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How would you fix fog of war?


Alastor15243
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I've been thinking a lot about Fog of War and my intense love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, I think it can be incredibly thematically appropriate or even necessary for some types of maps, really helps with atmosphere, and can really up the tension. On the other hand, it's also a fundamentally broken concept that often requires trial and error when played blind, has almost no replay value once you figure out what's hiding out there, and generally isn't an obstacle that admits of skill-based solutions.

I've been asking myself: could fog of war be good? Well, the answer is obviously yes, because plenty of strategy games have successfully implemented it. In fact, one of my favorite strategy games of all time, Invisible, Inc., has fog of war as a core, central mechanic to it, and I have literally none of the complaints I have about Fire Emblem's fog of war in Invisible inc., despite  I,I being a roguelike with a much more brutal fail state than Fire Emblem.

There are, however, several massive differences to Invisible, Inc.'s core design that allow this feature to work so well. Number one, while you start out with basically no information about the map you're in, not even the general shape of it, practically half the mechanics in the game revolve around intelligence gathering and figuring that out. Number two, the game is procedurally generated, so that the contents of each map are a genuine surprise you can't memorize or look up online, necessitating those in-game systems for intelligence gathering. And number three, the enemies are also subject to fog of war, and in fact are even more limited than your agents are, and thus in this game, if you succeed in learning more about them than they know about you, you can get the drop on them.

Of course, several of these changes would be difficult to apply to Fire Emblem's gameplay, but I can think of two big changes that would probably be a huge help:

1: Enemies are subject to fog of war as well and can only see you beyond it if you've lit a torch. This would make it possible to make clever use of thieves to scout ahead.

2: Bows lose effective damage against fliers, which would be justified by it being harder to see them. This would keep fliers from being a frustrating exercise in fear and paranoia to deploy.

Any other thoughts on what it would take to make fog of war work?

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I fully believe that Fog of war is already perfect, it does it's job perfectly. It's supposed to make things hard and unfair for the player. 

I was a bit upset that we didn't get more of it in FE16 honestly.

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1 minute ago, Rose482 said:

I fully believe that Fog of war is already perfect, it does it's job perfectly. It's supposed to make things hard and unfair for the player. 

I was a bit upset that we didn't get more of it in FE16 honestly.

The issue is that it only works once, the one time you don't know what's in the dark, and is often unfair in ways that can't even be countered with skill.

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Toning down the enemy strength a bit compared to what it would be if there was no FoW present would be one option. But you don't want to deplete it to the point that the map becomes a pushover.

 

Making the enemy abide by the rules of FoW in-full is, as pointed out in the OP, a definite move towards fairness. Although Advance Wars began like FE with enemies almost entirely forgoing the restrictions, Dual Strike and Days of Ruin leveled the playing field.

 

Speaking of Advance Wars, other than Thieves, FE units all have the same vision range. Change that. Why? Because it hurts the enemy more than it would the player. Resetting on permadeath means the player if they do that, will never lose Vision. On the other hand, if the enemy lost a Sniper with 4 Vision, a high value, it would suddenly find itself much more blind. It'd add strategy by complicating the player's choices of which enemies they choose to kill off first. An example:

  • If the enemy Killer Axe Berserker can't see me, it is harmless. And if killing the puny Wind Mage effectively blinds the Berserker, then I should do that. -if I don't have everything I'd want available to kill the Berserker or the Berserker and the Wind Mage.

 

Maybe add units that can hide in certain spots in FoW if no enemy is adjacent to them. Now, I can ambush the enemy just as easily as they can ambush me. And if my high Vision units can hide and are fragile, their fragility is now reduced so as long as keep an eye out for enemies in the distance.

 

32 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

1: Enemies are subject to fog of war as well and can only see you beyond it if you've lit a torch. This would make it possible to make clever use of thieves to scout ahead.

Are you saying Torches would reveal your own locations on top of revealing the enemies? A double-edged sword?

Although it makes little sense, I'd rather have AW's Flare units. Which reveal a 3x3 "+" area within a certain range (including hiding places), but only for the side that uses them.

But, Days of Ruin did include Fire spaces, which light up the surrounding area excluding hiding places for both sides. Seized properties became hiding places where units belonging to the conquerer's side can hide, and the seized properties have a small innate Vision field they emit for that side even if no allies are near them (and the range is larger for Radar properties).

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
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15 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

The issue is that it only works once, the one time you don't know what's in the dark, and is often unfair in ways that can't even be countered with skill.

I disagree on it only working once. It's true you would have an idea of what's waiting for you the next time you play the chapter, but the chances are you won't remember every single detail there is. Like this could just be me and my bad memory, but even in games like FE8, where I played through a lot, I still take a lot more time in each fog of war chapter. 

