Dawn Falcon wrote:Hmm... shining a "light" on an the enemy, blinding it, might be a micromanagement hell thing,
That's the point I brought up. If the system(s) is small and easy to use they will be deployed on lots of ships and used everywhere. This would bring about the micromanagapocalypse you (and I) fear. However, if the system(s) is large and has lots of restrictions then it may not have enough value except in very limited circumstances. We would need to tread on a very narrow path to avoid both pitfalls.
but how about a "remote cloak" ("shadow maker") module which affected friendly units? It'd be a version of your Battle Cloak, Cralis, bigger and with a lower tactical turn limit.
The ability to cloak other units is already on the futuretech list. It would only be able to cloak smaller units (at first), but I envisioned it being used to protect SRW units or squadrons. Using the battlecloak is an interesting idea (that I hadn't considered yet), and actually makes more sense...
Whitecold wrote:I still feel turn based solutions give you the worst of both worlds. All the record keeping without any of the randomness. Detect on rolling a 1 is much neater than the cloak works for 10 turns. You don't need to keep track of all the previous results, just which units have been detected.
These two concepts are not mutually exclusive. The idea behind earlier versions of CLK having a limited time would be an energy issue whether because the unit runs out of power or reaches a critical point in holding in emissions that it threatens to overload and damage the unit.
Also, any cloak only has a finite efficiency. Any cloak that is 'turned on' is much easier to defeat if you tracked them beforehand, so I'd very much like to encourage cloaks being always on, and not have to worry when exactly to turn them on, and what the effect is if you turn on cloaks when already detected. I'd keep it as 'detected units stay detected, until they move out of range'
For strategic movement you have a good point. Especially because we abstract movement, such a cloak would be much easier to use effectively if you didn't have to worry about when to turn it on or off.
The battle cloak is a little different imho. This is where the real cat and mouse gameplay will occur. The rules for CLK already address the P detection issue. But if cloaks have a time limit and we are using variable detection chances then
when you turn on your cloak couldbe very important.
I am not very fond of the idea of a 'friendly' remote cloak. It seems to make cloaking too much like an easy add on. I feel for cloaking one should take a holistic approach: If a ship is designed to cloak, that should be its primary design consideration, everything else comes afterwards.
Maybe cloak should not be a system; one could implement it as a hull type instead. This would naturally allow increasing cost for large ships, as hulls cost per HS, and it would also naturally allow for a cap on size. Fast hulls only unlock 1 EL after regular variants; cloak hulls could come some EL later.
It has been suggested to change Stealth Tuners into a hull type. And it does make sense. CLK creates a field around the whole unit and it's DF so it makes more sense as a system like ? or ?d. But it is something that I will consider carefully.
I think the short duration obfuscation device is much better handled by EDM, or some other decoys/flares/jamming system.
An internal EDM launcher could provide a defense buff limited by ammo available, and to my knowledge nothing fundamentally prohibits such a system.
At the power levels we are talking about, and given that it has to place the whole ship into a reflective bubble, I'm not sure a munition or even a small craft could do this at any SL we would consider reasonable.
Another note on Jammers, I personally would not prohibit targeting of other units but the jammer, but simply apply a targeting malus to them. -2 to hit strongly encourages to take out the jammer first, but if you absolutely decide you need to take out a ship, you still can. Also, SRW are not suddenly turned useless if the jamming ship is out of SRW range, but other enemies are not, which I feel would be way too strong against SRW ships, especially since they are less likely to mount datalink.
All good points to consider.
Also, what is the lore explanation for LOD reducing sensor ranges? I am just curious as it runs pretty much contrary to my intuition of how sensors, fields and noise interact.
All energy that reaches the sensors passes through the DF first. The technical explanation for LOD includes distortions in the DF that serve to reduce the emissions going out of the DF. Those same distortions will also affect energy coming into the DF. It is this distortion and attenuation that causes sensor effectiveness to drop while using LOD.
A very similar affect occurs with detuning