More flexible "stealth ship" requirements

[jorgekorke]

Today, in order to make an efficient stealth ship, you must make a lot of tricks with the power generator blocks in order to be successful. Requiring a lot of power to this gameplay is essential to maintain the balance. However, this rule could be more flexible, placing each block to have a certain value of power required by each placed.


For the 0C Cloaking device...


Today, it is required 100e/block - not calculating with the new 145, since it might change soon.

Yet, we could make different " costs " for different blocks. Example:

The core of the ship would consume 200e.

Hardened hulls and all sort of computers would consume 150e.

Power blocks, Power tanks, Shields and the weapon blocks in general would consume the already existing 100e/block

On the other hand, Thrusters could be cheaper on power, requiring 50e/block

Decoration blocks, 5 e/sec...

...while the common hulls, or in the possible future of multiple hull kinds, the lightest
of them would cost 0,1 e/sec.

Also, the shaping could have different cost as well, for the pentas costing 0,09 ,
wedges 0,08 , corners 0,07 and the tetras 0,05.


This could maintain the balance on stealth, yet encourage the people to make good-looking ships
with actual hulls, even being so light and fragile, as a stealthed vessel should be.


And for the radar jamming device, a similar ratio could be followed.

Core = 100e

All computers = 75e

Power blocks/tanks , shields, weapon blocks = 50e, as it is already

Thrusters = 25e

Hardened Hulls = 20e (This could add a bit more of gameplay element for fighters, since those small
ships contains a close to an equal number of hulls then actual system blocks; while the big ships have
for sure more systematic blocks then hulls on the total. In the end, fighters can use the radar jammers
for a short period of time in order to not be auto-killed by giant turrets, while they maneuver out of the
turret direction and let it focus something else. The different costs along wedges, corners, pentas and
tetras could be used here as well to encourage the building of smoother looking ships.)

Decoration = 5e

Common/Light hulls = same ratio of 0,1; to 0,05 for tetras.


The new possibility of adding the light hulls can't be abused or exploited, since it will increase too much the mass, requiring more thrusters, which will require more power as ever.

 

[ltmauve]

Well, the balance in the dev build was adjusted so that jamming is much easier, but having full perma-stealth is still just as hard. I would like to see some system where:
-Getting occasional jamming for all ships is possible
-Dedicated full-stealth ships can look good.
-Small ships can have fairly consistent jamming while firing

First, your idea would probably be a part of it.
Second, jamming/cloaking would increase in cost as time increases (maximum ratio compared to starting energy is based on mass)

 

[Lecic]

+1. Being able to actually put hull on a stealth ship would be great. It would allow for good looking stealth ships, but wouldn't make stealth ships too powerful.

 

[Ithirahad]

Personally, I'd like to see Romulan warbirds that can actually cloak... at the expense of a certain amount of shields and extra armor. (But that can still have a neat interior and whatnot.)

 

[Calbiri]

I like the basic concept, unfortunately doing block-type count checks like this to determine the cost of each type/group in the ship comes with a high performance cost, this is something we avoided using in other game mechanic solutions for the same reason.

Cloaking and Jamming are systems that we are looking to improve the basic game mechanic of, however the difficulty of a stealthed ship design should remain high as its advantages are great.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I had a similar Idea but mine was just to not make reactors take none if not very little power to cloak. How many power modules do you need to connect together before they are able to even cloak themselves? Most of the time you are building a flying reactor because you have to place a ton of power cores just to overcome their added mass.

 

[Darth Cestual]

Say a cloak requires a low cost X amount of energy to activate/maintain, regardless of ship size, the drawback of an active cloak is that shields are offline and speed is reduced to 1/2 base standard, 25kmh. The idea treats small stealth ships more like a WWII submarine, made for sneaking, getting off 1 or 2 vital shots, then making a run for it.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

I like the basic concept, unfortunately doing block-type count checks like this to determine the cost of each type/group in the ship comes with a high performance cost, this is something we avoided using in other game mechanic solutions for the same reason.