As for it being unfair...well, I think that's a point of it honestly. I don't think it was made to be fair for the player. 

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Just now, Rose482 said:

As for it being unfair...well, I think that's a point of it honestly. I don't think it was made to be fair for the player. 

There's a difference between being unfair as in putting the player at a disadvantage, and being unfair as in making skill irrelevant for completing a task. Fog of war often finds itself in the latter camp, and that's not good game design. A game that you have to lose once in order to win even if you're a super genius demigod is just wasting your time and not genuinely challenging you.

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Just now, Alastor15243 said:

There's a difference between being unfair as in putting the player at a disadvantage, and being unfair as in making skill irrelevant for completing a task. Fog of war often finds itself in the latter camp, and that's not good game design. A game that you have to lose once in order to win even if you're a super genius demigod is just wasting your time and not genuinely challenging you.

You really don't NEED to lose once though. Really the key to win a fog of war chapter (or at least most of the time) is to take things slow and not rush throughout the map. Just keep all your units next to each other and progress slowly until you reach your goal. Now of course usually it's not that simple, but the chances are you also won't get a game over if you followed this method. 

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6 minutes ago, Rose482 said:

You really don't NEED to lose once though. Really the key to win a fog of war chapter (or at least most of the time) is to take things slow and not rush throughout the map. Just keep all your units next to each other and progress slowly until you reach your goal. Now of course usually it's not that simple, but the chances are you also won't get a game over if you followed this method. 

The issue is that you have to basically perform actions that cannot conceivably get you killed no matter what's hiding in the dark, and if that's possible, that's not very good game design because it's also a boring strategy to let work and means there's a very uninteresting variety of things this game can hide in it.

Can you imagine what a fog of war map would be like in a game with Conquest's design philosophy, with the low unit HP, stat-debuffing ninjas, and insane varieties of skill combinations enemies can have that can see your cute little healer chain-lunged into oblivion like a chain wrapped around her neck and dragged her back into the dark to never be seen again? Without fog of war, those dangerous and terrifying enemy abilities are awesome because you have to think of ways to counter them. Making it impossible to see them coming before they happen would make that kind of game design an absolute nightmare, meaning that currently Fog of War can only really work with really basic, weak and uninteresting enemies.

Edited by Alastor15243
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let's see the main problem with fog of war is that it is unfair and player hostile in that the enemy can see you but you can't see them. Basically the main problem with it is that it completely blinds the player from all the necessary information required to make an informed decision in fire emblem because all that information(enemy stats, position, movement range, etc.) is pretty much taken from the player once again leaving them completely blind. Now this could this could work if getting that information wasn't stupid because the only way to see enemies is to move a unit and have them expend an action in order to for you to gain more visibility. 

The main issue with that though is that it essentially forces the player into a situation they cannot control because you cannot make informed decision because again you're essentially blind so sending any unit is a huge risk simply because you don't know anything about the enemy but they know everything about you. Even a reasonably tanky unit can and will get dogpiled because you didn't know the sheer amount of enemies there were. Cause with the way FE works, in this scenario scouting is actively discouraged because of permadeath and what have you. with this in mind, the question to ask is: How do we allow the player to gather the necessary information they need without putting them in an unfair situation they couldn't predict?

1. as stated above. Subject the enemy to fog of war as well.

2. encourage scouting by reducing the risk factor. Like for example lowering hit rates of every unit unless there's a torch lit. That way the player feels more comfortable moving units in the fog.

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Being able to see things like enemy torches might be a simple change. You would be able to see where some enemies are, but not what kind of units they are.

Edited by Slumber
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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Of course, several of these changes would be difficult to apply to Fire Emblem's gameplay, but I can think of two big changes that would probably be a huge help:

1: Enemies are subject to fog of war as well and can only see you beyond it if you've lit a torch. This would make it possible to make clever use of thieves to scout ahead.

2: Bows lose effective damage against fliers, which would be justified by it being harder to see them. This would keep fliers from being a frustrating exercise in fear and paranoia to deploy.

Any other thoughts on what it would take to make fog of war work?

1: This would be a neat mechanic if maybe a little hard to implement. As Observer pointed out you could have both sides using torches, which has the disadvantage of giving away your location. And tackling the inequality from the opposite angle, I would like the ability to make blind attacks into the fog after bumping into an enemy. No battle forecast, but let the opportunity to salvage a unit's action exist.

2: Hard disagree on this one. Fliers having stronger checks to mobility is fine with how much it normally runs rampant, and I'd argue it'd be more justifiable to say fliers lose movement on FOW maps than lose their arrow weakness. You don't want to fly when visibility sucks IRL.

