Beating Cloaking

[TDude]

I've noticed a lot that people like to cloak, so shouldn't there be a way to actually see cloakers? Maybe something should be made I don't exactly know what, but maybe something similar to a Radar dish so atleast a main base/home base can be protected from Invisible foes, because who really wants to leave a planet not knowing if a fleet of ships are waiting just outside for you to undock.

 

[Arclight]

I\'m not sure how cloaking works, but if you fire, are you revealed for a short time? Since the whole point of cloaking is to remain hidden and get a surprise attack on someone, I don\'t think there should be something to see cloaked ships.

 

[DoomsWrath]

What about having a wave-producer-module-thing that if activated and pointed in a certain direction the cloaker is seen on radar e.g lets say your in your base and you activate the module the \"waves\" will travel to the certain area and reflect off of the cloaked ship.

There is also many ways you could balance this like if you use the module it gives you the general area not the exact area.

 

[D-Car]

This has been handled a number of ways in games. A strategy/research-limited method would be to have competing levels of cloak/detect with the stronger winning out. That\'ll never work here since you have to assume everyone will have maximum level.

Consider, instead, the core idea of cloaking - not being seen. Not being seen means you\'re a silent observer who has the luxury of finding your enemies without being attacked and/or evading your enemies. In order to keep cloaking from being totally OP in terms of a pvp-based game, hard-coded restrictions to keep people from flying behind you, firing, cloaking and flying behind you again will be necessary.

Taking a page from EVE Online rules, but also giving a nod to the FPS nature of StarMade, I think disallowing turning your cloak on while enemies are in sensor range would be a good compromise. Once you open fire, your cloak turns off and you can\'t turn it back on again until you either make a fair escape or win the fight. This concept would also force cloaky ships to spend more space on energy generation as opposed to shields/engines/weapons since they\'ll need to stay cloaked for long periods of time to make it useful.

 

[WatcherCCG]

There IS a way to beat cloaking. It\'s called the SD-KB heat seeker missile. Unless they don\'t work on cloaked ships, which would be insane. The SD-BB smart missiles also seem like they\'d work if you pointed your ship in the correct direction.

 

[TDude]

But that\'s the issues most people don\'t know the direction, and sooner or later there will be people making fleets of Giant ships with cloaking ability, with radarjammers, thus allowing them to attack without warning, but to also find bases (such as Satalites, Even Satalite ships.) amd be able to get back to there main ship, or just take them out there, while still cloaked. I like D-Cars example by making all attacks, even Salvage, Repair, Power Drain, and Power Supply beams would cause the ships uncloak making them yet again seen.

Radarjamming is one thing, if we can see them we are good to go, but not being able to see them and no radar signiture would cause people world of hurt. So making it were any act of aggression, or type of attack be it mining the base while they aren\'t looking or attacking from afar with Rockets will cause you to uncloak.

Another way is to Add another AI type for Turrets (be the Cannons, or Rockets [ if they are implemented in the furture]) That doesn\'t look for Radar, but instead heat so that if the uncloak there heat signature will come back with them the Turrets will then be able to do there job as they were made, But with this the New Modules would have to be similar to Radar jamming, and Cloaking by making it were it will constantly take Energy to function properly, and thus take time to build a proper Turret that can handle constant fire with the Turrets model on.

 

[Arcrer]

Making it possible to see cloakers ruin the entire thing with cloaking.. Being cloaked.

 

[Apocalypse]

Maybe i\'m wrong but... if someone is cloaked you can still see him on the minimap... he needs this... \"anti-radar-thing\" too?

 

[Matticus88]

A scanner device would be good, Would require a equivelent amount of power to operate, compared to the amount cloaks use, and depending on the number of scanner blocks connected together, the better it is, detect cloaked ships futher away, etc

 

[Vulgarth]

Cloaking and/or Jamming requires a crazy amount of power, so much so that you need to design your ship around it and go without other vital systems/armour. It may seem powerful now because everyone has access to these huge ships but once the economy and balancing is put in to place these massive ships will require a huge time and money investment from multiple people.

I find it unlikely that cloaking will be a huge issue because most people will not want to risk their expensive ships by using lackluster shielding or armour.

 

[DoomsWrath]

there should be a module that if you point it in the general direction of a cloaked enemy it will detect its general area not its exact area.

 

[Charlie_]

Are the compromise.

Cloaking ships that work are essentially built with nearly nothing more than generators, a few thrusters, a core, and cloak modules,

However, in order to make it fair towards the crazy restraints of viable functional cloaking ships, these sonar pulses should require an equivalently crazy and ridiculous amount of power, meaning that as much as you have ships built around the sole purpose of hiding, you\'d have extremely vulnerable ships built to dedicate themselve to the exact opposite.

They could essentially become vital parts for functional fleets, as their use would be the only warning and counter measure against a cloaked strike force.

