I'm feeling a bit lazy right now, but I felt like writing down what was on my mind.
Cloak. It's next to useless on Fighters. You won't ever see a minute of cloak time, and at best it's for escaping sticky situations. Even on bombers it's pretty lacking for any use.
So what could we do about it?
Stealth Fighters. And possibly bombers.
Fast, flimsy, stealthy, and lacking in firepower.
Lets use, say, a Liberty Navy variant. A Heavy Fighter that'll blow its powercore within a few seconds with any intensive weaponry.
Hull: 7800
Power Output: 900/6500
B/B: 50/50
Cargo: 95
Impulse speed: 100
Cruise speed: 375
2xCM, CD only
Agility just a notch or two above that of a Guardian.
2x Class 9 slots
3x Class 8 slots
However, it has no fuel requirement for its cloak. Or if it could be coded in, have an extremely slow drain on fuel, perhaps twenty to thirty seconds per unit of fuel?
A more fantastical idea would be to have it be untargetable outside of 1200 meters, making it possible to spot out with watchful fighters, and not a completely undetectable spy. (Though, a fully loaded transport will see an hour, or more, of cloak time.)
With puny weapons and a powercore that a Liberator would laugh at, it'd be a nice, pricey target if ever caught uncloaked.
Obviously a hefty price tag would be included on the purchase.
Something something i'll probably make this more legible later something.
Disclaimer: I don't know shizzle about the balancing of energy and weapon allotments, so take that, and everything else, with a grain of salt.
If you want to use cloak for spying, luxury liner is your choice. But implementing fourth type of cloak and HUGE amount of fighters specially for using with this cloak is not the thing, which can be done soon.
Cloaks are being altered to use an ammo-based fuel rather than a cargo-based one. That would mean different ammo limits can be set for different cloak types to make sure the cloak time on different ships is not shorter or longer than intended for that particular class.
I'm not opposing the idea of dedicated cloak ships, however, this idea (The way it currently is put) would be moot once those change are implemented, and it's better to wait and see how would that work out before coming up with ideas for a new type of cloak usage.
I'm all for this idea (The original. Didn't see all these posts before I replied). I saw a while back a similar post, but having the fighter/ship that was cloaked not fully transparent, but cannot be targeted by missiles or CD's. Thus knowing that the fighter was there, but you couldn't stop him should he go into cruise.
Though, I do like your idea a little more. Sacrifice powercore for cloaking.
One thought could be, instead of making specific ships as a stealth variant, is change the fighter cloak altogether. So when you mount the cloak, it reduces your powercore, similar to having a technerf. That way have the ability to choose which ships you want to turn into a stealth fighter, versus being stuck with a small selection of pre-made ships.
I'd think this would be easier to implement than bringing in brand new ships.
EDIT: After seeing Aerelm's post, I shall wait and see what the new change will bring
(08-06-2013, 08:03 AM)Drrobe Wrote: One thought could be, instead of making specific ships as a stealth variant, is change the fighter cloak altogether. So when you mount the cloak, it reduces your powercore, similar to having a technerf. That way have the ability to choose which ships you want to turn into a stealth fighter, versus being stuck with a small selection of pre-made ships.
I'd think this would be easier to implement than bringing in brand new ships.
With all the ID's and weapons that make technerfs, why not a cloak? Though again, you'd have to change the properties of the light cloak itself, like having very slow consumption rate as you said.
But, will be interesting to see a ammo-based fuel consumption. Aerelm, any examples or previews you might be able to give us regarding the cloaks?
Not yet, mainly because these changes are not intended for the initial release (And yea, I forgot to mention it in my earlier post), and will be implemented in one of the updates. The general concept of how it's gonna work is formed and ready to be written down, but the actual numbers and whatnot would have to wait until the technical stuff are taken care of.