Cloaking nerf

[GDPR 302420]

I belive cloaking devices require a MAJOR NERF simply becuase perma cloaking is easy to acheive and your practically invinsible (especialy when using a radar jammer) when cloaked because if you can't be seen you can't be targeted.

I have multiple solutions for this...

Cannot shoot while cloaked (to prevent unseen attackers from attacking ships and the victims cant fight back)

Cannot reamain cloaked within 200 "blocks" of a anything (to allow people to unlock ships by flying into them)

A computer that can detect cloaked ships (to allow bigger ships to see smaller cloaked ships)

and

A maxiumun 2 mins cloak time (to completely get rid of perma cloaking)

Using one or two (or even all) of these solutions will balance ship to ship combat a lot if anyone agrees with me please reply this is my first post so be gentle please.

 

[Gameguru]

I am sorry, did i hear right? Nerfing is not the issue, if anything, it needs to be BUFFED. Just because some rich guy got smart on the server you played on and owned you, doesnt mean it needs a nerf.

Clock ships need to be made from the begining, that means you need to add antimatter cannons and other offensive weapons latter. You try to build a perma cloak ship with a legit play though and then tell me that it needs a nerf.

 

[GDPR 302420]

Oh please perhaps if a cloaking device and jammer was made available just like the 20 antimatter cannons i would be happy with that BUT if you made a perma cloaked ship you are perma invincible nerfing is a must!

and ps i dident get destoryed by a cloaked ship i dont play on online servers

 

[McDili]

If you shoot your ship uncloaks itself. Since AMC\'s are basically sustain fire weapons, you can\'t stay cloaked during sustained fire.



If a cloaked ship gets shot it gets uncloaked.



So bascially once you initiate your attack, you\'ve given a lot of information away to your attacker. For one, they know you exist. And for two, they know where they got attacked from, so they\'re probably going to start spraying around. And if they hit you, which is likely if they fire in your general direction, then you\'re boned because the trade-off for having a cloaked ship is that you have VERY little shields and you may not even have hull at all.



Not only that, but cloaked ships aren\'t even feasible after like 1000 mass. So it\'s not like it can take on a big ship or anything. It\'s good at getting the first shot in at the very best.

 

[darktoes]

I think it would be safe to say that this thread is not required.

 

[Commodore]

In the past, I have found that you do not uncloak when you are shot.

Anyway, I think cloaking is ok as is, I think scanner modules might be a good addition though, They could have logarithmic scaling so that 10 scanners give 200m range, 100 give 400m range, 1000 give 600m range, 100,000 give 1km range. This would help deal with people cloaking and trolling, but would still keep cloaking viable.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

Currently, a perma-cloak ship can fire weapon/s and re-cloak so quickly that it\'s impossible for other players to see them. To fix this, it should take 5 seconds to re-enable cloak (long enough for the player to use the radar to get some idea of who is shooting them).

Currently, a perma-cloak ship can have large turrets and \"docked shields\" (e.g. flat ships with hardened hulls and lots of shield that are docked onto your perma-cloak ship for protection) and end up with plenty of fire-power and plenty of armour/defense. To fix this, the mass of docked turrets/ships should add to the mass of the ship for cloaking/jamming (and turning/thrust).

Currently, cloak and jammer blocks are insanely cheap (and the \"free credits\" economy is entirely idiotic anyway). Once the economy is fixed the price of cloaker and jammer blocks should be very expensive (like maybe 5 million credits for cloaker and 3 million for jammer) so that people have to actually earn them.

Currently, there\'s no way to detect cloaked ships at all. I think there should be some sort of stealth detection block which gives a ship\'s radar the ability to detect jammed ships (e.g. so you see the radar target but not the ship itself if it\'s cloaked). The stealth detection block would be even more expensive (e.g. maybe 8 million credits) and consume about 25 e/sec per block. To prevent people using it in bursts (e.g. every 10 seconds turn it on for a faction of a second and turn it off again to bypass most of the power consumption) it should consume 500 power per block just to turn it on (e.g. for a ship with 1000 blocks it\'d cost 500000 power to turn it on and 25000 e/sec after that).

All these things would \"nerf\" cloaking/jamming.

In addition, cloaking/jamming consumes too much power making it hard to perma-cloak a small/tiny ship (due to the way power generation works - larger \"XYZ frame\" is more efficient per block) and making it too painful for everything else. It needs to be more like 80 e/sec for cloak and 20 e/sec for jammer (100 e/sec for both). However...

Temporary cloaking/jamming is almost non-existent. People either sacrifice everything and build ships for perma-cloak, or they ignore cloaking/jamming completely because it\'s far too hard to build a usable ship (e.g. with enough weapons/shield/thrust for more than sight-seeing) that can temporarily jam for more than 5 seconds (and temporary cloaking is much worse). For this reason; the amount of power consumed by cloaker and jammer should increase over time, possibly starting at 20 e/sec initially for both cloak and jam and rising to 100 e/sec for both in the first 20 seconds. That way people might actually bother with temporary cloak/jam as it\'d be easier to temporarily cloak/jam for long enough to bother.

Basically what I\'m saying here is that cloaking/jamming needs to be nerfed and also needs to be buffed.

 

[TheMoro]

To anyone thinking of nerfing cloaking by spewing out useless ideas like magic scanner blocks, I challenge you to build, and effectivly use, a cloaking ship. On a real multiplayer server, against real human oponents. Build it yourself, no stealing blueprints, totally destroy a larger ship, since cloaking is to you apparently OP, and then come back and share your thoughts. Some things you might find:

- even with perma cloak/jam, the cloak and jammer randomly turn off. Either as a bug, or a feature, im not sure.

