Astria Tiphareth
Caldari
24th Imperial Crusade
   |
Posted - 2008.10.27 12:47:00 -
[1]
Cloaking does not need any more drawbacks. It has plenty already. It does not need fuel, it does not need cap usage, it does not need heat. Cloaks are the counter to probes.
First, ask yourself the question 'why do I care about this person who is cloaked?'. If your goal is to kill some mission-runner in your 0.0 space, work harder on your gatecamps. If your concern is a cloaked ship interrupting ratting or mining, then stop ratting and mining without escort. If you're wishing to interdict the intel abilities of your enemy, well then we're into tactics - how about showing them false intel which will make them rely less on their scouts?
Secondly, the real core of the issue about cloaking is that it's an all-or-nothing endeavour. Probes find you unless you're cloaked. End of story. So, what could be reasonably entertained is a proper rebalance to both probing and cloaking such that probes don't find you in seconds, cloaks don't render you totally immune to probes, but rather we have a continuum of modules and skills.
For example, a new skill Signature Stealthing or somesuch - cloaks work just the way they do now, but depending on your level in the above skill, you may or may not be detectable to someone who has trained another new skill Recon Probing, which determines their ability to analyse probe data and penetrate cloaks. After that, it's just balancing to determine who has the favourable outcome and precisely how detection is fashioned - could be chance-based, could be a linear scale, etc.
I'd personally want it such that if I've fitted T2 cloak of invisibility improved plus (remember I'm proposing more new cloaks and perhaps even probes, beyond the two we have now) and trained Stealthing to 5, I should be just as impossible to find now except to a dedicated hunter who has equally trained Recon Probing to 5, fitted T2 gear etc. You could even up the ante by giving the ships intended for recon work a bonus to stealth, and give some ship, perhaps even the recon ships themselves, a bonus to probing cloaked ships. This would give us dedicated subs & sub-hunters, and a more suitable range of options for both sides to play with.
Given the chance, I'd probably take the entire thing further and have scanners as well as probes and a proper intel gathering system instead of 'look at local, maybe drop a probe or two', but that's me.
___
My views may not represent those of my corporation, which is why I never get invited to those diplomatic parties...
Environmental Effects
|