spawning units everywhere on the map/having tactical ops everywhere feels wrong

[Tombles]

We actually experimented with different ways of fixing this. For example, that you can only use operations in a zone that you have a hero in, or a special "spotter" unit such as a modded scout. Another idea was to allow war ships to project "operation coverage" to adjacent sectors, so that you could use them a little bit like a modern boat would fire off cruise missiles.

The main issue we ran into was that it was extremely hard to communicate how had coverage where. The player already needs to keep track of who owns a sector, but then they also needed to see who had coverage, and a single sector could have coverage from several players. We had no way of visualization it that wasn't really confusing, so we decided to see what would happen if we just used vision range like we have now. Although it does indeed feel a bit odd, it didn't actually give any real balance issues during testing, so we kept it. If for no other reason that it worked, and it was simple, and the game is already complex enough!

 

[Tombles]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! While I do agree that having some type of geographical limitation on Strategic Ops would add more depth and flavor to the system, I really can't stress enough how much we already tried to add it.

Things we tried:

1) Having units that projected operation coverage into the zone they were in
2) Having operations placed onto units (like those big trucks with nukes on them the Russians have) which you had to drive into range of the target
3) Having an orbital layer where the player deployed satelites to generate zones of coverage (like a cross between AoW2s towers the orbitals in Beyond Earth)

But in the end, they all detracted from the overall feeling of the game, so we dropped them. I'm not saying the door is closed on this in the future, I'm just trying to say that I understadn where you're coming from and I share your sentiments.