Discussion: Ammo-based Cloaks

[Jayce]

This is a bad decision. It completely ruins the point of surveillance ships.

If you're going to add stuff to the mod, don't render it completely useless after people have already spent money on it.

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[Freeroamer]

What Jayce Said

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[R.I.P.]

This would be the final nail for me, this update has already been screwed up enough.

[Freeroamer]

Same thing

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[Trogdor]

I agree with the concept but not the numbers. If you're trading your CM launcher (plus a lot of time, money, and effort) for a cloak, the cloak better be a darn useful piece of equipment. If you were to switch the cloak to mount to one of the "Equipment Type 1" slots instead of the CM launcher slot, then I could (begrudgingly) accept cloak times being made this short.

I like not having to choose whether to carry RP cargo or leave as much room for fuel as possible. I also like not having my fuel decay over time, and not having to run all over hell's half acre to get somewhere that sells fuel.

However, a few minutes of cloak time is just not nearly long enough to do anything besides escape from a fight. If you actually want to use the cloak as a cloak, and float around observing or doing whatever sneaky things, you need to be able to stay invisible for long periods of time.

I would say ~5-10 minutes for light cloaks, ~10-20 minutes for medium cloaks, and ~20-30 minutes for heavy cloaks. That seems fair to me. The fuel should be very expensive to compensate for this power.

Additionally, I would make it such that fuel is not consumed while the cloak is charging (though the need for this is lessened if cloak times are extended as much as I suggested above).

And I would make the cloak drain weapon power, instead of killing your shield. The ideal state being that you can still cruise while cloaked, but you can no longer uncloak right behind someone and immediately start unloading everything you've got into them.

However, I don't know what you'd do about fuel feeding, since there's nothing stopping you from buying ammo for equipment you don't have mounted, and every ship can carry the same amount of any given ammo.
It's ridiculous that a fighter could hold as much cloak fuel as a BS, and then give its supply to the BS, allowing it to cloak just as long as it did whilst using its own supply, regardless of what the numbers are.
Yet unless you can come up with a way of preventing ships from buying ammo for gear they can't mount, or from carrying as much ammo as another ship, I don't see how you could fix this. In this regard, using commodities for fuel makes much more sense.

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[Jayce]

Like I said. We could just not do this and not have to worry about making new FLHook scripts to stop people from buying too much cloak ammo on a snub.

Don't fix what ain't broke.

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[Trogdor]

Except it is kind of broke if we have some ships cloaking for an hour, cloak times on other ships are too short, and some ships can't mount cloaks at all. And I hate having to use MOX, which is hard to find, or go with a fuel that is 1/3 as efficient.

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[Jayce]

Then resolve the issue of fuel sale points.

What's the problem with a ship cloaking for an hour? The only ships that can do that are transports, which provide viable surveillance platforms.

If this kind of change is made, there needs to be some sort of refund to players who have already purchased a cloak based on their current usefulness.

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[Trogdor]

No there doesn't. Not any more than there were refunds when the hellfire legion broke up and they all lost their caps.

And I disagree.. Transports were made for hauling cargo (hence, transport) from point A to point B, not for being giant fuel tanks for an onboard device. I'm not saying we should take away their ability to use cloaks, but I don't think they should be able to cloak ten+ times longer than any other ship.

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[Misfit]

"Man, I can't wait to sell my fleet of scumbag cloaked Warans for 20mil each" - Nobody ever, 2014

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