I am working in my mind on a video/board game about a modern military tactic game that would look close to video games like Conflict, Super Conflic, Advance Wars, and especialy Dai Senryaku. Now I have some issues about how the fog of war would be resolved and I am exploring various alternatives.
There are 2 type of fog of war, those that hide ennemy position and those that hide the map forcing you to explore. In "Commanders: Atack of the Genos", they implement both fog of war and the map exploration is very annoying, because you never know where you are going. So I intend to stick to hiding ennemy units.
http://lariennalibrary.com/extern/forum/FogOfWar/commanders-attack-of-th...
In Conflict, there is no fog of war. When a unit is selected, it highlight the area that you can move, you select your target and you "teleport" to destination since no path is calculated to reach the target. It's simple and elegant. I would like to have something similar in simplicity and efficiency.
http://lariennalibrary.com/extern/forum/FogOfWar/Super_Conflict_SNES_Scr...
But no fog of war makes scouting units useless and artillery unit more powerful. Units with cruise missile that can target units at more than 15 hexes away are just too abusive with no fog of war.
In Dai Senryaku, ennemy units are not shown and when you enter in collision or in the zone of control of an enemy unit, a surprise attack is initiated from the enemy. The problem with this solution is that a travel path must be calculated. Most of the time, the shortest path is used, but a player could want not to use the shortest path to avoid some obstacle, which implies askin the path to the user but implementing this feature would be even more complex.
http://lariennalibrary.com/extern/forum/FogOfWar/DaiSenryaku.jpg
In "commander: attack of the genos", not only they trace path, but you cannot move farther than where you can see so means in many situation you need to move a unit multiple times before spending all your movement which is not a convenient solution in my point of view.
So I thought of a compromise that could possibly work. The idea would be to show the position of the ennemy in the fog of war, but do not show their type and their stats. So when moving into the fog, you know which hex can be valid movement targets, preventing the need of path and colision detection while preventing long range unit to target ennemies inside the fog of war eve if they know their location.
The only drawback is that stealth units could be impossible to implement, but it's not such a big deal. Thematically, it makes sense that vehicles get somewhat detected by radar and other detection mechanism. So maybe showing the position of the ennemy is not so irrealist. As for infantry, if I want them more stealthy, I could use a different mechanic system that would allow them to stack over other units, or don't trigger blocking or interception. Not sure yet.
What do you think?
Any other solution?
Both! It would be a video game that has a board game feeling. Hex map, unit tokens, dice roll, etc. The only differences are some minor details harder to implement in a real board game like fuel consumption, ammo depletion and of course fog of war. Because like you said, it's a pain in the ass to implement.
Like I said, when there is no fog of war, it is easy to manage because player can easily see that valid moves they can do. But with FOW It ask the game to validate the move during the execution of the movement which is a bit more complicated.
Now was trying to see if I could have a fog of war without movement path calculation. Because I liked the idea of warping from a location to another without tracing a route and validating a move before moving. But I might not have a choice because it could impact other mechanics idea like for example artillery overwatch.
Which could allow a artillery to be placed in standby mode and shoot if somebody enter it's attack range. But if no movement path is calculated, then only the starting hex and the destination hex could trigger the overwatch. I could remove that ability, but it could still be interesting to keep it.