Discussion: Ammo-based Cloaks

[Trogdor]

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.

There are ships which are designated as giant fuel tanks:

""Kujira" GMG Transport (...) was originally built in a more peaceful age for transporting refined H-Fuel to the four Houses."

""Uruz" Rheinland Container Transport (...) engineers looked through the archives until they came upon the design of a heavily armed H-Fuel transport. While originally designed for gaseous or liquid cargo transporting, it's pods can now accomodate a wide variety of cargo."

Yes, but those transports, like many others in this mod, carry their cargo in external pods. Containers that are attached to the ship, but not accessible to the crew. Think about an 18 wheeler. You have the cab, and you have the trailer. Connected, but separate. The trailer can be designed to carry solids/liquids/gas, but the driver can't reach back and grab a sammich.

Now, I know there are exceptions to this, and there are allowances made in roleplay, and so again, I'm not saying transports shouldn't be able to mount cloaking devices. I'm just saying that in my opinion, a truck is designed to be a truck, and a transport is designed to be a transport. It shouldn't be ten times better at cloaking than other ships which are designed to be warships and recon craft. The ships with the longest cloak times should be cruisers and battleships.

My opinion.

@Jayce Yeah, but there are other container transports that can. I just wiki'd the first one that came to mind when I went to link a picture, and it happened to be that one.

@Narcotic So, then, you'd have both ammo and commodity fuels to power your cloak? Interesting. But you'd still have the issue with snubs fuel feeding.

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[sindroms]

I might simply be upset that I might have my toys taken away from me with this ''balance'' but let me just throw a rather....justified concern out there for a moment.


Our active balance team is small. They mainly work on fighters, because that is the main ship in the game. Do they have active characters that utilize cloaks to know what is their everyday usage and use that information and experience while balancing these?

In other words, how do we know that the people balancing cloaks, especially on caps, are up to date and even fly the things in the first place? Rather than just a bunch of snub elitists, who have third party input on how cloaks behave ingame and how they should be balanced based on some butthurt induced rants?

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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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[Echo 7-7]

I might simply be upset that I might have my toys taken away from me with this ''balance'' but let me just throw a rather....justified concern out there for a moment.


Our active balance team is small. They mainly work on fighters, because that is the main ship in the game. Do they have active characters that utilize cloaks to know what is their everyday usage and use that information and experience while balancing these?

In other words, how do we know that the people balancing cloaks, especially on caps, are up to date and even fly the things in the first place? Rather than just a bunch of snub elitists, who have third party input on how cloaks behave ingame and how they should be balanced based on some butthurt induced rants?

While I don't have the final word when it comes to PvP balance, I do own a cloak-equipped bomber and liner. While I too will be somewhat disappointed that my Liner will no longer be a space submarine, I understand why normalizing cloaks is necessary.

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There was a sig here, once.

[Trogdor]

Can't we normalize them to a happy medium, though? The times proposed in the OP seem extremely short.

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[aerelm]

Our active balance team is small. They mainly work on fighters, because that is the main ship in the game. Do they have active characters that utilize cloaks to know what is their everyday usage and use that information and experience while balancing these?

In other words, how do we know that the people balancing cloaks, especially on caps, are up to date and even fly the things in the first place? Rather than just a bunch of snub elitists, who have third party input on how cloaks behave ingame and how they should be balanced based on some butthurt induced rants?

That's a valid concern. Our "active" balance "team" (as in, people who actually implement balance changes and edit .ini files and whatnot) currently consists of only one person, so it's admittedly not much of a "team" anyways, but since that one person fortunately does not have his head all the way up his arse, he understands and acknowledges his lack of experience with capital ships as he's mainly played snubs and gunboats through his time here, and when it comes to discussing slash brainstorming new changes (be it for snubs or caps), there is a "Balance brainstorming chat" with about a dozen players focused on different ship types and from different skill levels (we even have a couple of "dedicated transport pilots" there) to weigh in on whatever's on the to-do list at the time. But to answer your actual question - Despite not being an active capship user, I've used the large cloak on both transports and battleships on various occasions, and my main char (which is a bomber) ran with a cloak from early 86 to very recently, so despite your concern I'm not really unexperienced when it comes to cloaks.

As for the concern raised about the large cloak, most of the opposition appears to come from people who own and regularly utilize "permacloak stalkships", i.e. larger transports filled with fuel, able to stay cloaked for unreasonably long time and stalk ships such as suppliers of "hidden" POBs with no risk. Removing that ability is one of the main two reasons behind making cloaks ammo-based (the other bein making it useful on gunboats and below), and even though the ammo limit is still under consideration (We've even considered up to 1000 ammo limit on the large cloak, which would give it ~15 minutes of effective cloak, but frankly that seems a bit too excessive), granting any ship the ability to cloak for anywhere around 15 minutes (half the time of an "average" trade route) or more would turn said class into a "permacloak stalkship" again, which is what we're trying to avoid. So, even though some people have been trying to compare Discovery cloaks to real-life stealth ships, that's not really a valid comparison because in real-life, interaction is not the goal, so a piece of equipment entirely nullifying the need for interaction would not be considered a bad thing "out there", but goes against the very basics of this mod and server we play in.

Any actual number suggestions is welcome, with the above taken into account.

[sindroms]

Could we in that case make a seperate cloak for snubs, freighters, transports, gunboats, cruisers and BSs? With their own consumption rate? Just to allow more fine tuning between problematic ship classes and cargo hold sizes?

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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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[aerelm]

From that short description, I don't really see the point. But maybe you can elaborate on why that would be necessary or beneficial?

[sindroms]

For the sake of fine tuning. If the problem is, as you stated, cloaked transports with a massive cargo hold, then perhaps splitting up the cloaks a little would not only boost POB activity with the production of new ingame items, but also allow to finetune the cloak usage through ship classes without impacting others. Within reason.

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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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[Flinx]

Well...
you have cooldown times for weapons.

Why not set a *cooldown* time / effective time for different cloaking devices and do away with the fuel / ammo consumption totally ?

Then you can limit different ship types to different cloaking devices and set the effective time for the ship class as you see fit ?
Or perhaps take a low fuel use, but set it so that the ship has to be visible for a minute before being able to cloak again.

It would give me the creeps if I get stalked by a Bomber, appearing on my screens for about a minute every five or ten minutes and dissapearing again.

*ping* still there... find me....

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[TAZ]pope residing at the Brunswick Shrine and Service Station. May HER blessing be upon you.

[Thyrzul]

Is it possible to set different cloak battery capacities for each ship similarly to how we have bots and bats?

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