Warning, long wall of text inbound.
What we have currently:
- A Cloaking device that will drain 100Energy/block to disable rendering of the ship (aka cloak).
- A Jammer device that will drain 50Energy/block to prevent the ship from being marked.
Issues with current system:
Due to the excessive energy consumption and the way reactors work, there are only two possible ways of creating 'stealth' designs which incorporate both devices (since you need boith invisibility and jamming for 'true stealth):
Either you build incredibly large reactors and then attach large weaponry and shieldblocks, creating the skeleton of a large warship. Or you build a minimalistic fighter consisting of >90% reactors. Even if you only go for the jammer it's impossible to create small 'asthetic' ships.
How it could/should (personal oppinion) be:
First off, clarification: I will refer to different ship sizes as tiny, small, medium, large, capital in that order.[
Trivially, it should be easier to hide smaller ships then overly large star destroyers. medium ship should only be able to hide by spending vast amounts of energy and dedication towards it and capital ships shouldn'T be able to stealth at all.
As well, common sense dictates that a huge capital ship should have trouble detecting a nimble little spacecraft, simply because it's own presence should block out any sensor data from much smaller objects.
I would like to see a Starmade where building small ships stealthy is actually possible, where stealth actually matters in a gameplay-sense and eventually even approaches realism.
The concept:
Implement a signature-based system. Every ship has a 'signaturelevel'. The signature of a ship determines from where it will be marked as an object (using the current mark-system).
Example: Cube A has a base signature of 500. Any other Cube B (with both cubes being simple ship cores) will be able to detect Cube A (aka, A will show up on B's screen as indicator and be listed in the navigation tab) at a maximum distance of 500m. If Cube A leaves this range again, Cube B will lose track of the ship (though a player could follow A by sight).
I already suggested a base signature of 500 with the above example. This is much less then the static 2-3km you currently have ingame, but of course there are further modifiers for it.
Every block on the ship adds 0.2 to it's signature. (aka, 2 signature per point of mass), increasing the range at which it can be spotted. This means your large 5000-block battleship will be marked at a distance of 1500m, whilst that nimble cube will not be detected before 500.5m.
Additionally, an actually active ship should be easier to detect then a motionless object, let's incorporate this as well: A ship in motion will have a gradually higher signature, depending on it's momentum. Something like 1% signature per km/h (assuming we, at some point, get higher speed caps) could be appropriate.
Example: The afromentioned battleship, when not in motion, will be same visible (1500m) as a 2500-block battleship moving at a speed of 50. ( ((2500*0.2)+500) *1.5 )
Of course it should be much less of a trouble to detect a FIGHTING ship. Firing any sort of weapon should increase your signature by a noticeable amount. Later on in developement, stealth weapons with lower impact could be added, but for now something like 200% sounds reasonable to me.
Example: Did you remember our little cube A? If said cube starts firing wildly (with a newly aquired 1-block-AMC), it will end up with ~1500 signature as well.
Great, now everybody will light up like a christmas tree whenever you are doing something (or even doing nothing for large ships). How would that promote stealth?
The answer are the three new/reworked stealth devices:
-Radar Jammer
-Radar Enhancer
-Cloaking Device
Let's start with the Jammer. Instead of nullifying your marker, as the current Jammer would, the new Jammer will merely reduce your signature. Jammers will stack with dimishing returns, which means that for 'ultimate jamming' you will probably need more of them.
Every Jammer (when active) multiplies your signature by 0.7 .
Example: Your ship has 1000 signature.
One Jammer: 1000*0.7 = 700
Two Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7 = 490
Three Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7*0.7 = 343
Four Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7*0.7*0.7 = 240 ...
The new jammer will consume noticeably less power then the current one. Something like 2 Energy/Block would be fully sufficient. If you would want to completely remove signature from the ship mentioned above, you would need about 25 Jammers to reduce your signature to 1 (which means you're pretty much jammed). And this amount of Jammers would require 50 Energy/block again.
However, just utilizing partial jamming, using only a few jammers, will reduce your signature significantly... making small ships hard to mark, without draining their entire energy in an instant.
But then everyone would just run small un-targetable ships and large ships would be entirely useless? That's where the Radar Enhancer comes in. This device can be activated to increase your own sensory vision. However, as mentioned previously, an own massive ship should realistically block out your own sensors. Therefore here my suggestion:
Each active Radar increases your sensor range by +(20 - blocks/100)% (or does nothing if the value is lower then zero).
