Scouting

Owned by Aubergine
Last updated: Mar 21, 2012Version comment
3 min read

Overview

The act of moving units in to enemy territory or bases to gain visibility of enemy units and structures via the on-board sensors of your units.

Why scout?

Scouting is important for a number of reasons:

  • Determine which build orders and research paths the enemy is using more rapidly – allowing you to adapt your own research and builds to counter the enemy.
  • Locating areas, features and oil resources on unfamiliar maps – for example you can't build on an oil resource until it's been detected by your sensors
  • Distracting the enemy – for example you could use scouts to attack their oil derricks

Which units should I use?

For best results use cheap and fast units, and ideally those which won't give your enemy information about you when they detect them:

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Trucks are relatively cheap, but pretty slow and very weak. You can get them very early in the game and they don't give away any information about you. Their only real use as a scout is to sense oil resources (usually when you already know roughly where they are) and then build a derrick on them. Avoid making too many trucks early in the game.

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Machine gun viper wheels are the first attack units you can make after building a factory and HQ. They're pretty fast, can sustain light attacks, and they don't give the enemy any information about your plans when they see them. As well as scouting they can be used to deliver mild damage to the enemy, such as destroying trucks and oil derricks. If you want to avoid the enemy hearing "Unit under attack" warnings, set your unit to "Hold fire" on it's settings panel.

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Cyborg mechanics are the cheapest unit in the game and with good speed, they are a popular choice. Once they've served their purpose as a scout, you can use them to repair damaged droids or, if you have lots of them, use them as cannon fodder to waste enemy artillery and missile rounds before sending in your main attack forces.

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Even before you get indirect fire weapons, sensor droids can be highly effective scouts due to their greatly increased sensor range. As everyone will be researching sensors, they don't give the enemy much information when they spot them. Putting them on hover propulsion enables them to move around the map quickly and rapidly retreat for repairs if they get damaged.

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VTOLs are expensive and not available until the middle of the game, however they can be incredibly useful for scouting huge areas of the map very quickly when ordered to patrol or circle via their options panel.

For developers

If you're developing Warzone scripts, there's two approaches you can take to scouting:

  • Send units to scout – this is the ideal scenario because it doesn't involve cheating
  • Deity cheat – use the enumDroid() and enumStruct() functions to get a list of enemy units and structures without actually scouting for them

Here's some useful links:

  • derrickPositions[] – an array of available oil resources (not derricks)
  • DORDER_CIRCLE – tell a VTOL to circle around a point on the map, giving an effective scouting range of about 40x40 tiles!
  • DORDER_MOVE – tell a unit to move to a location, making them less likely to attack enemies they see on the way
  • DORDER_PATROL – tell a unit to patrol between two points on the map
  • DORDER_SCOUT – tell a unit to scout to a location, attacking any enemies they see on the way
  • Droid object – properties of droid objects
  • enumDroid() – get a list of units on the map
  • enumStruct() – get a list of structures on the map
  • eventObjectSeen() – an event triggered when your sensors (on structures or droids) detect something new on the map
  • orderDroidLoc() – tell a droid to move or scout to a location on the map
  • startPositions[] – an array of player starting positions, useful for assessing where enemy bases are likely to be
  • Structure object – properties of structure objects