Battlefield obscurant capability

[DFDelta]

Having smokescreens disrupt you and your own teammate's radars would make excellent grief material. Yet, having them as temporary AECMs would be overpowered.

But we have to add sone disadvantages, or else the whole map will only be one black foggy... thingy 

About the AECM... maybe, but remember that the ones profiting from the ECM effect would be blind themselves (visual and radar)

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

How about giving the APC a TAG-laser style smoke grenade 'weapon'? TAG area, smoke screen artillery lands, park next to smoke to reload your team/let BA's respawn. Could help make the APC asset more than a 'park 'n' forget' asset, as a player would want to jump into it now and then to call in more smoke/smoke up a new area.

[Flyingdebris]

well to keep smoke from being abused, the idea of screwing over the user's sensors only makes sense.  smoke doesn't discriminate

So you could get the bonus of having your detectable range being shortened, but the range at which you detect is also shortened.  I imagine that if you were already running passive at the time, you wouldn't see shit or be seen on radar for the duration of the cloud. 

The way this could be balanced, methinks, is that when we have a mechlab any land vehicle could mount smoke launchers, but they'd be mounted on the same hardpoints as stuff like AMS, sensors, or any other types of top mounted external equipment/countermeasures.  So that handy smoke launcher might cost you an ecm or an ams or something.

[DFDelta]

IMO they should better not be avaiable to everyone in the mechlab. I think this would result in too many people shooting those things around, making E-Optics obsolete. At its worst those people will equip "smoke launchers" themselves because they never get to really use E-Optics because of the smoke everywhere, and then we have 8 out of 10 players running around using them.

I belive giving them only to tanks is a better idea, maybe as a special weapons pod carrying the smoke launcher and a double ballistics slot (or something alike)

[(TLL)Siilk]

 This could be countered by very limited ammo for smokescreen launchers. Making it one or two shots per ton(or no extra ammo at all) could drastically decrease smokescreen abuse.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

Speaking of AMS/LAMS, is that 'Automatic turret destroyed!' message I often see in the upper left hand corner a notification my AMS has been destroyed/isn't present? I often see a full/nearly full health 'Mech walking around with a burning AMS laser on it's shoulder... is the AMS not repairable?


Or give the smoke screen a VERY hefty cooldown, either 4-5 minutes and/or several times the duration of the smoke itself (smoke lasts 2 minutes, cooldown is 4-8 minutes)?

[DFDelta]

LAMS:
Yeah unfortunally it is not repairable and it tends to get broken after the first LRM-10 salvo every darn time I use one 

Smoke:
Such drastic ammo limitations combined with a high cooldown would be another good way of reducing abuse, didn't thin of that, good idea

[Flyingdebris]

naw man thats way too long for the purposes of this game

if anything popped smoke should only last no more than 15 seconds  More than that and you'll have way too many smoke clouds lingering.
Artillery smokes should last almost a minute to both be effective and since you won't have too many of those going off at a given time.

as for how to limit them.  I don't think there even needs to be an ammo limit for them, on account of how small and cheap smoke nades are.  Just give them a nice long cooldown, like 30 seconds.  Also maybe set whatever game entity is creating the smoke be subject to damage from missiles, to simulate high explosives dispersing the smoke.

As someone who tanked a lot in bf2 back in the day, and played a number of mods that catered to my tank whoring ways, where everyone had smokes, i can tell you that there was never any smoke abuse.  People popped smoke primarily under the same circumstances under which a squid would release ink. i.e. things went ass up and they need to break away.  of course though a smoke cloud can't stop a tank round, so that didn't always work out.  and in every game i've ever played that involved smoke grenades, people almost always swapped them out for something with more tangible results, like frags or other types of equipment, thus limiting their use.  And even if you do have some jackball hiding in his little fortress of smoke as blind as a bat, there is nothing stopping you from shooting into the smoke, or just mosing up with a beatstick mk2 and ruining his day.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

The times given in my previous post were more of an example than a suggestion, was just trying to put out the idea of a ratio, to prevent one guy from chain-smoking an area into submission. 15 second smoke with a 30-60s cooldown works too, makes it more mobile and still requires multiple people to invest in smoke launchers to effectively block an area permanently, even then its not foolproof, as you can just go/shoot around/through it anyway.

