The costs versus benefits of Radar.

[ash]

After my first few games I've never really bothered building radars. Radars use a lot of electricity and they seem to take a long time to scan large areas. What are the benefits that I may be missing?

The strategic benefit of seeing a regularly updated overview of alien activity just doesn't seem to be worth it. You can manually explore an area once and then you know the rough location of where threats are going to come from and can plan accordingly.

I don't need to know the exact size of the alien nest. It's obvious that the nest will be growing and that attacks will also grow larger over time.

In my previous games I haven't missed radars at all.

[daniel0674]

Praesmeodymium の投稿を引用：

Radars also seem to aggro the biters directly... electronic bait of a sort.

Everytime I install a huge radar array (think seti) I get quite an attack concentration.

That made me go looking for the Lua description of the radar and oddly i dont find it so it must be in the game binary or something.

Radars don't make more biters attack you, as they don't cause pollution.
(Well, not entirely true, as they use energy and cause your boilers to make more pollution if you use steam power, but that's not the reason they attack the radars.)

If biters are already on their way to attack your base and they come near a radar then they will attack it instead, as the radar is treated as a military building (same as turrets).
This is not defined in the lua description but directly in the code, and is true for all entities of type "radar".

TL;DR they won't send out more biters just because you placed a radar there, but the biters already on the way will attack it if they come across one.

[Bromstine]

Necro-time!

Because in 0.15 ff the cost/benefit is very different, due to the zoom-in map mode, where you can easily put down blueprints, ghosts, use deconstruction planner (zoom could be better, but still). Sure, you can do that without radar coverage, but you have to place stuff blind, no outlines.

[Warlord]

Fight Aaaaaah の投稿を引用：

Necro-time!

Because in 0.15 ff the cost/benefit is very different, due to the zoom-in map mode, where you can easily put down blueprints, ghosts, use deconstruction planner (zoom could be better, but still). Sure, you can do that without radar coverage, but you have to place stuff blind, no outlines.

True that. Before, they helped to clear out fog of war, but with the new zoomed in map view letting you issue orders and such, they get much more useful throughout the base.

[fractalgem]

I used them even before the .15 update to keep an eye on encroaching nests. I'd also plop em' down with a solar panel and a power pole while exploring to help explore faster (or even drag the main power line with me. They don't IMO use THAT much power. (certainly not compared to, say, beacons...)

[SandScorpion]

I use them to see what I'm doing when I'm building things remotely with robots.
I zoom in on the map where I want to build, plop down roboports with the robots already present there, then just build whatever I want to build with the robots.
No need to go everywhere myself.

[Lingluo]

Put a radar,a substation,8 solars and 6 accumulators.They will auto scan and require no base electricity.

[Warlord]

DOUBLE NECRO-O-o-o....

They aren't really like chunk loaders, since all chunks revealed (and some not yet revealed) are always loaded and running. Radars are simply fog-of-war revealers, allowing a clear view of what's around a radar and getting updates on chunks further out from there every now and then.