OpenRA

It's not about unfair advantage, it's about sneak attacks getting hard to execute at all or they are discovered quicker which makes them less effective. Together this makes sneak attacks not profitable to go for.

I know you think sneaking is impossible, and maybe you detect everything in time. Yet there are plenty people who don't. But they do now.

Sorry, looks like you misunderstood me - I meant quite the opposite - that sneaking is still possible. You just need to distract your enemy (as you should have been doing before, it's just more important to do it now).

penev wrote: OK, and how does those work if your opponent is not out for coffee at the time?
It now requires you to have a 1-man distraction at the very least, and the notification gets nullified, because your enemy is distracted - something you should have been doing without the notification anyway. Otherwise you are just relying on luck and on your enemy being afk.

This is wrong. This is terribly wrong.

Sneak attacks never needed a distraction. Any sneak attack are based upon the attacker's better map awareness and micro with the surprise element being the key. Not because of distractions.

Without announcements, you have to be aware of the vulnerabilities of your enemy's base, micro your small taskforce there and go. As I said, not everyone monitors the radar all the time so chances to slip it through because not looking at radar is big.

With announcements, besides the micro requirement to get the taskforce into the vulnerability position - you also have to micro it now to not even get announced, have fun knowing all the sight ranges of everything -, you also have to micro another taskforce to prove a distraction, and that's why the fuss is about announcements. The micro intensity of a sneak attack became ludicrously huge.

Ah ok, sorry yes, true. Distracting the enemy greatly enhances the chance of succes. But it's a shame that it becomes a must. Before it was really possible to drop an engineer, Walk it into the enemy base and capture the ore refinery or construction yard.

Ofcourse a player who lets that happen is a bad player, but it happens. And I've had times where I suddenly noticed a building flashing (engineer capturing), while I was watching my own base. I just didnt notice an enemy engineer walking in my base.

The notification has been removed for the next playtest.

That's good news! It seems very suited for missions where waves of enemies come, though.

Maybe we could do some adjustment so the enemy detected notifications could be a toggle button agreed upon before the start of the match...

*off sneaking an APC filled with grenadiers and rocket soldiers*