Actually, since cloaked ships can do barely anything... and torpedo-suicide-ships are already a thing....
Oh my god, invisible torpedo-ships. Don\'t think the cloak works without a pilot though.

Anyways, as much as the cloaking needs a ship to be geared towards NOTHING ELSE, the counter should be as equally restrictive. These would be the only protection against spies, but would require a significantly strong escort in order to avoid any damage.

And thus.. the game of cat and mouse began..

 

[Ratking15]

There is just a simple answer to this which is that when you have a ship near you and you go cloaked when you come out of it by shooting or fireing weapons you have a cooldown time.

Or you have to rengage cloaking since the enemy ship can then scan and lock onto your cloaking signiture which takes about two clicks to do taking about 2 seconds of where your visable however you\'ll have to make sure that when you recloak the enemy wasn\'t still scaning becuase then it dectects since it scans the random frequency you used (or what ever they are saying to explain it and stuff).

 

[Damiann47]

I agree, my biggest worry is that the counter to cloaks would make them completly useless, at the same time there needs to be an viable counter against them. I say its fair that it takes the same power to detect then it is to cloak and jam, although the cloaking ship\'s main defense is the stealth. A detector ship doesn\'t have any defense other then its detection, it wouldn\'t be able to defend against a normal ship, while a cloaker would generally be safe.

 

[Zxaber]

What about the ability to \'ping\' once to detect cloaking nearby. Building off the sonar idea by Charlie, it could be used to check for nearby cloakers, but only once before a cooldown. An additional restriction could be that they don\'t give a set location of the cloak, but perhaps a distance? This would still give the cloakers an advantage, but at the same time allow the defending fleet to be on alert. It could also be used to play \'Hotter/Colder\' with a cloaked station or immobile capital ship. Required high energy use could be debatable, but a cooldown between pings might be enough. An additional possible downside could be that the pings are detectable by basic ship cores, meaning that ships serving as cloak sweepers would themselves be easily found by everyone; you can cloak or seek cloakers, but not both effectively.

 

[KuramaFox]

Does it matter if a cloak won\'t work without a pilot in a torpedo-ship?

You ditch it, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere without a ship, unless there just happens to be an enemy vessel nearby you can steal (presumeably the target\'s either still in his ship in build mode looking at the damage, or dead), or unless you bring along your own parts to try and hastily throw together a functional escape vessel in the middle of an angry beehive you just awoke with your explosive shenanigans.

 

[D-Car]

I like the idea of having a general idea that there\'s a cloaker nearby, either as an inherent ability to the core or via module blocks. My concern is that noting somebody in the area is pinging for cloakers would add more clutter to the interface, especially since you can\'t possibly keep the nav list open while doing anything but looking at the nav list.

 

[HadrasVorshoth]

I feel that whenever a cloaked individual fires of a weapon or does anything except simply driving (at certain speeds too: my gut feeling is that the cloaks should be hard to maintain beyond a slight flicker of invisibility at high speeds as it tracks the visuals around it, whilst at slow speeds it is a perfect disguise.) it briefly makes their ship flicker a bright colour, revealing their position. There are a lot of restraints on cloaking already, mainly the sheer power to do it, so I feel an infiltrator type ship should be limited to just that, infiltration.

that said, I would feel it to be a good idea to have a Plasma Cloud Emission weapon computer and weapon eventually.

it would fire an AoE stream of short range plasma \'fire\' out of its emitters, to detect any hidden ships in its region, but by being a short range and a computer weapon means it will likely focus attention away from the main combat as the \"Pyro\" analogue ship tries to hunt down the \"Spy\" analogue ship.

 

[Zxaber]

My thought would be that, when someone uses a ping, the area around their diamond would glow for a second. If they\'re out of range for the diamond to normally appear, or if they\'re using a radar jammer, the effect would still happen around where the diamond would normally be. An accompanying \'ping\' sound, similar to the classic submarine radar pings, would help demonstrate the point.

As for the cloak sweepers themselves, I\'m thinking a message popup or something similar that reports the nearest cloak signature, \"x meters away\". I agree that it shouldn\'t require opening the nav menu. Alternatively, since as far as I know the left side of the screen is usually left open, a list window could be created there, showing the top 5 or 6 nearby signatures with a count of total found. In this way, even though the sweeper would end up detecting their own cloaked allies, they could keep an eye on the count. If a fleet of ten ships suddenly has twelve cloaks detected, they\'d know something was up.

 

[AnNoYiNg NaMe]

How about a weapon (of sorts) to counter-act the cloak? What I have in mind is, you activate it the same way you fire missiles or the salvage laser, but intead of a single beam or projectile, it releases a bubble, like a 3D sonar ping. when this \"ping\" comes in contact with something, like an asteroid or a cloaked ship, the bubble breaks around it and you can see an outline of what it hits. Plus, the more (I guess this would be called) ladar blocks you have set up, the farther out it reaches, or the faster it moves, or the faster it recharges, just like any other weapon. This could work, right?