Cloaking and Jamming are systems that we are looking to improve the basic game mechanic of, however the difficulty of a stealthed ship design should remain high as its advantages are great.

I'm curious - do You (the Devs) have any concepts how to change stealth/jamming? Or is it something You currently do not think about?


Maybe the solution would be to have system which doesn't work with binary results - either the ship is cloaked or not, but instead the ship could be totally invisible or only partially, the ship's diamond if completely jammed would be invisible, but if the system wouldn't work with full output, then the diamond may show up from time to time, or "jump around" the screen.
Just throwing some loose ideas.

 

[Izikiel]

I do like the idea of better (or easier) cloaking and jamming, my destroyer would be even more fun (hopefully it can go past 2 minutes...). Also, any permanently cloaked ship looks terrible, but that's just me echoing the thousands of other times it's been posted on the forums.

 

[ltmauve]

Implementation for change. Warningwalloftext
-Jammers/cloakers now have an ECM rating (how much mass they can hide). Increases linearly with the block count of the group.
-cloakers also provide jamming ability. This ability will shut off when you fire, along with the cloak. If you activate a jammer while cloaked, you lose the cloak.
-If you don't have enough ECM to completely hide your vessel, you build up "suspicion" for being close to not-your-faction stations and ships. Suspicion slowly dissipates once away from other vessels. (docked ships don't generate suspicion) (other cloaked/jammed ships do)
-As a vessel builds suspicion, the IFF shows up in the nav menu, with a random range that approaches the actual range as time increases. If a player selects it, or enough time passes, the IFF shows up in the environment around where you are, jittering around your location. The jittering slowly decreases in size until max suspicion, where the beacon is at your actual location. At that point you are no longer jammed (though you may still be cloaked).
-Getting shot (even if shielded and with enough ECM) builds suspicion.
-Jammers consume 30e/mass and cloakers 100e/mass
-Jammers and cloakers pull their energy from capacitors, which are power tanks linked to any of the cloakers/jammers in the group. Capacitor capacity increases linearly with the block count of the group. A cloaker/jammer has a small amount of capacitance.
-Capacitor charge rate starts out at a fraction of the discharge rate of the cloaker/jammer group, and then gradually increases to the discharge rate when you start jamming/cloaking. In other words, you need to have a large capacitor to take up the slack before you reach equilbirum
-Capacitors completely discharge when you deactivate the group.

 

[1adog1]

I personally like the current system. But then again it did take me quite a bit of time to figure out how it worked and even longer to develop a small ship that could completely cloak and jam at the same time indefinately. If anyone's curious on how to do it currently, here's a post I made a little while ago on the subject: http://starmadedock.net/threads/creating-completely-cloaked-ships.838/

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I think the main problem with the current system for cloaking is actually that efficient power reactors require ridiculous designs that make stealth ships long, spindly, and ugly (bare systems everywhere. About the prettiest one I've seen, made by ApexAurajin I think, only had basic hull covering and a simple bridge as the only interior space.) and that it's a mass-based system of power use relying on a box-size system of power generation; that's just never going to work quite right since balancing it for one size will unbalance the others due to the difference in scaling.
Plus, the inability to perma-cloak with capitals due to the soft cap really limits cloaking abilities (no Romulan Warbirds).

Cloak should be more viable energywise, but at a greater cost to the ship, such as shields (in Star Trek, shields are down while cloaked and for a bit after decloak, making it something you can't just rely on for fights) and being partially visible when hit (again in Star Trek, the cloak doesn't keep you fully invisible while under fire, making weapon sweeps at an area a cloaked ship just left in viable and adds to the penalty of being unshielded).

Jamming I think is nearly fine currently, except that turrets need to be able to at least somewhat work against it or there will be balance issues due to the all-or-nothing nature of it vs. turrets (maybe have some sensor blocks that can resist jamming per-ship and per-turret, so that the bigger turrets at least will still function against a jamming fighter, and have turrets still fire on a jamming but uncloaked ship for a bit, just not directly at the core).