I’ve decided to begin work on the 1.6 branch with some new experiments.

The EW pod in 1.5 didn’t seem to see much use, perhaps this was due to lack of knowledge but I found myself that I’d very rarely bother to attach the EW to any unit in a game, competitive or casual.

Meanwhile, the PvP “meta” of CC2 has stabilized at the top end of competitive games. Prior to Rev 1.3, there was a clear “rush to manta” strategy that proved to be too powerful and too reliant on the initial state of a new map. The team with fastest access to aircraft production and heavy bomb production would have a significant advantage over other teams.

With Rev 1.4 and the “Manta Rebalance”, plus the base game cost and production time increase for Mantas, this has pushed the “Manta Bomb Rush” further down the road, but it is still there. A team able to secure their supply of Manta bombers is very very difficult to defend against.

There are some possible routes to address this more generally. I am pretty sure I can’t entirely fix this in revolution.

This brings me back to the EW pods. My very first idea for the EW pod was a jammer for aircraft, to make them harder to see for an enemy. But with the difficulty in defending a carrier from even a modest Manta wing it is the Carrier that needs the help, not the attacker.

EW-Jamming

EW pods are produced in the same way, you convert part of your stock of virus bots into an EW pod and attach it to a unit. Now, due to the extra weight and power requirements, only the Walrus and Petrel are able to fit the EW pod.

When an EW pod is fitted it will have these effects:

• The types of nearby friendly aircraft and ships will be spoofed
  • The enemy will see your BRG show up as a NDL,
  • PTR becomes RZR
  • etc
• Aircraft sensors are jammed
  • Compass will show incorrect heading
  • GPS will fail (no waypoints displayed)
  • RWR will fail
  • Optical tracking of distant tagged targets will fail
  • Camera stream degraded

My thinking is that the EW pod now becomes a potentially useful defensive item, deploying a petrel or walrus carrying an EW will make it harder for an attacking force (but not impossible), that if an attacking Manta is forced to evade a missile, they may become disoriented and unable to resume their attack run quickly.