Peak scouting -- feature or exploit?

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Bringa

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Jan 23, 2006
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I feel a certain sense of deja ecrit--as in, I feel I've WRITTEN this before, but hell:

When you have a hunter with a hawk (or any version of the flying scout unit) and you tell it to scout on a tile with a peak on it, you get incredibly distant visibility. Basically, one or two hunters positioned within scouting range of a peak can provide you with scouting info about your enemy's entire country.

I wonder if this is a feature that the team wanted like this or if it's simply an oddness in the engine, and if so, if one shouldn't take steps to stop peak scouting. I feel it cheapens scouting mightily. You don't have to make any effort to find out what's going on in your enemy's country, you just build one hunter with a hawk and you'll know all there is to know.
 
You know about the horizon, the higher you are, the further you can see and add to that the eyesight of an eagle and that "Animal Companion" relationship the bird has with its master and its quite logical.

The distance to the horizon is 120 km away if your "eyes" are 1 km up. (there is a formula to calculate this)

In a DnD pen and paper game this is a DM nightmare when it comes to "enchanted" birds and what they can see.

Edit: The horizon is 4,8 km away if your eyes is 1,7 m up.
 
It's controlled by GlobalDefines. RECON_VISIBILITY_RANGE (5), PEAK_SEE_FROM_CHANGE (2, meaning you can see through anything of lower level - which is everyting except FEATURE_WALLS and other peaks) and PEAK_SEE_THROUGH_CHANGE (2).

None of them have changed in FfH from BtS. Note that one is automaticly added to the range.
 
definitely makes sense if you think about it. even if it was an exploit, its a logical one so even then it really wouldn't be.
 
Also, if you haven't noticed, hills give a pretty big line of sight boost, too. Annyway, be glad it doesn't go further on say, flat worlds, where the horizon would be the nearest other hill/mountain, or the edge of the world.
 
I don't think that this makes any sense - the bird can fly as high if there is no mountain below it, so why should it see better on peak tiles...
 
Yeah, the fact that the bird (or plane in the normal game) always keep one "altitude" level above ground is a pure game techniqality. Sure could probably be modded on some way, but I don't think that would be worth the effort, after there are peaks (almost) everywhere.
 
Frozen-Vomit said:
I don't think that this makes any sense - the bird can fly as high if there is no mountain below it, so why should it see better on peak tiles...
Click to expand...

Not really, if you think that reckon flight takes few hours or days. Bird flies up the mountain, rests, eats, then keeps on flying, never going too high from ground.:D It's not like she darts right up in the sky.
 
Okay, everyone--can you stop trying to think of whether or not this is logical, whether this makes sense in a real-world situation, and think about GAMEPLAY for a second? What this means for gameplay is cheap, uncounterable scouting. I always thought that having secrets and hiding them from your enemy is a big part of fun in multiplayer.
 
In "Standard" civ you do this with airplane, no fuzz about that, recon mission is a very good Early Warning system.

Here you got it much earlier, but you also got magic, special powers like hiding, invisibility, monsters and so on
 
Bringa said:
Okay, everyone--can you stop trying to think of whether or not this is logical, whether this makes sense in a real-world situation, and think about GAMEPLAY for a second? What this means for gameplay is cheap, uncounterable scouting. I always thought that having secrets and hiding them from your enemy is a big part of fun in multiplayer.
Click to expand...

You can get their scout. If he entered your borders, you aren't guarding your secrets.
 
I always make it a priority to capture one or more Griffons for this reason - in addition to their ability to fly over and stay on water. I will send them out on peaks near my borders to act as scout to warn me about approaching bad guys. I also try to keep them as HN units (long healing times is a minus there) and let them get strong picking off barbs and AI units that approach. I often get them above 100 XP.
 
TheJopa said:
You can get their scout. If he entered your borders, you aren't guarding your secrets.
Click to expand...

That's precisely the point I'm making. The hunter does not need to come anywhere NEAR your borders. Please, do me a favour and fire up a game of FFH, worldedit yourself a hunter with a hawk, let him scout a peak and just have a look at that insane range. If you have a peak anywhere within about, oh, a screen of your border then your enemy gets free vision on a huge chunk of land without ever coming close to your borders.
 
Well maybe make it possible for hawks to intercept other hawks?
 
That would be one solution, yes. I'm still not sure if I'd prefer intercept or simply no scouting on peak. First, though, I want to get a consensus that this is a problem.
 
Meh. Peak-scouting is far too useful for exploration purposes for me to consider it worth changing. Actually, what bothers me about Hawks is that hills and forests LIMIT their vision, which doesn't make much sense for something flying about that.

Hawks are supposed to give you a huge scouting advantage. It's what they do, it's what they are designed to do.
 
I find it useful for searching for land over larges areas of ocean. I can see how it can be an exploit, but it depends how you look at it. Like map sizes, exploring huge maps can be really tedious thus incredibly helpful to have such a large area covered. But then then tiny maps can be nearly revealed completely with a well placed recon. I personally don't have a problem with it, I don't use hawks often though.
 
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