Example: You put a radar on your large 5000block ship. You now gain (20 - 5000/100)= (20-50) = -30 radar bonus... actually, you don't get anything. Your ship is too large!
But if you now have a small, 500 block frigate... here you will gain (20 - 500/100) = (20-5) = 15 % radar increase. Let's assume there's a ship with signature 1000 somewhere around. Usually you could only see it from up to 1000m. With your new active radar, you can, however, spot it from 115% of it'S normal siganture. Which means 1150 in this case.
If you would have two radars, you could spot it at 1300, with three radars at 1450 and so on. (As you can see, the radar bonus stacks additively).
Each active Radar Unit would drain a static amount of Energy per second, f.e. 2000. Keep in mind, 2000Energy. Not 2000Energy/block.
Reason? This way, extremely small ships cannot properly use Radars, because they would need large amount of cores to compensate for the energy drain. Though a scout COULD activate 5 radars, draining his energy in 2 seconds, to create a short 'radar pulse'.
However, permanent radar is supposed to be for larger ships only. But ships past 2000 block can't use radars at all? The solution is the middleground: A 1000-block medium ship can easyly mount multiple radar enhancers, whilst as well providing the energy necessary for those to function.
This way, you now got three ship archetypes: Small stealthy fightercraft, powerful but blind warships... and medium frigates able to spot targets on large distance due to their radar systems.
What about cloak? Of course, we wouldn't want to forget about cloaking devices here.
Cloaking should be the most supreme form of stealth. But right now hiding your ships appearance does literally nothing in any engagement past ~250m, even less so for small ships which are hard to spot either way.
I suggest following changes:
A ship can only cloak with a sufficient amount of cloaking devices equipped: A ship needs 1 cloaking device per 20 blocks, otherwise it cannot cloak at all.
Cloaking your ship reduces your signature to 20 (Means both your base signature of 500 and your mass are ignored, moving will still boost your signature), as well as making you entirely invisible. True stealth. Well, except somebody flies right past you (or is a frigate full of radars and is 'nearby').
Of course firing will still break your cloak instantly. Additionally, taking damage or colliding with anything will break your cloak, too.
Upon deactivation, forced or intentional, your cloak enters a recharge period of Cloaking_devices*10 seconds. During this cooldown period, the ship cannot enter cloak again. This means that tiny fighter can stealth relatively easy, whilst that small frigate can be pulled from cloak really easyly.
Example: If your ship has a size of 400 blocks, you would need 20 Cloaking devices. After you started to fire at your enemy, you cannot cloak again for 20*10=200 seconds. No more 'invisible-ROCKETSTOYOURFACE-invisible' play for anything larger then a tiny strikecraft.
Now to one of the main factors: Energy consumption. Here I would suggest something radical:
As long as you are cloaked, you cannot regain any energy. This doesn't mean your energy output drops to 0, it just means that any excess energy (which isn't used for thrusters or radar) will not be stored anymore.
Additionally, every Cloaking Device will drain 20 Energy per second.
Example: You got a super-tiny stealth fighter with one cloaking device equipped. After retreating from a fight, you engage your cloak at full energy. You will now be able to last exactly 1000 seconds (assuming you got no external energy storage), which equals about ~15 minutes. After all you're a stealth strikecraft.
On the other hand, you're 400-block frigate with it's 20 cloaking devices can barely last 100 seconds (unless you bring a lot of storages, which again increase the amount of cloaking devices needed, etc). And keep in mind that more cloaking devices mean longer reacharge-time, etc.
In total, this means that cloaking is theoretically possible for any ship... But large ships will need to bring countless devices and energy storages to create any sort of useful cloaking duration... and will still suffer from excessively long cooldowns. Yes, you CAN stealth that huge 8000er capital ship... but only for x minutes and after disengaging cloak you need to wait one hour before cloaing again.
On the other hand, that nimble tiny fighter can easyly pop in and out of cloak every ten seconds, with long lasting durations.
THAT is the way stealth is supposed to be (in my humble oppinion).
Feel free to leave comments, critique and improvement.
PS: Not a native English speaker, please excuse incorrect grammar and spelling.
