Stealth Armor: Unbalanced

Suicide Junkie · #1 December 8th, 2001, 03:34 AM

Countermeasures for stealth armor are actually quite cheap. One spysat per system is not expensive to build, and is free maintenance-wise.

As long as you research the first level in some sensor tech, defending against stealth armor is free.

Aub · #2 December 8th, 2001, 04:07 AM

quote:
Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
As long as you research the first level in some sensor tech, defending against stealth armor is free.

Yes, but researching it is more expensive than the armor itself. And the tech you'd research is not otehrwise an obvious choice (e.g. gravitic sensors). Plus, the guys who puts Stealth Armor on his ships does not lose anything - I'd put it on my ships even if it didn't have the stealth ability, because of it's other advantages!

Please gat me right, I don't think Stealth Armor is a game breaker

I'm simply saying it's unbalancing... other strategies don't hold against it, you HAVE to do it...

Baron Munchausen · #3 December 8th, 2001, 06:52 AM

Advanced Miltary Science, levels 3-6, gives Hyper-optics. The very FIRST level of this will defeat stealth armor. Yes, it costs a bit more in research terms but remember some of the 'special' techs like Psychic and Temporal also get sensors free with their racial tech trees. So it's not such a big deal. Personally, I think it makes the game more realistic. It's actually quite difficult to see a tiny little ship in the vastness of space. Standard 'vision' (ability to detect ships) really ought to be changed to have limited range instead of being 'all or nothing' over a whole system. Then stealth armor would just let you get closer before being seen.

Taqwus · #4 December 8th, 2001, 07:47 AM

Hm. Are cloaked ships still prohibited from sweeping?

MegaTrain · #5 December 8th, 2001, 08:42 PM

I think in the Gold release they've fixed it so when a cloaked minesweeper enters a mine field, it automatically decloaks to sweep.

Well, that's better than just being killed by the minefield, but it does expose you to attacks by other enemy in the sector.

Mysterial · #6 December 8th, 2001, 10:41 PM

quote:
Originally posted by MegaTrain:
I think in the Gold release they've fixed it so when a cloaked minesweeper enters a mine field, it automatically decloaks to sweep.

According to the history file, it only does that with known minefields. If you don't know about it your minesweeper(s) still get blown away.

About Stealth Armor: I don't agree about its cloaking ability, but I agree that there really isn't a way to counter the 5-15% to-hit bonus it gives.

Mark Walton · #7 December 9th, 2001, 12:22 AM

Personally I think all cloaking devices ought to give a to-be-hit penalty if there is a shortfall in the scanner tech.

So a target ship with level 4 cloak being fired on by a ship with level 2 scanners would get 2x the bonus.

The bonus should be scalable in settings.txt (say 5% default)