Ambushing! Or, "no auto-sight"

[Boston]

Right now, as soon as a hostile force enters your map, you instantly know about it, and can "see" the combatants the entire way to your base. This makes dealing with combat, and especially tribals (zerg-rush nonwithstanding) almost trivial if your colonists have a long-range weapon.

What I propose is twofold:

1) You can only "see" an area of about 50 "tiles" around each of your colonists, and things like trees, hills, and mountains decrease this even farther. This means that you actually have to send out "scouts" to do things like hunt, mine, pick up cargo-pods, etc, and you probably want to cut back trees and tall grass/vegetation away from your base (preferably, more than one "survival rifle range" away), just so you don't get ambushed by tribals. You would also want to send out "scouting parties" every once in a while to make sure that you don't get snuck up on.

2) both you and opponents get the ability to "hide" behind vegetation and rocks and such. In real life, the reason why bow-users were able to "stand up to" firearms was because the bow-users would hide behind trees and rocks, and strike from ambush before the firearm-users would be able to shoot back.

[HalfmoonSmile]

I think you're a little mixed up about the strengths of bows. Bow users stood up to firearms because of the relatively great rate of fire at the time; for example, Comanches could fire an average of six arrows per minute without ever needing to reload-. That fired arrows are smokeless and largely silent was definitely a plus, but not a real gamebreaker as the army was good at forcing engagements (everyone needs to camp somewhere). Still, it wasnt until the late 1830's, with the Colt revolver entering mass production, that bows were really outclassed by guns in the American Old West; soldiers could carry two or three at once without them becoming ungainly (12-18 shots before reloading), they reload much quicker than rifles, and were relatively affordable. I think the bows in Rimworld are a bit slow, actually, but they are being compared to modern arms (and the great bow does maim pawns pretty well).

I don't think that fog of war would be entertaining unless there were more supporting mechanics in place, such as patrol routes, weapon sounds mattering more, visually relevant darkness, and maybe differences in the day-night behavior of wildlife. It also feels like it would unavoidably add plenty of micromanagement (hunting alone is already fairly time consuming). It might be fun if it was done right, but I'd rather see other content before fog of war was considered. I do like the roleplay potential of setting up an ambush, though.

[skullywag]

We used to have FOW back in the day but it was removed, not going to go into details, but lets just say i doubt it will return in the core game, mod? maybe.

[Kegereneku]

There was a long discussion on Fog of War before.
The problem is that feature like that change the game in a fundamental way and is not coherent with Rimworld game mechanic. (pawn speed, warning detection, radar... etc)

To sum up :
- The only point of a Fog of War is to fight the FoW, defeating the ability of the enemy to ambush you. That's why Strategy-Wargame have cheap scout and expandable units.
- In our case FoW translate as a wish for "looming threat" or to explore/expand. But looming threats is already taken care of in the unpredictability of events and exploration is best done through different suggestions.

Beside, Ambush is entirely feasible with the Events system.
It only need to be expended, for example : spawn 3/4 tribal/raider if you have a colonist near the border and have them try to attack/capture, not just "rush the base".
At which point a FoW feature would actually get in the way. If you cannot possibly save your Colonists in time or can't scout fast enough this is simply punishing the players.


As said, FoW was taken out in the past, for a good reason.