On each field, your view (first line, postfixed with 'V'), your jamming (second line, postfixed with 'J') and the terrain jamming (third line, postfixed with 'T') are shown.
A field in ASC can have 4 different visibility states:
To understand the basic, we can ignore the difference between 3) and 4).
Invisible is the initial state of all fields. An invisible field is just grey. You cannot see terrain, units or anything, and you cannot move onto this field.
To calculate, which fields are visible, ASC works like this:
All units and building have a view and a jamming capability. And each field has a view and a jamming variable for each player. First, the view is calculated. A unit having a view of 30 and standing on a plain will add 31 view points to the field it is standing on. So the actual view is always 1 point stronger than specified. The 6 fields surrounding it get 21 points, and so on, until all fields with a distance of 3 fields get 1 viewing points. Here you can see why 1 viewing point is added: so that a unit with a view of 30 can see up to 3 fields distance, so the range works just like weapon or movement range.
This view calculation is done for all units, so the view of all units adds up.
But certain terrain and objects have their own radar blocking. If the field next to the unit has a forest object (having a radar blocking of 5), this is subtracted from the view power, so only 16 points are added to the neighbouring fields.
For flying units, only a fraction of the radar blocking applies:
In a second step, the jamming of all enemy units is applied. This works almost the same: a unit with jamming of 20 will apply 20 jamming points to the field it is standing on and 10 to the neighbouring fields. The only difference is that certain units only jam their own field and not their neighbouring field (attribute name: jam only own field).
The third step evaluates the view and jamming. For each field where the radar power is higher than the jamming value, this field will become visible.
By activating the Visibility map overlay you can see the parameters of the view:
On each field, your view (first line, postfixed with 'V'), your jamming (second line, postfixed with 'J') and the terrain jamming (third line, postfixed with 'T') are shown.
You can clearly see how the viewing power is reduced by 10 for each field when a line from the radar vehicle. The fields with forrest add additional terrain jamming, as you can see by the viewing power being reduced by more then 10 points from one field to the next. In the area where the view of the radar vehicle and the trooper overlap, you see the sum of both radars - it's difficult to divide the value into the individual contributions if the line of view is not following streight lines.
You can also see that your trooper has a radar jamming of 11. This means, that an enemy must have at least 12 viewing points on that fields to see it.
Special rules apply for seing mines, submarines and satellites. These are only visible if the field is in the state completely visible. A field will get this state if there is either
If there is just a Mine, or a just submarine, or a just a satellit on the field, everything works fine. But if there is for example both a submarine and a mine on a field and this field is covered by a unit/building with mine view, but without sonar, the submarine will be visible nontheless because the field gets the completely visible state. If the mine is removed, the submarine will become invisible again.
Last change: Sun, 2009-01-11 13:21