Beyond that, I'd say the most important aspect is making sure you have ways to scout. Give extended vision to bow users so that you have a less niche scouter than a thief, and throw us a torch before we get ourselves into it. Maybe throw in a supporting Combat Art or Gambit to reveal tiles at a distance? Invisible siege weapons are a big NO. The DS games also have a neat aspect where the path you take reveals tiles, but with that being your only scouting method the maps are uncomfortably trial-and-error.

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I'm not sure fog of war really needs "fixing" - how it's implemented in most games seems to function exactly as their intended, which is to obscure information from the player to get them to play more cautiously or incentivize them to use certain units/items to mitigate the reduced vision. Given that, I'm not sure what could be done to "fix" Fog  of War that don't undermine the point of it. The only small adjustment I think that could be interesting would be to have some indication of enemy movement or reinforcements, which could also be somewhat "realistic" since even if you can't see stuff, you probably could still hear. And maybe in the preparations you get a rundown of the general composition of the enemy army so you have some idea of what type of units to expect.

I see a lot of arguments(not here strictly, but in various threads and other communities) that enemies should be affected by Fog of War just like the player and this somehow would be a "fix," but I'm entirely unconvinced by that - is it really a problem that the player is disadvantaged in this way? The player gets all sorts of disadvantages compared to the enemy anyway, so I'm not sure that this one is really so egregious. And I'm not really sure it would make much difference from the players perspective anyway.

47 minutes ago, X-Naut said:

Give extended vision to bow users so that you have a less niche scouter than a thief, and throw us a torch before we get ourselves into it.

I think having extended vision for niche units is the point - it encourages players to deploy a more diverse set of units. Plus on indoor FoW maps, players will  probably bring a thief anyway.

On the latter, don't most games do that already? The only game I can think that doesn't is FE5, and that game has some easily obtainable torches in its first FoW map.

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theoretically the objective of fog of war is to encourage the player to move more slowly and cautiously across the map by limiting the information available to them at any given point, however contrary to that aim it is often more expedient to simply charge ahead anyways and expand your field of view as quickly as possible by advancing faster then normal, especially by putting out the odd unit with expanded vision (a great example of this actually would be fe16's ch 3/lonato map, theoretically your suppose to approach the map more cautiously and slowly due to the fog but its more in the players interest to advance ahead fast to protect your npc allies and to kill the dark mage producing the fog not helped by the enemies not being arranged to take advantage of this) so the fog can be said to not actually be doing its job.

personally, i would fix this by either further restricting the players field of vision such as reducing the effect of torches and lowering the thiefs view range and thus giving them less options to advance quickly with and thus improving the fogs ability to limit the players information, or by focusing on enemy placement that takes advantage of fog to slow down the player more efficiently.

if we were to make the mechanic more player friendly however i dont feel changing enemy ai to act as if blinded in the fog would change much on the player end aside from making enemy waves more manageable by a tiny amount. instead of that, how about the fog doesn't completely obscure enemies but instead leaves an indistinguishable silhouette of sorts. that way enemy numbers and placement is still conveyed to the player, but information on what those enemies and what they'll do is still limited so that the fog still encourages the player to take things more slowly (theoretically anyways).

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Fog of War would be an interesting mechanic, but the way it's handled in Fire Emblem can be really frustrating.

For example when you can only attack what you see, yet the enemy can still attack what they can reach - a big part of this issue. Especially when the game gives the enemy Bolting tomes and status staves which you don't even know where they come from, and surprise - somebody is dead. Or when they also put you into a desert with fog of war where you can hardly move, but the enemy has a squad full of mages and flying units who are not hindered by the movement (yes fe6 ch14, I am looking at you). Times like this fog of war just feels unfair. Or combine fog of war of Thracia where the enemy has a status staves that has infinite reach, and status effects last until the end of the chapter - feels even more unfair. Recently Three Houses pulled a bad one with fog of war too, unless you are using Torches you are up to nasty surprises, like Swordmasters rushing you down and doubling you, or 3 mages out of nowhere to kill your armor knight.

Even when I feel like I'm playing safely, fog of war does find a way to screw me over. The best action would be to limit the enemy's field of view as well, so they can only attack targets in their fog of war - fair play. Or don't put 15+ range units into this map without indicating them. Ballistas were at least visible in some games, but the mentioned mages were not. Another option is to give the enemies torches as well, but both sides can see where the torchlight is coming from - that could be an interesting twist. Maybe allow your units to be invisible in some tiles during fog of war maps.

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I've heard it said before that applying the same rules of Fog of War to the enemy wouldn't be good. As in practise it would make most maps involve stumbling around in the dark with engaging the enemy being very tedious and unreliable, and thus boring. Having the enemy be able to see you gives the battle an actual flow. However, if we change the system to be a bit more open we could make something that can apply to enemies and still give the battle flow. Have it so enemies can be "seen" without actually being seen. Make enemies turn into shadows then they're outside your vision range. Maybe something like this.

