Spring RTS Engine

on the original TA, building a radar targeting facility unit enabled automatic shooting at "radar blobs", which matched exactly the position of the enemy units.

on spring games, units shoot automatically at radar blobs, but there's this position error per unit that changes over time and can be removed by building the radar targeting facility unit later in the game.

The lack of a targeting facility unit reduces the effectiveness of long ranged units by a lot unless one of the sides is advancing and getting lots of opposing units into line of sight of each other. It also makes cloaking the commander in early game fights more useful, as precision shots like lasers and missiles are more likely to miss a cloaked commander even if the enemy has radar coverage. It adds randomness to the battles.

Is this good for gameplay? does it make the game more fun? does it make sense? What if we just removed the targeting facility and the positioning error.

I'm curious about what people think.

They are two different game modes, I also like the non-automatic targetting, because you can sneak more. But the problem with removing it is that it can be done by lua anyway, so how to prevent that? It gets complicated.

I mean, you can make a widget that automatically targets radar blops in spring.

In OTA: the first thing you would bomb would the the targetting facility, a fusion or a nuke. The targetting facility was a prime target. In spring it's not really relevant anymore. In XTA it reduces radar blop inaccuracy (but only laser units benefit from it), and it makes radar buildings have more hp. There have been many threads of what to do with this building now.