Let me start by saying I love the concept of holograms. They're decent in FFA because you can't always keep track of everyone else. In quickmatch, however, the hologram is nearly useless.

Let's review the process of what you're doing when you build your first offworld at HQ level 5.  Most of the time it's built into one of your resource or building triangles so you can hide it well. We'll use a steel triangle next to your base as an example. So first you'd buy a hologram and put it on a steel mill. That first move sometimes gives your intentions away because a lot of the time it will hologram it as a special building. Then suddenly you delete that "special building" right after it appears because you're using that tile to build an offworld. Then it takes a long time to construct that offworld so your tile appears blank for an extended period of time unutilized (which is another giveaway as wasting precious tiles isn't normally done). If your opponent is watching your HQ that whole time they would see a sudden hacker array show up (with no construction build time/transition time), get deleted, the tile goes dormant for a long time, and then something else appears. Hmm....i wonder what that is?

Solution:

Make it so that if you build an offworld market on top of a hologrammed tile you would build it on top of the existing building. So say instead of deleting a steel mill and then building an offworld market you can click the offworld building and essentially build "on top" of the steel mill. Once you start that process you would lose any steel adjacency but the adjacency would still appear to your opponents the entire time so it looks perfectly normal.

I haven't really checked but I would imagine right now if someone holograms a tile in a steel triangle and then builds an offworld an opponent would be able to tell it's an offworld or hologrammed special tile just by hovering over the production of the three steel mills to see if it's the correct adjacency bonuses (correct me if I'm wrong). Is that right? If so that should be changed.


While we're on the topic of holograms I mentioned this awhile ago but bears repeating. Hologramming a tile as something better than it really is serves no point in my opinion. You're trying to conceal the building not get it attacked and point it out. In my opinion hologrammed tiles should never show up as special buildings at all especially if there's anything remotely close that resembles a "normal" building.

Thoughts? Comments?