Suggestion: Stealth as game mechanic

[Navalus Magnus]

Reading naval novels about Jack Aubrey, Horatio Hornblower or Richard Bolitho with pleasure, the following comes to my mind:

 

Much of the suspense created in such novels is linked to the narration of stealthy actions, for example an amphibious operation at night.

 

@sterner Would it be possible to implement stealth as a game mechanic and thus use its potential for creating suspense ingame?

 

For example:

-       Give Units a certain radius of visibility, depending on thier size (ships as well as land units). This way enemy units would just react to one another, if they are inside of such a radius.

-       Let this radius of sight be decreased or blocked completely by things like islands at sea, or woods, houses and rocks on land.

-       Implement night and day scenarios (an automatic change of day and night wouldn’t be necessary).

-       Implement bad weather like fog, (heavy) rain or storms (also: no autamaticly changing weather necessary).

-       Let the radius of sight be decreased in general at scenarios at night, or in bad weather.

-       Allow ships to decrease thier radius of sight further by putting out or screening thier lights at night.

-       Give units a damage bonus, if they manage to do a surprise attack (getting close undetected) to the enemy.

-       Create scenarios that could be or must be won by stealth tactics like passing greater enemy forces undetected.

[pandakraut]

As far as I know it's not doing much for naval units, but there is already line of sight and stealth system in the game. If you hold L you can see the vision lines from a given area or unit. Units also have spot and stealth stats which influence which units they can reveal.

[Navalus Magnus]

54 minutes ago, pandakraut said:

As far as I know it's not doing much for naval units, but there is already line of sight and stealth system in the game. If you hold L you can see the vision lines from a given area or unit. Units also have spot and stealth stats which influence which units they can reveal.

Thanx for the answer, didn’t notice it in the gameplay videos i saw.

After some more thought about that matter I have to admit, that such things seem hard to realize in a strategy game.

A pity!

Edited February 19, 2020 by Navalus Magnus

[WilliamTheIII]

This is such an awesome idea but I totally agree would be very difficult to implement. The naval mission priority already has several of the features you mission and could be used to make a more interesting "run away" mission. Although the randomness of ai movement and the restrictions that come with sailing could leave to a lot of frustration and an overall failure of the system. For land at least, this is much more doable where you could potentially have random patrols. One mission that comes to mind is the one where you have to attack a british fort while the soldiers are out partying. You have to dodge patrols with your units and capture the fort or else a large force comes to reinforce the fort making things much more difficult.