What we have currently:
- A Cloaking device that will drain 100Energy/block to disable rendering of the ship (aka cloak).
- A Jammer device that will drain 50Energy/block to prevent the ship from being marked.
Issues with current system:
Due to the excessive energy consumption and the way reactors work, there are only two possible ways of creating 'stealth' designs which incorporate both devices (since you need boith invisibility and jamming for 'true stealth):
Either you build incredibly large reactors and then attach large weaponry and shieldblocks, creating the skeleton of a large warship. Or you build a minimalistic fighter consisting of >90% reactors. Even if you only go for the jammer it's impossible to create small 'asthetic' ships.
How it could/should (personal oppinion) be:
First off, clarification: I will refer to different ship sizes as tiny, small, medium, large, capital in that order.[
Trivially, it should be easier to hide smaller ships then overly large star destroyers. medium ship should only be able to hide by spending vast amounts of energy and dedication towards it and capital ships shouldn'T be able to stealth at all.
As well, common sense dictates that a huge capital ship should have trouble detecting a nimble little spacecraft, simply because it's own presence should block out any sensor data from much smaller objects.
I would like to see a Starmade where building small ships stealthy is actually possible, where stealth actually matters in a gameplay-sense and eventually even approaches realism.
The concept:
Implement a signature-based system. Every ship has a 'signaturelevel'. The signature of a ship determines from where it will be marked as an object (using the current mark-system).
Example: Cube A has a base signature of 500. Any other Cube B (with both cubes being simple ship cores) will be able to detect Cube A (aka, A will show up on B's screen as indicator and be listed in the navigation tab) at a maximum distance of 500m. If Cube A leaves this range again, Cube B will lose track of the ship (though a player could follow A by sight).
I already suggested a base signature of 500 with the above example. This is much less then the static 2-3km you currently have ingame, but of course there are further modifiers for it.
Every block on the ship adds 0.2 to it's signature. (aka, 2 signature per point of mass), increasing the range at which it can be spotted. This means your large 5000-block battleship will be marked at a distance of 1500m, whilst that nimble cube will not be detected before 500.5m.
Additionally, an actually active ship should be easier to detect then a motionless object, let's incorporate this as well: A ship in motion will have a gradually higher signature, depending on it's momentum. Something like 1% signature per km/h (assuming we, at some point, get higher speed caps) could be appropriate.
Example: The afromentioned battleship, when not in motion, will be same visible (1500m) as a 2500-block battleship moving at a speed of 50. ( ((2500*0.2)+500) *1.5 )
Of course it should be much less of a trouble to detect a FIGHTING ship. Firing any sort of weapon should increase your signature by a noticeable amount. Later on in developement, stealth weapons with lower impact could be added, but for now something like 200% sounds reasonable to me.
Example: Did you remember our little cube A? If said cube starts firing wildly (with a newly aquired 1-block-AMC), it will end up with ~1500 signature as well.
Great, now everybody will light up like a christmas tree whenever you are doing something (or even doing nothing for large ships). How would that promote stealth?
The answer are the three new/reworked stealth devices:
-Radar Jammer
-Radar Enhancer
-Cloaking Device
Let's start with the Jammer. Instead of nullifying your marker, as the current Jammer would, the new Jammer will merely reduce your signature. Jammers will stack with dimishing returns, which means that for 'ultimate jamming' you will probably need more of them.
Every Jammer (when active) multiplies your signature by 0.7 .
Example: Your ship has 1000 signature.
One Jammer: 1000*0.7 = 700
Two Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7 = 490
Three Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7*0.7 = 343
Four Jammers: 1000*0.7*0.7*0.7*0.7 = 240 ...
The new jammer will consume noticeably less power then the current one. Something like 2 Energy/Block would be fully sufficient. If you would want to completely remove signature from the ship mentioned above, you would need about 25 Jammers to reduce your signature to 1 (which means you're pretty much jammed). And this amount of Jammers would require 50 Energy/block again.
However, just utilizing partial jamming, using only a few jammers, will reduce your signature significantly... making small ships hard to mark, without draining their entire energy in an instant.
But then everyone would just run small un-targetable ships and large ships would be entirely useless? That's where the Radar Enhancer comes in. This device can be activated to increase your own sensory vision. However, as mentioned previously, an own massive ship should realistically block out your own sensors. Therefore here my suggestion:
Each active Radar increases your sensor range by +(20 - blocks/100)% (or does nothing if the value is lower then zero).
