Stealth Armor: Unbalanced

[Aub]

quote:

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Originally posted by Taqwus:
Hm. Are cloaked ships still prohibited from sweeping?

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Here is a different question: what occurs first, sweeping or combat? If I send a bunch of suicidal sweepers through a warp point, will they sweep before they get destroyed by the guarding ships?

IF the asnwer is "yes" then by sacrificing some sweepers first I can easily sneak a cloaked task force through a mined warp point (and then it can travel undetected and pick lightly defended tragets).

If the sweepers are destroyed before they sweep then the combination of some mines plus ships is very effective at stiopping a cloaked invasion.

[Rollo]

The answer is yes.

Mines are encountered (and swept) before combat. Any ships that survive the minefield will then be engaged by the defenders.

Rollo

[Master Belisarius]

"BUT: Stealth Armor is extremely cheap (and you gat it along with the regular Armor and other benefits), and once you get it you can do stealth attacks, which gives you a huge advantage. Counter-measures? They are rather expensive..."

The counter-measures in the early game, is very cheappy: Mines. I always go for stealth armor and mines in the early game.

[bearclaw]

Personally, I think that the whole issue of mines, cloak, sensors, and sight is off and should be adjusted. IMO, there is the potential for a massive range of different cloaks suspible to different sensors. As it stands, all the sensor types are identical. The only difference will be how someone chooses to research them. If each sensor type had it's own advantage over the others, and the research cost wasn't so high, I think that would add much more to the game.

Example: The Amorkrie have developed Reflective Hull (EM cloak), while the Drushock have developed Gravitic Displacers (Gravitic cloak). Meanwhile, the Terrans, in the middle, have researched Gravitic Sensors because of an ongoing Arms buildup with the Drushock while all the time, unaware of the Amorkrie presence.

[Phoenix-D]

That can be modded in..

Phoenix-D

[Skulky]

Totally agree with bearclaw. Then you could build all inclusive cloak ships that woudl be a must-have in any late game fleets but could also have a balanced early game as the level 1 or maybe even 2 of all cloaks (tehre woudl be more now) would be detectable by any detector. Then as more advances are made you would be able to detect more cloaks. A short reange (2 or 1 square detector that is cheap) would allow early counter to stealth armor without losing the cost.

[Mark Walton]

I agree with Bearclaw - actually I have been testing this, because I wanted to change the way cloaks work. To my mind, Psychic scanners should not be blocked except by psi-shields.
One thing, if you have multiple cloaking components on a ship, hitting the "cloak" order activates all of them at once, so it is possible to seperate out each type of cloaking into a seperate component and combine, mix&match as required.