Extended radar range by placing them together or radar-plane

[Zequez]

So, after a while radars turn completely useless, since once they hit the limit there is nothing you can do about them. If you want to explore more territory you have to go to the edge of the visible map and place another radar, and with a thousand biter bases in the middle that's usually not practical.

What about allowing radars to extend the range by placing them together (thus simulating a bigger radar), or increasing the power usage? Or both! When radars are placed together they could much more power than individually, but the range also increases!

Also, instead of radars, we could have radar-planes, that would need increasingly amounts of fuel to travel further, but would have an unlimited range.

[Shaymes]

radar disable the fog of war in a limited area too i dont think its complete useless, a rescan mode will be nice that check a 4x4 square of already detected area to find new biter spawns

[Ohlmann]

radar disable the fog of war in a limited area too i dont think its complete useless, a rescan mode will be nice that check a 4x4 square of already detected area to find new biter spawns

I am quite sure they do that already.

[DerivePi]

It is important, at some point in the game, to engage the natives. Placing a well defended forward radar base is an opportunity to do just that. I wouldn't want the developers to take that opportunity away.

[Koub]

I have already made a thread about radars. It turned out that :
- They do refresh already discovered chunks, one after the other, the oldest not refreshed chunk first
- The rediscovery is soooooooo slow that I decided to deconstruct all my radars, and patrol on foot

I'll rebuild my radars if they one day give enough refreshing for the energy upkeep they have

[MalContentFL]

What if radars placed in a 2x2 had there own connected texture.

[Zequez]

You guys just made me realize that the map has actually fog of war, and you only see the last thing you saw, or the last thing the radar saw. So I guess the radar is not that useless after all

[atehxx]

I have already made a thread about radars. It turned out that :
- They do refresh already discovered chunks, one after the other, the oldest not refreshed chunk first
- The rediscovery is soooooooo slow that I decided to deconstruct all my radars, and patrol on foot

I'm not so sure about this refreshing.
I had a map where i bulit great wall around my base, with turrents and radars. Then I killed all the biters in huge radius from this wall.
Then I played for some time in middle of base, and then I left it over night running on x50 speed.
Now at morning guess what - on map covered with fog of war I didn't see any biters anywhere around my walls, but when I run outside they were there!

[BurnHard]

I also doubt that there is any refreshing done in the extended range after the initial scan.

[ssilk]

But it will:
https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... itle=Radar

-> Many radars can make much sense.

[BurnHard]

Jeah ssilk, it's written there in the wiki, but I have NEVER experienced it happen ingame after A LOT of playtime... How do you know this function is not broken?

[Rahjital]

The devs themselves have said the radar rescans the area around itself. If it doesn't, it's a bug and you should report it.

[AssaultRaven]

Hopefully radars will be obsolete for exploration purposes once we get more fully developed flight, since a basic reconnaissance drone should be able to have a range on the order of 10 km.

[ssilk]

How do you know this function is not broken?

You can watch it: Every time the radar has ended it's cycle a chunk is explored, which can be seen on the map as suddenly highlighted. Which means, it is explored. And you see then then, when natives meanwhile settle between two chunks: the explored shows then suddenly their village, the unexplored not; looks like there is a straight line between the two chunks.

Hopefully radars will be obsolete for exploration purposes once we get more fully developed flight, since a basic reconnaissance drone should be able to have a range on the order of 10 km.

Radars will get very important, when a Throne Room is added: They mentioned anywhere, that you can access all areas with radar-access from this Throne Room alone, which makes the game quite different later.

BTW: do you know what ten kilometers in factorio is like? When a tile is about one meter, then it's 10,000 tiles. Ten thousand tiles is by train without stop about 5 minutes. Or 50 radar ranges.

[Rahjital]

And you see then then, when natives meanwhile settle between two chunks: the explored shows then suddenly their village, the unexplored not; looks like there is a straight line between the two chunks.

The problem is that people can't see it and it's so slow it pretty much has no effect on gameplay. I found that in one of my recents saves, soon after loading the biters build a base right in the middle of my highway. I used this to test radar refreshing by building a small radar base with 4 radars nearby and watching how soon did the biters appear on the map. Even after half an hour and plenty of biter attacks coming from the new base, it still didn't appear on the map. I then gave up and dismantiled the radar base because I couldn't justify the additional megawatt of energy consumption.

The refreshing should either be made faster or it should highlight the chunks the same way as if new chunks are explored, otherwise people won't notice it at all.

[AssaultRaven]

BTW: do you know what ten kilometers in factorio is like? When a tile is about one meter, then it's 10,000 tiles. Ten thousand tiles is by train without stop about 5 minutes. Or 50 radar ranges.

I know. Hence why more fully developed uses for Flight would make the current use of radar obsolete. I'm imagining that this would enable playable maps with much more widely spaced resources, and other more interesting things when you get a command center, as you describe. But planes would still be a more interesting way to scout out or monitor territory than radar. Radio towers would make more sense for command and control purposes, and also much more interesting if they do not automatically convey intelligence over a large area. Line-of-sight radio alone covers about 40 km, so presumably that could just be part of the command center.

[ssilk]

@Rahital: you're invited to make a balance-suggestion.

@AssaultRaven:
Wrong thread. Go to https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4636



This theme is much more, than just this single thread:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/sea ... id%5B%5D=6

More direct links:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4304

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=1915

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... can#p15554

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... rer#p30331

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... rer#p35573

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ore#p26741