[Liberius]

its already in as a feature..engines going critical on mechs's in another fasa game centurion this was a standard option to drop sheilding smoke.

I lol'd

[Redvan]

Battlefield obscurant capability

thats the fanciest way of saying "popping smoke" I ever heard

rather than smoke, how about a brief aoe cloaking field... would be less hard on the FPS for systems seeing as it's reducing the amount of rendering other players puters would need to do, rather than filling screens with smoke...

[Gremlich]

you could still try shooting center-mass of the cloud and a little low and MAYBE hit your target. anything electronic does not cloud your eyes, just your sensors. Remember, the idea is to disrupt/degrade the electronic and visual detection of your presence. Atmospherics on a given map (like the wind on Sandblasted) will dictate whether you can even use an obscurant or not. Visual, radar and thermal sensors can be thwarted, but not negated by smoke, depending on what's in the composition.

Suggested instances when the use of smoke is warranted:

- When you want to "Run away" (not quite the same as a tactical withdrawal)
- Artillery preparation of the battlefield (when the longtoms rain in a mix of HE and smoke on the area you want to move into)
- When you want to mask your intentions (lateral movements, tactical withdrawal to a stronger position, and outright deception (make someone think you are moving somewhere else when you really are not))

Mechs don't need this capability. The tanks and related vehicles do and the BA could even benefit from having a launcher that can lob grenades out to about 200m max (not quite the same as a mortar, but a similar idea. Mortart can shoot out further than that) as well as a sticky grenade that they can attach to a target, whether tank, mech, tree or building, just to annoy.

[Haunted]

- When you want to "Run away" (not quite the same as a tactical withdrawal)
- Artillery preparation of the battlefield (when the longtoms rain in a mix of HE and smoke on the area you want to move into)
- When you want to mask your intentions (lateral movements, tactical withdrawal to a stronger position, and outright deception (make someone think you are moving somewhere else when you really are not))

Mechs don't need this capability.

My main use of smoke would be to cover me from LRM. Since they need to see me (if i am passive) to get a lock. And that would be a great bonus for brawler mechs.

BA .... as well as a sticky grenade that they can attach to a target, whether tank, mech, tree or building, just to annoy.

Hell NO. Those buggers are already hard to track. And with most weapons effective against BAs you need a pretty close (if not direct) hit. Having a BA glue a smoke at a mech would make it utterly impossible for the mechs pilot to defend his mech (unless he the mech would have flamers).

[CHHs Cyan]

STICKING WITH TABLE TOP RULES,

You can set fire to trees, this would rape every server because trees are already a joke on the processors, but smoke has a set of predefined rules in table top, such that they block line of sight. Translating this to the game wouldn’t be as hard as smoke generally blocks everyone’s line of sight anyway.

As for jamming radar I think that is somewhat impractical, BUT!!!. If you had your radar turned off it would work normally as an environmental object blocking line of sight, as in you wouldn’t have target acquisition/locking ability, or in turn be able to be locked or acquired as a target.
So if you’re the one who set down the smoke you knock off your radar, and pop in and out of smoke to make sniping shots straight at your target


this would have its main USE verses LRM's ,and I could see it having alot of use on sandblasted allowing people to crest the dunes with out fear of a serious missile barrage

[=KoS=toasterpastries]

I agree w/ Haunted, smoke 'nades for BA would be far too easily abused. I do think giving them to mechs in such a way that they are dropped or launched a very short distance would give the sort of tactical addition we're looking for. As far as radar effects, then we are talking about chaff. Combining smoke and chaff into one shot=OP. Smoke should stick to its purpose of obscuration.
Like on Inferno when the other team is coming down the hill to base rape, drop smoke in the choke point and have a chance to cross the gap and spread out. This would still be useful against LRMs in denying a visual for missile lock, except I've noticed that the smoke effects from a mech going critical don't prevent line-of-sight for targeting, i.e. you still get red crosshairs/missile lock. Something would need to be added in the code to give a true visual obscuration. Unless there's something about the targeting systems I don't know about that would make you able to target w/o actual pilot visual.