[dumbluck]

Originally posted by dumbluck:
Cloaking that is percentage based instead of level based. That way, you never really know if your ship slipped past his sensor grid until his fleet pounces on it...

To elaborate:
Cloaking becomes a new ability tag "% chance to remain undetected", one for each type of cloaking (i.e. Active, Passive, Psychic, etc). It is, of coarse, a value. Cloaking components/sectors/systems have a positive value, cloak defeating sensors have a negative value. These values should NOT be cumulative (or better yet, make that moddable in settings.txt with a simple true/false line).

The basic sensor ability (before any research) is just the cloaking tag attatched to the hull size. It should probably be about -50% (or 50% chance to detect normal ships). Colonies get an inate sensor rating of about -25% chance to remain undetected. That should be moddable in settings.txt as well. The values, of coarse, aren't set in stone....

If you wanted to get really elaborate, you could have seperate tags for "% chance to remain undetected" and "% chance to detect". Then you could make it so that (for example) the cloaking values don't stack, but the sensor values DO stack. (which IMO would be unbalancing, unless the sensors didn't have a high value...) I think it would also be kinda neat if there were two kinds of sensor tags, System wide, and sector wide. Then you could make all sorts of interesting cominations! (System wide sensors having a lower max ability than Sector specific sensors comes to mind...)

Now comes my favorite part. A check is made each turn to see if your ship is detected using the following formula:

A - B = C
where:
A = Highest available cloaking %
B = Highest available sensor %
C = % chance of detection.

As an example, we'll use my numbers above. An uncloaked ship enters a system in which you have a single colony. 0%(cloak)-25%(colony sensor)=25% chance that you will detect the ship THIS TURN. The game does a quick random number generation, and determines whether or not the ship is detected. Next turn, assuming that the ship is still in system, the game goes thru the whole process again.

That way, just because you slipped past the sensors Last turn, they might detect you this turn. The opposite is true, as well; just because you detected that star destroyer as it entered your system this turn, that doesn't mean that you will be able to detect it next turn!!! Even better would be to make the turns between sensor checks moddable, too. Yet another line added to settings.txt....

You could also mod a highly negative valued sector % chance to remain undetected tag onto Warppoints, if you wanted. That way, you see the cloaked ship enter the system (since it activated the WP, which would probably be notice). But as soon as it moves away from the warppoint ... I hope you had sensors researched...

I provided a few examples of how versitile such a cloaking model would be. Hopefully, Aaron is convinced now. (yes, I know he probably will never see this thread...)

[ January 27, 2003, 15:06: Message edited by: dumbluck ]