- As people have said, there\'s a HUGE tradeoff to making stealth ships that make them, actually really underpowered. (though the new update makes turrets and such kinda broken, I agree with adding their mass the the ship)

- In my opinion, they are the only ships that you actually have to THINK when you build it, and takes any skill to pilot. I\'d hate for them to be nerfed to oblivion.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Besides, if you need a cloaked ship, it\'s obvious you\'re not just sightseeing. \"All is fair in love and war.\"

 

[Dr_Dac]

You can also make combateffective permacloak/jamships around 4k blocks. Just improve your reactor layout and it is possible. On the other hand getting these to work is another thing. you should only attack as a group, but well cloak is fine so far. Serverlag deactivates cloak and jam, so it is screwed enough as it is

 

[EpicFailLord123]

you can make a large cloakship, but you need almost 120,000 reactor blocks,(or 3 millon e/s) to do so. I have a stealth scout. Cloaking is fine where it is, which is only viable for scouts.

 

[fieryeye]

i think cloaking should jsut remain as it is.it consumes alot of power, hence it might be expensive to make a perma-cloak ship, depending of the size and whether or not it is a fighter.

 

[Trafalgar]

50^3 power generators in a cube would be 125,000 blocks, which would require 150*125000 = 18,750,000 e/sec to cloak and radar jam. To just jam it would require only 50*125000 = 6,250,000 e/sec, which is still approximately twice as much as it is capable of generating.

 

[z1967]

In order to just use a jamming device on a ship, you need 50 e/sec per block. that means that every 3rd block would have to be a power block in a reactor. The mass limit for a jamming ship is 2000 mass. just cloaking without jamming requires a power block every other block in a reactor. The mass limit for that is 1000. Want to try both? it requires 150 power per block, which means your ship will be about 75% power blocks assuming you make a REALLY good reactor. Mass limit for this is about 650 mass.

Now tell me that a 650 mass cloaker could still go toe to toe with a capital ship. I made a cloaking fighter that had a thrust to mass of 2:1 and a single gun that could do 143 damage. it had a few shield blocks and could permacloak even when moving. another model that I scrapped was a PvP cube that was designed to preform and kill, not to win a beauty contet. They are possible, just hard to effectively make.

 

[Trafalgar]

You can make a perma-stealth (cloak+jam) ship with up to approximately 650 mass, but it requires a very specific power design to accomplish, and I would not recommend flying such a ship into battle because any hit would disable the cloak. The largest functioning stealth ship I\'ve built is 648.9 mass, with twelve 180-unit AMC guns (about 31523 DPS), 102k capacity shields, 978,831.7 e/sec power regen, 411,583.5 power storage, and bounds of 201 m x 196 m x 203 m - which is essentially all just a couple power generator lines. Oddly, power generation is less than predicted, although as far as I can tell the formula has not changed, and as far as I can determine the size of the two generators are 594 blocks each (there is a camera on the front of the ship, otherwise bounds have been 2m above the block widths/heights/lengths lately, so 201-2 + 198-2 + 203-2 - 2 = 201+198+203-8=594), which should be 983,244.640582757 e/sec, but 978,831.7 is quite a bit lower and I\'m not sure what\'s happening there.

Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26452959/starmade-screenshot-0000.png

The small ship is an 11x11x11 missile pod, for comparison.

(It is possible to build a smaller ship with more redundant power generation so it\'s less susceptible to damage, of course.)

Currently the most effective way to make a stealth ship is to make a smallish one, and then mount ridiculously huge turrets on it because those don\'t affect your speed/mass at all. And they fire while cloaked, or they did. Not sure if they still do. AI didn\'t know how to deal with them, in any case. So I built a tiny turret gunship and it was all kinds of amusing (and this was before the \'turrets also cloak\' fix).

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

Perma cloaking anything that is a worthy combat vessel is impossible.Yeah, you can make a ship purely out of generatorsand some thrusters but it will not let you do anything other than scout.If I try to cloak my titan, it disappears for like 3 seconds... Any other ship, big or small does pretty much the same.



Either you are an amazing cloak ship builder, or you don\'t know what you are talking about.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

You want cloak nerf but you don\'t even play online on servers? So what exactly are you worried about?

 

[GDPR 302420]

Many of you think a cloaking nerf is a bad idea but i have seen and built lots of combat worthy cloaked/jammed vessels its very easy to make a combat worthy cloaked ship that cannot be hit becuase its very fast and cant be seen trust me i have seen it, Multiple small ships using cloaking and jamming permanently using missles for combat. To fast to be seen or hit and completely invisible i dont want to remove perma cloaking i just want to make it harder to achieve and easier to detect with the suggestions above

 

[AAlexandrosTGreat]

i made a single cube of heat seekers made out of 1million blocks here are the stats. http://imgur.com/a/RaHx5#0 so have fun with that \"missiles vs capitals\" idea Note:that lagged be to death shortly after and i could not even see the missiles shooting. also if we nerf cloaking we will have to nerf jamming because jamming in my opinion is alot more useful you can hide a capital then aslong as no one goes into view range or you have long range guns they wont know what hit them. Maybe this gun would work?http://imgur.com/a/iIGZ5#0

but that had around 955161601.2 power storage and 14897868 but hey 22k damage is nice but i find it much much more effective at crashing servers then anything else. But in my opinion cloaking is fine the way it is i belive someone made a cloak able battle cruiser (link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjU2HJkOq1s) download that ship and tell me how \"easy\" it is to remain cloaked. also if that loses around 3 blocks of power regen it cant cloak anymore soooooyea the end

 

[BDLS]

Rebalancing cloakers requires more than just nerfing or buffing one aspect.



I\'d say partially reduce energy requirement per block for cloak & jam, but add a startup time cost, maybe 2-3 seconds.