are too many unscouted reclaimed dead units, that they start disappearing from the non-scouting player's map? That would prevent a memory leak-type situation and it wouldn't be game-breaking because it would only affect idjits who don't scout.

I'm thinking solution #2 is best because it is probably more feasible to implement.

Has anyone done something similar in the past?

[keyser]

can you make also that we can't see trees getting break down in the fog of war, it help a lot spotting in coming early raids on some maps

[Little Miss Murder]

Also, mexes and other upgradable structures turn dark grey on radar the moment they've upgraded, as if they have been destroyed. More free intel.