Another cloak discussion

[Jack_Henderson]

Cloaks are cool toey but a little... weird, at the moment.

What is strange about them is that they work on some ships brilliantly, making them very powerful, while working not at all on other ships of the same class.

Primary example: The Pirate Transport. A very strong transport with awesome dodging ability, tiny frame, great firepower and CD... that can cloak forever now. It works so great because the Ptrans is more a "pvp tool" than a transport, so the cargo-fuel trade-off does not work for it really, while it would seriously hurt the "real trader".
This one is odd because top military high tech gear should not work best on pirate equipment, imo.

Cloaky Bombers: They are odd because...
a) some bombers can cloak, many cannot due to cargo restriction. I ask myself, why there are exactly 2 heavy 3-slot bombers (Thor, Eclipse) that can cloak, and both are pirate equipment. Again, top military gear works best on pirate equipment, which kind of makes no sense to me.

b) bomber/fighter cloak times are short. My Roc can cloak for ~50 seconds with a UAU5, making me a paper toy in a fight. If CDed properly, you reappear fast, which is likely what it is meant to be like. While the "got caught after cloaking" probability was rather low at the beginning (people did not know), it feels as if it was very easy now to get the cloakers. Perhaps a little bit too easy in fact.

Jinx asked for how long people feel ships should be able to cloak:

LF: long. 4-5 minutes? So they can be proper cool scouts. Fast, and invisible. Would be cool if they could engage cloak more often (less initial drain for activating) so that they could just fade out, fade in, fade out.

Fighters/bombers: short. Max 1min 30 sec. Lower than 1 minute makes it rather easy to CD often enough to force them to appear again. Adding some little extra time would keep a probability to get away or catch them to both parties. But: every bomber should be able to get some adequate cloak time. Below 30 seconds is simply useless.

Transports: Max should be really long (10-12 minutes), but no one would put a lot of fuel on a transport anyway (exception: pewy transports). So if you use a realistic scenario (1/3 of cargo hole is fuel), you should be able to cloak for 3-4 minutes, imo. That could be enough to get away, to run a blockade, to finish the last illegal leg of your smuggling run, etc.... and give your opponent a realistic chance to counter you.

GBs: no idea. I was told they are broken when it comes to cloaking. But I have no clue.

Caps: not much experience here, so I have to pass.


My main criticism about cloaks is that there is that unlawful bias in them. They work best on the unlawful side and that's weird.

And no, this is no QQ

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[Veygaar]

CD's, and if he runs to another system, take the time to refill yourself See how long he'll keep doing that.

how that helps in group fights?

Cntrl+T works wonders. You guys seriously haven't figured that out yet?

Anyways, as a user of all three types of cloaks. I don't see a serious problem for any of them except for fighters (although with their functionality perhaps they don't need them). Cloaking transports are quickly dispatched by hellfire+SNAC x2. All it takes is 1 bomber and something to hold another load of hellfires for it and they're toast before they can cloak.

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[Vrabcek]

I would be happy for every change towards the cloaks.

Currently, capital ships with a cloaking device are simply unbeatable...

try to use torpedo,snublover.
Like it do torpedo wing. or this is very hard for you,you want beat them on fighters,herr admiral?

The last time I have encountered a cloaking liberty dread it was 8 bombers against it, some even with nova...and ill tell you, even though the ship is big and even though everyone was shootig CDs and novas we did not manage to track it...

And well, in the previous version it was possible to shoot down caps with only fighters...

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[Remilia Scarlet]

Read the first post. It's not about time.

It's about a way how to at least start to balance things in cloaks. Currently with the usage of the cargo fuel it is unreal to put any sence into cloaks.

So the question is what if we'll use ammo fuel instead of cargo fuel. So the actual balance could be done by simply changing the cloak generator consumption rates for various generator classes.

I think ships should be able to cloak for a long time. But the cloaking time itself must be long to prevent it being effectively used in the middle of the combat. Also fuel should not be consumed while generator charges. This will give the way to make a long charge at all so the fuel will not be running out before ship even dissapears.

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[Jack_Henderson]

*edited out* It is the Liberty Carrier that is immune to Novas, so my answer didn't make sense.

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[Lonely_Ghost]

What do you wait from server which became 99.9(9)% PvP ?

Cloaks are used to instablue or to escape giving blue. Make cloak gens cheap to be cheap (20M) and dont consume fuel, and activating like cruise speed, but when you do it, your weapon's energy goes to 0. To counter it, give snubs EMP torp, which disables cloak, plus, make cloak being distrupt by...dunno, collusion with asteroids. At least, it will give some opportunity to counter cap fleet with bombers and being able to stop them from running.
Snubs not even need cloak imo.

[Pancakes]

All that's necessary is a cruise disruptor style equipment that's also produced on PoBs to stop the cloak effect. If someone happens to be carrying some missiles and tags the cloaker before he cloaks, should shut down the entire command for 5 minutes or so.

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

Though GB cloaking should be fixed regardless (maybe add anther cloak? 8-|)

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BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

[SA_Scavenger]

Well at the moment cloaks are a waste unless you're a pirate or using them for scouting or infiltrating areas difficult to get to. Smuggling with them is a waste, too much cargo space needed to be useful. Once people realise how to use disruptors, dumbfire missiles, nova tOrPedoes and the length of time it takes to cloak for capital ships and transports, their usefulness in getting away, unless you're in a big furball, is very little.

And now with the ability to swap the cloak off your ship quickly via multi-boxing, so that you can do lawful runs, being removed the house laws with respect to cloaks just gets in the way of smuggling RP.

While cloaks are feasibly useful in certain scenarios, their price is off the chart and fuel use costs can also use a bit of tuning.

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[Knjaz]

I would be happy for every change towards the cloaks.

Currently, capital ships with a cloaking device are simply unbeatable...

Is this a joke?

I think you should get "into the field" more often....

The last time I have encountered a cloaking liberty dread it was 8 bombers against it, some even with nova...and ill tell you, even though the ship is big and even though everyone was shootig CDs and novas we did not manage to track it...

And well, in the previous version it was possible to shoot down caps with only fighters...

Then it was one helluva lucky sob. When we're gunning down cloakers, they die more often than not.

Then again, we actually do bring heavy firepower into the play, that allows us to deal with single enemy capital ship in one minute at most.


P.S. A member of "Admirals should fly Caps, not Snubs" club.

[JayDee Kasane]

CD's, and if he runs to another system, take the time to refill yourself See how long he'll keep doing that.

how that helps in group fights?

Cntrl+T works wonders. You guys seriously haven't figured that out yet?

that wasnt what I meant. I mean that you fire at some BS, then it cloaks and run to resupply, while rest of BS is engaging. when one more damaged enough he cloaks and rans too, and old one already repaired joins to battle to replace him.

anyway, I think that using a bug with cloaks about missiles/torpedos is quite poor. even more poor then constant cloak/repair/re-engage

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