Discussion: Ammo-based Cloaks

[aerelm]

Ammo-based Cloaking Devices:

Making cloaks ammo-based rather than cargo-based was considered (and even tried) early in the 4.87 development, but since a few technical issues were preventing it at the time, it was decided to postpone the change to a later stage of the beta. Since there were more pressing issues present during the development of each update since, this was marked as a low priority task, but now that the team has started working on the final release and all of the major bugs are already fixed, the concept of ammo-based cloaks was revisited and finally implemented.

Please note the following numbers are the initial draft, and are subject to multiple adjustments:

Cloaking Device Batteries (the new "ammo" for cloaks) will be limited to 1,000 per ship.

Light cloaks will take up 10 cargo space, available to ships with up to 250 cargo. Having a charge time of 20 seconds, and a consumption rate of 3 batteries per second will give any ship with light cloaks ~5 minutes of effective cloak.

Medium cloaks will take up 200 cargo space, available to ships with up to 1100 cargo. Having a charge time of 40 seconds, and a consumption rate of 2 batteries per second will give any ship with medium cloaks ~8 minutes of effective cloak.

Heavy cloaks will take up 450 cargo space, available to ships with 1100 cargo or higher. Having a charge time of 60 seconds, and a consumption rate of 1 battery per second will give any ship with large cloaks ~15 minutes of active cloak.

As these numbers are still concepts, and are planned to be adjusted based on results of the future test runs, feel free to discuss this change and share your opinions, suggestions or concerns regarding it in this thread.

Discuss.

Remember to include a short justification in your post if you decide to propose an alternative set of numbers.

[bloogaL]

Light cloaks will take up 10 cargo space, available to ships with up to 250 cargo. Having a charge time of 10 seconds, and a consumption rate of 4 batteries per second will give any ship with light cloaks ~100 seconds of effective cloak.

Charge time is still lower than the time it takes for shields to regen, leaving cloaking bombers to continue being perfect for constantly restocking and re-engaging throughout a single battle. Would rather see it upped to something like 20 seconds.

Everything else looks fine.

[SnakThree]

DELETE

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[sindroms]

Not to mention capital ships are inheritly slow.
If a battle is taking place in, say, the Rochester field and you start charging your cloak at Baltimore Shipyard, it will take far more than 400 seconds to fly to the spot, stop, regen your energy and move into striking range.



Rendering the battleship cloak useless for attacking as well as escaping.
EDIT: I do see how this will make things easier for cloak transports though, now that the fuel does not consume cargo space.

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[Sath]

Will these ammos be tradeable like any other ammo?

If so, a fighter group can effectively keep the BS cloaked till all of them run out of ammo.

[Karst]

As discussed in the balance conspiracy chat, here's what I think:

This is an overall very welcome change, because the disparity between small and large cloaks is currently too great.
Particularly for small cloaks, basing them on ammo will allow snubcraft other than the heaviest bombers to use cloaks effectively.

With large cloaks, it's less simple. Currently, the maximum time larger transports can cloak is excessive, but the basic system of sacrificing a dynamic amount of cargo space for cloaking time makes sense. While the large cargo requirement of the cloak would mean there may not be a huge absolute advantage in free cargo space, it is the dynamism of the system I would miss.
With a non-flexible requirement of cargo space, any transport with a cloak will always have the maximum cloaking duration available. The current system requires planning: How long will I realistically need to cloak during this trip? How much fuel can I really afford to take on? A hard cloaking time limit would take that step away.

Anyway. Other than that, the new system and times will be much better, especially for snubs.

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[bloogaL]

making it unusable to escape.

People shouldn't be able to pay in to a free ticket to escape and restock.

Not to mention capital ships are inheritly slow.
If a battle is taking place in, say, the Rochester field and you start charging your cloak at Baltimore Shipyard, it will take far more than 400 seconds to fly to the spot, stop, regen your energy and move into striking range.

Then don't start charging so far away. Simple.

[Zayne Carrick]

Yes, please. VHF cloaks for everyone, not only Nomads/infectees!

[SnakeLancerHaven]

yeah Charge time is realy slow, 15 Seconds for Cruisers 20 Seconds for Battleships, is fine. Gives you enough time to CD it, if you're able to notice.

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[Ponge]

"Heavy cloaks will take up 450 cargo space, available to ships with 1100 cargo or higher. Having a charge time of 60 seconds, and a consumption rate of 1 battery per second will give any ship with large cloaks ~440 seconds of active cloak."

This calculation seems to be off: 450 max ammo limit - 60 ammo needed to charge the cloak, and 1/sec consumption = 390 seconds of active cloaking.

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