With update 13.18214 units in stealth are now revealed when within 2 range of enemy units. There are good reasons for a change like this, but it also drastically reduced the usefulness of the stealth ability.
The positive is that it prevents stealthed units from body blocking units that can’t reveal them and eliminates the issue of being helpless against stealth units even when you know exactly where they are.
The downside is that it greatly diminishes the utility of stealth, especially for melee units. They are revealed before they make contact so they can’t get fully into position for a surprise attack.
To solve this, there should be a delay between when a unit gets into range, and when it is revealed. This delay should be enough that even the slowest stealth unit can walk directly past a single stationary unit and not be revealed (Maybe 3-5 seconds?). Actually being able to sneak past a few units as you walk by is a reasonable ask for a stealth ability.
There should be no delay for buildings that use stealth. It would be pretty obvious that there is a wall there if you walk into it.
Sabotage
There is an ability called Tsetse Sabotage available to the Hausa Emir that lets them greatly slow the production speed of a building. A similar but expanded Sabotage ability for Spies and equivalent units could help them to be more interesting and useful.
Using the Sabotage ability on a building would do the following for a short duration:
Slow training speed
Slow research speed
Slow (or maybe siphon off) resource generation
Unlock (Gates)
This ability could come with a number of caveats to moderate its use:
Must be in stealth mode to use
This makes buildings like Town Centers and Forts immune
Stationing any building or unit that reveals stealth nearby will protect from this
Units like JPK really suffer from the stealth rework so I think they also need a boost like this.
As far as Tsetse Sabotage goes, it’s so weak it’s essentially useless how it is now so I don’t think it would be a huge deal if Spies got a watered down version that could easily be prevented by an Outpost or Explorer.
I mostly just want Spies to be able to open Gates, so maybe a more limited Infiltration ability would be a better fit.
That’s exactly how stealth used to work. Now any unit can reveal units in stealth mode if they get close enough, not just the ones that always reveal it.
There’s no way they’re going to change every map for such a niche mechanic.
Yup, though the old system had some failures. I think part of the success of SC2 is their clean ui, showing radious and with icons which units can “detect”, besides this:
Halving the speed of stealth units plus the fact stealth is a “stance” making any stealth going for anything near.
Probably, for me best would be old mechanic with tweaked speed and “IF” they add that to maps would enhance the game and give lots of new ways of playing. Though as you said prob not going to happen soon.
Dont know if trigger in a map could archieve that, would be a nice experiment.
Yup, totally agree, some units are way to slow, others too fast.
I was thinking about this the other day, unsure if it required a post, But for spies their stealth should not easily be revealed by units unless there is a hero, tower, fort or TC
Spies/native stealth is very useful in knowing what your opening is doing, essentially RTS games have always been knowing what your opponent is doing
I can understand the abusing of stealth on other units to block path, but maybe different level of stealths could exist?
one where spies are not detectable by units where as other combat units can still be detected?