Ok… so i know some people wanted this, so we could have selected special modules which could fire when the camouflage shield was active. And so… I’ve coded support for it, and tested it, and all is great.
But…
The code that controls when to camouflage, is pretty simplistic and turns out to be darned useless if you want to engage the enemy whilst all hidden. basically it scans around the ship to see if there are any viable targets. If there are any, it re-materializes! unless. it is currently following a retreat order, or it’s hull is at 25% or less…
Now coding new orders that only apply to being camouflaged is a bit of a pain, so I was wondering about just improving the default behavior.
I thought that the ships could ignore enemy fighters for the purposes of forcing a dematerialization, as they are not worth it.
I also thought that if a ship had more than 20% of it’s weapons able to fire when camouflaged, it would never re-materialize until it ran out of power.
So, the ship now can fire when camo’ed, but if any ship enters in range, it turns camo offline to shot?
ouch…
Then the ship will be begin able to shot at the enemies when camo is online, it will not rematerialize when fighters enter in range and also, if it has most of its weapons online, it will not rematerialize until power goes down…
okay, and when it loses all weapons it will rematerialize? isn’t that a bit kamikaze?
I mean, if you dont have weapons, you might want to get the hell out of there as fast and secure as possible, right?
Anyways, if you can code what you said above, i’m pretty sure that most of players would happily start using Camouflage modules again, shotting when camo’ed is something that i’ve always wanted ^^
So if i understand what your saying, when you have a ship that is cloaked, which is scanning for targets (cruisers and frigates), one of the following will happen:
If your ship has more than 20% of its weapon loadout that can shoot while cloaked, it will not drop the cloak until it ran out of power. (all the while sniping from the shadows, fully cloaked !)
or
If you ship has less than 20% of its weapon loadout that can shoot while cloaked, it will drop the cloak and rain fire on the intended target(s).
else
This behaviour will be superseded if the ship is following a retreat order or the hull integrity is less than 25%
To me that that sounds rather fantastic
(Especially as it would make the second string weapons more useful . .)
I like the logic that I’m seeing unspooling here … not enough to make the camouflage module a horrible powerhouse, but just enough improvement to make it useful for something other than abusing hull bonuses (I know this was the primary use for it awhile back).
May I assume that it will be possible to mod weapons with the same “fire under cloak” capability?
Let me clarify my plans a bit, because I think i haven’t explained them well:
Ships will entirely ignore fighters for the purposes of making any camoflage decisions. In other words, no ship ever re-materializes just to engage fighters.
Ships with less than 20% of their weapons able to fire when camoflaged will behave as before which means:
[]They hide whenever possible (when power is available)
[]They rematerialize if there are enemy ships (not fighters) in range UNLESS they are on 25% or less hull or they are retreating.
Ships that do have more than 20% of weapons that can fire when camoflaged will never rematerialize, unless the camoflage shield is low on power.
Of course there are minor problems here. Ships will be open to fighter swarms they can’t fight against when hidden, but hopefully that’s not too effective vs the camoflage anyway. It will encourage the development of all-or-nothing ships, ie: hidden stealth ships are likely to be designed with 100% fire-while-camoflaged weaponry.
Thoughts?
How about the simplest solution, no re-materialize and no smart AI? Just flash between hidden and reveal every 3 seconds regardless of situation? This will automatically force guns to only fire each time it gets out of cloak, and naturally syncs. I choose 3 seconds specifically because that’s the cool-down time for cruiser plasma.
The only think I can think of that’s better is to actually cloak when they are being targeted.
Rush ships will never want to waste money on a cloak anyway. Cloak is super expensive and just dump in another engine is better even with perfect cloak when targeted AI. Cloaking might work in long range fights for dodging each others plasmas, that’s about it.
Throw a modded version on a fighter hull, add torpedos, win? Of course it would then be quite slow, but stealth bombers could be really interesting…
If you deploy these cammo changes in the next patch, what weapons will be “steatlhable”? Do you have any kind of system, say only laser weapons, or only blaster and plasma weapons, ect?
It probably won’t work under the current vanilla, see how terrible camouflage and repairs are in preventing damage, but it is promising for modding purposes.
Although I do wonder how multiple holograph will play out, like say I have 7 holograms and 1 cruiser laser per ship just for lols. Probably just gonna get bypassed by the rescuer tag like armor tanks.
Actually, that brings up a thought. Will the holographic projector function if the ship is cloaked? Or does it get shut down with the rest of the normal guns?
That was the main reason of my last comment sir
If yes, it would be like “oh noes, our target dissapeared!.. ohh look! there it is!!!.. wait… what the f…???”
That was kind of my thinking. I like the idea of a ship that essentially hides behind an image of itself that draws the fire just long enough for the repair system to make some headway. And I’m sure that if Cliff decides that’s not what he would like for the Outcasts, it will take about 4.2 seconds for someone to add it to their own modding efforts.
I like the idea of having the Holoprojector function while the host vessel is cloaked. It would seem to make it much more useful, especially if the Holoprojector and Cloaking Device tried to time things so that they would become active in roughly the same period of time. Your real ships would be trying to avoid getting hit for a while by cloaking, and the holoprojector would provide a more tempting target (probably) for enemy ships to fire on. The interaction of the two modules would (in my opinion) work together to make both more attractive. This could also work if holoprojectors on other ships in your fleet were set up to prefer to generate images while friendly ships were cloaked.
As it stands right now, I don’t usually want to add cloaking devices to my ships because it encourages enemy ships to fire on the portion of my fleet that isn’t cloaked, which concentrates enemy fire temporarily, and it also reduces my firepower for a little while. Having the holoprojector module work while the cloaking device is active solves the problem of encouraging fire concentration by the enemy fleet, since I’m not reducing the total number of available targets for the enemy ships.
Having holoprojectors non-functional while cloaked also creates a bit of a problem when it comes to making a decision of whether or not to cloak if you put a cloaking device on the same ship you put a holoprojector on, since the game would then need to consider whether cloaking to allow the ship to repair itself somewhat is better for the fleet than staying uncloaked until the holoprojector finishes firing (or at least I would want the game to consider that). It is also a bit of a trap, if it isn’t immediately clear that holoprojectors will not work when a cloaking device on the same ship is active, since at first glance they would seem to work well together.
Also, one question about cloaking devices:
Aside from the health bonus, is there any advantage to having multiple cloaking devices on a single ship, i.e. will the ship spend more time cloaked as compared to a ship with a single cloaking device, or be harder to hit while cloaked than a ship with a single cloaking device?
Well, i dont really know what will writte cliff in the backstory/description of the outcasts, but…
Special missile systems that might look like standard ones but will give a little surprise to the enemy…
Holographic projector as distraction…
Firing when camouflaged…
Fast ships…
I think that the outcasts have everything what they need to become the perfect ambush-lovers of the universe. A race that likes to fight the enemy by using strategies full of distractions, hide&seek and more than anything deadly traps… the universal cheaters, that would be something new and interesting ^^
