REVEAL MECHANICS
Systems for uncovering hidden map information — fog of war lifting around units, scouted regions that persist or re-fog, detection sweeps exposing stealthers, reveal abilities as tactical tools.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN STRATEGY · MOBA · 4X · RTS
StarCraft's fog is the competitive standard (explored terrain stays visible as terrain but re-fogs for units, making stale information a real trap), Civilization layers permanent map reveal atop live visibility, MOBAs price wards and sweepers into an entire vision economy — League's ward war is arguably the game's highest-skill layer — and roguelikes reveal dungeons room by room as exploration's heartbeat. Designers control revelation because information is the strategy genre's true resource: what you can see determines what you can plan, so reveal mechanics turn knowledge into something buyable, contestable, and destroyable — scouting becomes spending, vision becomes territory, and the fog line becomes a front as real as any army's. The two-tier model (terrain memory versus live unit visibility) is the genre's quiet masterstroke: it makes old knowledge distinguishable from current knowledge, and the gap between them is where ambushes live. Reveal abilities meanwhile create counterplay loops with stealth systems — every invisible unit implies a detector, and pricing that detector balances the pair. Key decisions: what persists after scouting (permanent terrain, decaying intel, full re-fog — each sets a different scouting cadence), reveal sources and their costs (units, structures, consumables, abilities), and asymmetry — games where one side sees more (Dead by Daylight's killer, GM-style roles) build entire genres on unequal vision. Pitfall: vision as invisible math — when players lose to things they couldn't see and can't reconstruct why they couldn't see them, the fog reads as cheating; good reveal systems make vision itself visible (ward ranges, sight radii, fog edges drawn crisply), because the mechanic's fairness lives entirely in players knowing what they don't know.