Example: You put a radar on your large 5000block ship. You now gain (20 - 5000/100)= (20-50) = -30 radar bonus... actually, you don't get anything. Your ship is too large!
But if you now have a small, 500 block frigate... here you will gain (20 - 500/100) = (20-5) = 15 % radar increase. Let's assume there's a ship with signature 1000 somewhere around. Usually you could only see it from up to 1000m. With your new active radar, you can, however, spot it from 115% of it'S normal siganture. Which means 1150 in this case.
If you would have two radars, you could spot it at 1300, with three radars at 1450 and so on. (As you can see, the radar bonus stacks additively).
Each active Radar Unit would drain a static amount of Energy per second, f.e. 2000. Keep in mind, 2000Energy. Not 2000Energy/block.
Reason? This way, extremely small ships cannot properly use Radars, because they would need large amount of cores to compensate for the energy drain. Though a scout COULD activate 5 radars, draining his energy in 2 seconds, to create a short 'radar pulse'.
However, permanent radar is supposed to be for larger ships only. But ships past 2000 block can't use radars at all? The solution is the middleground: A 1000-block medium ship can easyly mount multiple radar enhancers, whilst as well providing the energy necessary for those to function.
This way, you now got three ship archetypes: Small stealthy fightercraft, powerful but blind warships... and medium frigates able to spot targets on large distance due to their radar systems.
What about cloak? Of course, we wouldn't want to forget about cloaking devices here.
Cloaking should be the most supreme form of stealth. But right now hiding your ships appearance does literally nothing in any engagement past ~250m, even less so for small ships which are hard to spot either way.
I suggest following changes:
A ship can only cloak with a sufficient amount of cloaking devices equipped: A ship needs 1 cloaking device per 20 blocks, otherwise it cannot cloak at all.
Cloaking your ship reduces your signature to 20 (Means both your base signature of 500 and your mass are ignored, moving will still boost your signature), as well as making you entirely invisible. True stealth. Well, except somebody flies right past you (or is a frigate full of radars and is 'nearby').
Of course firing will still break your cloak instantly. Additionally, taking damage or colliding with anything will break your cloak, too.
Upon deactivation, forced or intentional, your cloak enters a recharge period of Cloaking_devices*10 seconds. During this cooldown period, the ship cannot enter cloak again. This means that tiny fighter can stealth relatively easy, whilst that small frigate can be pulled from cloak really easyly.
Example: If your ship has a size of 400 blocks, you would need 20 Cloaking devices. After you started to fire at your enemy, you cannot cloak again for 20*10=200 seconds. No more 'invisible-ROCKETSTOYOURFACE-invisible' play for anything larger then a tiny strikecraft.
Now to one of the main factors: Energy consumption. Here I would suggest something radical:
As long as you are cloaked, you cannot regain any energy. This doesn't mean your energy output drops to 0, it just means that any excess energy (which isn't used for thrusters or radar) will not be stored anymore.
Additionally, every Cloaking Device will drain 20 Energy per second.
Example: You got a super-tiny stealth fighter with one cloaking device equipped. After retreating from a fight, you engage your cloak at full energy. You will now be able to last exactly 1000 seconds (assuming you got no external energy storage), which equals about ~15 minutes. After all you're a stealth strikecraft.
On the other hand, you're 400-block frigate with it's 20 cloaking devices can barely last 100 seconds (unless you bring a lot of storages, which again increase the amount of cloaking devices needed, etc). And keep in mind that more cloaking devices mean longer reacharge-time, etc.
In total, this means that cloaking is theoretically possible for any ship... But large ships will need to bring countless devices and energy storages to create any sort of useful cloaking duration... and will still suffer from excessively long cooldowns. Yes, you CAN stealth that huge 8000er capital ship... but only for x minutes and after disengaging cloak you need to wait one hour before cloaing again.
On the other hand, that nimble tiny fighter can easyly pop in and out of cloak every ten seconds, with long lasting durations.
THAT is the way stealth is supposed to be (in my humble oppinion).
Feel free to leave comments, critique and improvement.
PS: Not a native English speaker, please excuse incorrect grammar and spelling.
