The Cloaking Minister and Minesweepers

[Slick]

The minister would decloak if a cloaked ship were told to either move onto a KNOWN (automatically tagged minefield due to running into mines there) or TAGGED (manually created minefield tag). The decloak would occur sometime between the "end turn" and the minesweeper moving into the marked sector. The replay log is unreliable so I don't think there is any way to know exactly when the ship decloaks. But it doesn't matter since in simultaneous turns, if the defender can't see the cloaked ship before he hits "end turn" there isn't anything he could have done about a mid-turn decloaking.

Slick.

[Fyron]

So it decloaks whenever it is going to move into a known minefield, regardless of whether there are mines there or not?

[Captain Kwok]

Imperator Fyron said:
So it decloaks whenever it is going to move into a known minefield, regardless of whether there are mines there or not?

Yep, just like you would have known if you read the first post in the thread. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img]

Anyway, more in-game tests are needed to confirm the reliability of this move. If it does prove workable, I wonder what other moves can be thought up?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Knight to Queen 4!

[Mephisto]

I'm with Narf.

[geoschmo]

Ok, I've run some tests of my own now. One thing does concern me a little bit about this.

In every test I have run, if the ship clears a minefield it ends up decloaked at the end of the turn. Also the defending player gets a message that their minefield was swept. (When did that get changed by the way? I thought you didn't get a message unless the sweeping ship took damage?) So on these two points it seems not so bad. I had a PM report that someone ran some tests and the sweeping ship wasn't always decloaked at the end of the turn, but I can't confirm that. In every test I ran they were decloaked. Even if they had more orders left to run.

Also in every test I ran the sweepers did not decloak for UNKOWN minefields and were destroyed. They only decloaked for minefields that had been marked as minefields, either manually or by a ship hitting it on the previous turn.

However, what concerns me is that apparently if you manually mark a sector with a tagged minefield, your sweeper will not decloak unless there are actually mines there. So this would be a way to surreptitiously tell if someone does not have a sector mined. If it is mined your ship will be detected and sweep the mines, but if there are no mines it will stay cloaked.

This is not as serious as it could be, but it is a little gamey. Perhaps it's really not that much different then just sending a cheap cloaked ship into a sector to see if it goes boom. However, I am loathe to even suggest banning it in a game because it would be next to impossible to detect. I would prefer it just become one of those little quirks that becomes common knowledge and everybody deals with.

I suspect that the reports I got about the sweeper not decloaking in every case were instances where there were no actual mines present.

[geoschmo]

Yeah, you misunderstood him Fyron. If it were uncloaking for UNKNOWN minefields then I would totally agree with you that would be a nasty bug expolit. But that's not what's happening according to his description.