Well, I for one can't talk about cloaks on caps, because I've never used a cap.
But, I do think that buffing the fuel type is a very good idea. I currently use a cloak on my Eclipse, and I've got no complaints other than the fact that in some areas of space, cloak fuel is very expensive. Having cloak fuel as an ammo type would be much much more efficient for cloak operators. As well as the fact that it can be regulated so cloak times are more appropriate.
(02-13-2013, 09:38 AM)713.dstryr Wrote: Well, I for one can't talk about cloaks on caps, because I've never used a cap.
But, I do think that buffing the fuel type is a very good idea. I currently use a cloak on my Eclipse, and I've got no complaints other than the fact that in some areas of space, cloak fuel is very expensive. Having cloak fuel as an ammo type would be much much more efficient for cloak operators. As well as the fact that it can be regulated so cloak times are more appropriate.
I use a cloak on my cap ship, and it is good as an 'escape' counter measure, as previous posts stated, countermeasures are useless with ships this slow. It would be a bit more enjoyable if you could get shorter charge times and longer cloak times. Perhaps changes could be made to the fuel efficiency. Or in 4.87 equipment that ups your cargo hold capacity, or 'fuel filters' to get better ratio than 1 unit/s (for MOX). 60 seconds, when getting ganked by a bunch of bombers, is a long time to go without shields (not to mention using 60 units just to get cloaked). Also, i believe that the ability to ambush, or explore enemy or far out systems with a cloak would be an amazing ability, and like most highly expensive and rare pieces of equipment, ought to be a right you earn through experience. The current system makes it all impossible. Either MOX needs to be more accessable, or a way to provide an 'infinite' fuel or energy source to the cloak should be included, maybe as ammo, or even as something that occupies all of your cargo spaces so you sacrifice being able to carry any cargo for an infinte cloak. Currently, even if you could get something to increase the MOX consumption rate from 1:1 to .8, .5, or .2:1, would make using the cloak tactically actually possible, and give those who have earned such equipment better advantages. Instead of seeing it as disadvantaging players without, maybe we should see it as something that will stimulate a tech or arms race amongst factions to travel in numbers, have better shields, CM's and armor, to counter a ship with a long lasting cloak.
What about this idea that someone had back then? About cloaks?
A cloak that instead of making the ship invisible would make it untargetable and vanish from the target list (but still leave it visible to the eye).
From what I remember. it would...
deactivate shields
deactivate weapons
deactivate thrusters
deactivate cruiser engines
cost no fuel to run (cost is all the energs from shields/weapons/cruise engines/thrusters) - it would still need some time to prepare though, maybe 15 to 20 seconds?
My memory is kinda vague on it but that would make nebulas and asteroid fields useful. Of course this idea would be for snub craft. Such a thing on a capital ship would be of questionable use I would guess.
Also, whoever remembers the original thread or person who had this idea to begin with, feel free to post a link, I don't have time and couldn't find it on a quick search. But I found the idea promising.
Naaaah, Freelancer has a Cloaking engine, let it be like this. However using much lower fuel and using lower cargo space (for the device) would make it just usefull as it is. Comon age goes on, technologie improves! However what I find most inappropiate is that people are able to CD the cloak (facepalm), there are people who just constantly spam CD on you which makes the cloak TOTALY unusefull. Don't allow the cloak beeing CDed, it takes a hard effort to build them! The people who work hard to build a cloak on their Bases earn it!
I agree, CD'ing it makes using it to escape pointless. Some may think it works fine, but since it is a countermeasure, and you have to sacrifice your standard countermeasures to have it, and yes, it does take a lot of work to get one, it would be nice to know that once you activate it, as long as you can survive the charge time (without shields, can this get any harder?) you WILL manage to escape....it should be considered a more reliable and superior form of CM since I havn't seen a CM that costs 400 million +. If you pay that much for it, it should just work!
(05-29-2013, 01:44 PM)Xelon Wrote: The cloak wasn't made for people to autoescape whenever they have a cloak on their battlesip or transport.
The way it works now is just fine.
But on cruisers and fighters it was used for escape only, really. (before the cloak nerf)
There is a reason we had sort of a taboo on cloaked cruisers in our RNC raids - because those were too vulnerable to missile spam, had rather short cloaking time, very limited tactical use for offensive operations and cloak was falling off after several BS missile hits.
Cruiser cloak is only good for those who either do not face enemy battleships/battlecruisers, or doesn't plan to. I.e., Piracy and anti-piracy activities, for those who plan to run away when they encounter enemy battlegroup.
Devs fixed the fighter issue giving it 3-4 seconds cloaking time (so you have a chance to activate it before someone realises), but if I'm not mistaken, cruiser one is still same.
The way battleship cloaks are/were used is totally different from cruiser and fighter one, obviously - mainly it comes from huge difference in light and heavy battleship performances at different distances (it's like, you have 10% to win at one distance, and 90% chance to win at another one), huge difference between DPS of a battleship with drained powercore and fully charged one (as a result of cruise drain), and inability to thrust, making it hard to quickly maneuver through the battlefield.