Stealth

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    I'm sure someone has probably mentioned this before but i cannot find it for myself but i think that stealth is too hard a matter to accomplish. I wanna be able to cloak and/or jam radars but the power needed is normally to great. I understand you need to make it balanced so that you cant just plonk a cloaker on a ship like the Damocles but a little balncing would help :)
     
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    I also concur that the stealth system seems right at this point. It might be a bit hard to manage stealth and jamming, but that fits with most space genre ships I\'ve seen in my life: ships with stealth functionality tend to be specialised for that stealth functionality, at the expense of other things, unless you are brilliant like the Klingons and have stealthy ships that are terrifyingly effective in a straight-up fight, due to psychological manipulation of their enemy in hailing and high-impact (although often low damage, just causing shaking of the ship) shots to disorient the enemy.

    This might not apply as much to Starmade, but to be honest, this is more of a balancing issue anyway, and probably it\'s too early to consider, since it\'s still in the \'adding new things\' phase of development.
     
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    The only thing that might need adjustment is allowing hull to be ignored by the block coverage of jammers. This way a stealth ship can have a covering and not look like an uglyass pile of blocks floating in space. Actual stealth planes in the real world look very sleek and streamlined. We need hull in Starmade to get the same effect.
     
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    Real world stealth vessels are Jammer ships, they do not cloak from visual moniters. So you can easily have a nice looking Jammer ship that cannot cloak.
     
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    When you said Kilngons you reminded me of the new Star Trek movie. For some reason I thought of the part when the Enterprise get knocked out of warp! Sooooooo funny. (sorry if you havent seen it yet).
     
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    The current power-gen costs for cloaking seem quite balanced to me (a pilot who depends on cloaking and jamming).

    Cloaking costs 100 energy per second per block, and jamming is 50 energy per second per block, so in total 150/second/block. In order to produce this much power, it is essential to use the dimension bonus. This can be achieved by long lines, 3d crosses, or combinations thereof. To keep down size you can use multiples of these, but a single larger line or cross will be more efficient.

    These dimension bonuses, however, cap at approximately 1 million regen, meaning that it is impossible for capital ships to cloak indefinitely, and difficult for them to cloak for a long period of time. On small ships, well-built reactors as mentioned above will give enough excess energy for thrusters (Which also are more efficient in lines or crosses, FYI), weapons, shields, and the cloaking energy for said systems.

    Weapons can be optimised for greater DPS by using many small arrays, but these will have less range and slower projectile speed. Shields are generally limited (This is good, because cloaking and jamming is, in itself, a defensive system), meaning ships are very fragile in prolonged combat.

    Anyway, the point of all this text is that the cloaking system works well (I just pointed out the varying things that let one build effective cloaking ships), that it is, indeed, balanced to prevent cloaked capitals, and that the energy cost acceptably forces cloaked ships to be fragile and well-designed, usually with no hull or aesthetic blocks.

    EDIT: I was missing a full stop. :(
     
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    Another possible solution to the same problem would simply be to alter the mass of hull blocks, which has been suggested elsewhere and would buff ships across the board, allowing a meaningful decision about which type of hull to use in a build, one which is based upon agility (less mass =faster turning, easier to reach high thrust:mass ratios) as well as price and armour value. Lowering the mass would also decrease the cost to cloak hull blocks (providing the cloaking calculation is actually based upon mass, rather than # of blocks), but still leave some small cost, discouraging players from building huge sacrificial plates of hull for no additional cost.
     
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    I, for one, think that the current stealth system only needs one thing - making it possible to shoot while cloaked. It is already close to impossible to make a ship capable of:

    1.Cloaking

    2.Jamming

    3.Flying

    4.Shooting

    at the same time, so no need in miking it completely impossible. Furthermore, those ships will still be possible to kill by looking where the projectiles come from.
     
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    This would only be good for ships made to harass ships many times smaller than itself as using 1+2+3 at the same time costs more than 150e/s per block. The amount of AMC to be able to fire continuously under such a small amount of remaining e/s could only damage unshielded ships, very small ships normally used by very new players, and people outside of their ships.
     