Enemy <= vision range = See them normally

Enemy < vision range + 2 = See an outline of their class

Enemy < vision range + 3 = See a shadow indicating only that an enemy is there

Enemy > vision range + 3 = Completely invisible

And for extra fun, maybe even;

Terrain Distance > vision range + 4 = Completely invisible

Enemies that are shadows can even be attacked with the battle forecast being completely obscured.

This would also solve an annoying issue of running into fog and doing something, only to have your turn interrupted by an enemy standing between your unit and their destination. I'd also add to what someone else said of giving more vision range to Archer/Snipers. Someone said reducing effective damage against fliers, but I think it'd make more sense to reduce accuracy of all ranged attacks across the board. Throwing stuff in fog is naturally going to be way harder than swinging a sword at something.

In addition, to utilize a more involved fog system better, have a skill that increases vision (niche use, but still useful) and a spell that bypasses the hit reduction for ranged attacks.

FOW.png.6c85704cfb6fb05d9842a28e762938a1.png

Edited by Jotari
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I think fog of war can be greatly improved by a few things:

  1. The enemy units are just as bound to the rules of fog of war as the player units. That way, it is far more fair to the player while still providing a unique challenge. 
  2. Watchtowers. These would be on certain points of the map, can only be entered by stepping on the tile in front of the ladder, and if a unit is inside one, then the player can see far and wide across the map, with a maximum range of 8-10 tiles. It would also give a boost in power, accuracy and evasion to archer and magic units. This would provide a significant tactical advantage to whoever has them, and finding them would be a priority; the trade-off being that your unit is effectively stationary for the time that they're in the watchtower.
  3. Lanterns as an equip-able item that increases the range of sight for the unit. Unlike how torches previously were used, the item doesn't have limited uses, but you can't equip a lantern and a shield at the same time. 
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On 9/2/2019 at 2:48 PM, Rose482 said:

You really don't NEED to lose once though. Really the key to win a fog of war chapter (or at least most of the time) is to take things slow and not rush throughout the map. Just keep all your units next to each other and progress slowly until you reach your goal. Now of course usually it's not that simple, but the chances are you also won't get a game over if you followed this method. 

The problem is that in general, fog of war chapters tend to discourage playing slow. Take a look at Battle Before Dawn on Hector Hard mode. It's one of the most despised levels in the entire series, because it is possible to lose before you could have done anything to avert it. Ditto for Arcadia in Binding Blade, which combines desert and fog of war (sure, this also happens in Blazing Blade, but only on Hector hard mode). Both of these maps discourage taking it slow because of circumstances (in the former, you need to protect Zephiel. In the latter, you're essentially timed if you want the game's good ending).

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1 hour ago, Shadow Mir said:

The problem is that in general, fog of war chapters tend to discourage playing slow. Take a look at Battle Before Dawn on Hector Hard mode. It's one of the most despised levels in the entire series, because it is possible to lose before you could have done anything to avert it. Ditto for Arcadia in Binding Blade, which combines desert and fog of war (sure, this also happens in Blazing Blade, but only on Hector hard mode). Both of these maps discourage taking it slow because of circumstances (in the former, you need to protect Zephiel. In the latter, you're essentially timed if you want the game's good ending).

I know, which is why I said it's not always that simple. Some chapters do sometimes force you into trying to rush through some fog of war maps, which of course makes things much harder. But I really think that's the whole point of them to being with. 

However I would say that in recent games (or at least in FE16) from the like....two fog of war chapters that I've gotten to play, the fog of war twist didn't nearly make things as hard as it did in some of the GBA games. I like to take that as them trying to balance things out their own way.

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1 minute ago, Rose482 said:

However I would say that in recent games (or at least in FE16) from the like....two fog of war chapters that I've gotten to play, the fog of war twist didn't nearly make things as hard as it did in some of the GBA games. I like to take that as them trying to balance things out their own way.

Well that's more a silver lining of Three Houses' level design being, shall we diplomatically say... mediocre. And easy.

The problem with the current fog of war system, as I said earlier, is that it puts an upper limit on how fun difficult encounters can be, and needs some tweaks to it to give the user more options to combat it if it's ever going to be in a game as good as Conquest.

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A full on tactics game fog of war system like in SIlent Storm would be amazing innovation for Fire Emblem. I don't think it's necessary, but if using existing fog of war mechanics with map design changes only I prefer harder fog of war levels to easy ones.

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Reading this topic I have mixed opinions about it.

I agree that the whole point of Fog of War is that it's really unfair to the player but it must also be balanced with it's enemies or map design like just look at BBD either Zephiel should be slightly stronger in everything or just have enemies come ONE TURN AFTER. 

I understand it can be frustrating but not really if you plan out your first turn and have a thief scout in battle preps.

Edited by This boi uses Nino
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