Cold Take #37 - Scouting Trouble

Most strategy games have tools for spying on the enemy, often at the cost of resources. This is known as scouting, and it is a tricky thing to design since its balance depends on the usefulness of information. Scouting is a waste of resources if you know the enemy's plans, or if your response would not be changed by knowing them. On the other end of the scale, games with large strategy spaces rely on strong scouting to keep strategic RPS in check. To complicate things further, the power of scouting changes over the course of a game as the strategy space expands.

Scouting is always competing for resources that could be spent on building up your economy or deploying a larger army. Small differences early in a battle can snowball into a large advantage later, which makes scouting a hard sell for the early game. In Zero-K this is reflected by a lack of dedicated light scout units. Early scouting is done by raiders, which are able to deal damage as well as spy on the enemy. Even the nominal "Light Scouts" are armed and able to harass undefended constructors and metal extractors.

It would take a bit of a redesign to see pure dedicated scouts in the early game. Such a scout would have to be either very cheap or very powerful to offset its drawbacks. This power could be relative, i.e. raiders could become near-blind, but the issue with blind units is that regularly blundering into the enemy feels bad. Ultimately we avoided forcing dedicated scouts into the early game as it would be too much to manage. Remember, monospam is much easier to use than a mix of units, and there is already plenty to do early on without extra complication. We only discovered this relatively recently after adding the Sparrow.

Sparrow is a light scout plane that is accessible to all factories by morphing a Radar Tower. These days Sparrow is a bit too expensive for the opening, but initially it was much cheaper, at 120 metal. This turned out to be too powerful as the ability to see everything made it too easy to punish deviations from a middle-of-the-road opening. In general scouting is too powerful when it removes otherwise reasonable strategic approaches. Most of the strategies that push at the edges of the strategic triangle are aided by the fact that the enemy cannot instantly start moving to counter them.

In addition to being too powerful, early Sparrow was too onerous. Scouts take attention to keep alive, since they want to get close to the enemy, and it takes even more attention to use the information they reveal. Some of the immediate burden is reduced by the fact that scouted structures leave a persistent "ghost", but there is no such feature for units. Early Sparrow was particularly problematic because it could fly around dodging turrets for minutes. This is not so much of a problem later in the game, as once dedicated AA comes out scouting missions tend to be quick and one-way. There are other types of scouts, such as cloaked units, that can hang around, but they require much less attention to manage than a flimsy plane.

Different types of scouts are good at different types of scouting, and players pick them based on what they want to discover. One type of scouting is "weakness scouting", i.e. scouting to find a crack in the enemy's defence. Raiders are particularly good weakness scouts because they are equipped to follow up on the weaknesses they find.