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    Well you can make ships which can do everything and (could without this stupid limit) sustain cloaked, sadly it does not make sense to build ships with more than 500K energy regeneration which extremely limits them in their possibilities.

    Starmade really needs an more efficient power storage since the storage mass ratio would need to be 3000to cloak the block itself and an other block for 10 seconds which would be ridiculous for weapon sytems...


    By using Intelligent Design you can even make them look nice and kick ass



    By the way dont you dare to copy my design
     
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    Yeah if you keep it small anything over 1500 mass is unmamagible as I have found out. And use black hull to get around cloaking until you can afford it because at about 380m away from a 2000 mass ship I could barely see it (only thing I could see was the parts I hadn\'t completed yet and you could still see the power blocks)

    Radar jamming is very expensive though, forum post on radar jamming - http://star-made.org/content/radar-jammer-power-requirements-nerf-and-other-things
     
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    Stealth has a high entry barrier as only players who really know how the power systems work can use it. If it was to easy than every ship would be able to cloak and/or jam and that would just be a mess. It\'s also quite possible to make nice looking stealth ships





    http://star-made.org/content/ucc-stealth-tech
     
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    All the same, I think the bar should be lowered. The best way to do that would be to have hull ignored by the power requirements for stealth functions. You still need to know how to rig a power core correctly, but now you can use something other than shields to protect your ship.
     
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    Really, you only need both cloaking and jamming if you want to remain completely undetectable. Most stealth combat ships I make only use cloaking since it frees up a lot of power. Even if someone sees your on their navcom they can\'t really do anything about it if you\'re cloaked; aside from firing wildly into space.

    Other things I\'ve found useful in stealth ships:

    You don\'t have to worry about AMC energy usage; the cloak AND the energy it uses is turned off as soon as your fire.

    Thrusters get a connection bonus and a second bonus for each new block getting a new XYZ dimension. Big blocks of engines can work, but you can get a better thruster:mass ratio by rearranging your thrusters a bit.

    Lag can cause you to randomly decloak unless you have enough spare energy generated.
     
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    I don\'t think we\'ll get a cloak ignores shields option because that removes the only thing that is capable of countering a cloaked ship, the powerdrain beam. I believe the powerdrain beam is in the game as a counter to cloaking ships. Stealth ships will always have exposed powercores and powerdrain beams only work on exposed power. I\'m eventually going to make a stealth hunter ship that uses powerdrain beams.

    Hopefully the next update has a fix for the lag-decloak issue, at least that\'s what I got from reading the patch notes on the pre-release.
     
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    If you don\'t jam you have your diamond still. It is not firing wildly, any good pilot will fire at your diamond, your core.
     

    Koloss_Meshuggah

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    I\'d say jamming is more important than cloaking in my case at least. I have a not-so-good computer and keep the veiw distence as low as posible. Whenever I run across an Isanth it is effectivly cloaked up to 100m. All I do is fire at the center of the red square until it says \"overheating\", seems to do the job.
     
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    A few things i have to say on the topic of stealth ships:

    1. A ship that can cloak, jam, fight and fly all at the same time would be ridiculously over powered, imagine being able to engage with another ship, then cloak and jam, fly around behind the ship your fighting, uncloak, shoot at it until the ship turns around, then cloak and go behind it again. There would simply be no stopping a ship with this kind of system.

    2. The whole stealth system is completely fine as it is, most of the people complaining about how difficult it is are noobs and want to leap straight into the advanced stuff within minutes of first playing.

    3. Theres not a lot of point in cloaking, unless you want to spy on someone elses base, but most of the fighting that happens on normal servers is Pirate VS Players (the exception being PvP, but thats normally advanced players), and pirate stations are easy to predict.

    4. Jamming is much better in combat, because it uses less power, you can still shoot, and as long as you stay out of the other ships field of view, your still un-detectable.
     
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    Could some one please put up a link for a good small cloaking/jamming ship that has decent speed and guns also shields?