Cloaker feature/nerf/adjustment thread

[idontknow]

I didn't want to start it in the features or bug forum as this would imply any prejudice

Considering recent events there has been some discussion about the capabilities of cloakers and how useful/powerful/annoying they are.

In short, there are some who believe that cloakers are a pain in... you know. I tend to agree. I don't think even a big cloaker squad is that powerful as they get hurt easily, but they are really hard to kill if they're cloaked.

Here are my two cent regarding what could be done to deal with this kind of issue:

Add a counter on cloaked ships which will force them to uncloak when it reaches ten. Only reppers can active it. In other words: Let 10 repper moves uncloak a ship. If it was 5 you would only need one repair ship which might not be too fair, but with 10 you can be relatively sure that one cloaked ship is the primary target of a sizeable fleet. Thus, it would not be down to chance by having 5-10 ships doing pickups for a tick or two but it would be more of a strategic decision to be made ('If we want to have good chances against this cloaker, we will sacrifice the repping power of two of our ships for this tick'). The cloaker could use his moves to either jump out our cloak again so it wouldn't be a definite kill either.

The benefit would be that this would not question the found balance of pickup-percentages or strength of certain ships. Additionally, it could upgrade the value of repair ships.

One alternative might be to reduce the fighting ability (speed?) when being cloaked. But this would also mean that they could be more easily killed in any situation - which would certainly reduce the popularity of cloakers and weaken them significantly.

[idontknow]

Jhyphi just added the problem of how reppers could put these counters on cloakers without seeing them. An interesting question, indeed.

Maybe make it 6 counters(so you need more than one repper and one tick) and do it randomly if a cloaker is in the sector?
Maybe make it 4-5 counters and give the repper a percentage of decloaking a ship (10% lvl 1 up to 75% or so as a carrier?)

[Jhyphi]

I'm still unsure how reppers can put counters on without auto-detection.

Though, I do like the part about carriers having higher ability to decloak a ship given that the carrier lost some of it's usefulness with AP.


Overall, I think cloakers need to be killed more easily. I DON'T think it would make them more easily to kill in any situation if they're weaker when cloaked. Active cloakers are already unkillable in fleet battles. No one is sitting around doing pickups.

Here are my suggestions. Do one of the following.
1) Make cloakers weaker always (compared to fighters, considering no-decloak hypering is really powerful).
2) Make cloakers 30%(?) weaker attack+defense when cloaked and/or if they were cloaked at any point that turn.
3) Revert to decloak-hypers (not ideal as current way is interesting feature).
4) More pickup attacks - maybe up % of free + triple and/or even add another pickup attack which is a normal attack which is much more frequent (so it's like attacking normally with uncloaked ships - the using 1 move for normal attack balances it).
5) (((what idontknow suggested with reppers)))

It took 2 ticks of pickups to kill leafblower and 1.5 ticks didn't do it for David with our full fleet here. Seems a bit excessive that a cloaked ship is essentially unkillable even in enemy fleet for over 1 tick and then can hyper away while still cloaked = no chasing.

I personally like #2 or #4 in my list.

[LoB]

And yet the top 15 has no cloakers. Cloakers are already weaker, cloaker legion is the weakest of 3 active legions. Why do you have to be able to kill a ship even with full fleet? If it's cloaked it can't do much anyway.

If any of these suggestions is implemented then cloakers need to become stronger. Like more weapons perhaps.

Alternatively I think fighters need to be stronger significantly, rather than marginally.

Another alternative to destroy cloakers, but still keep some element of surprise in them. When you pick up an attack but decide not to use it, you can defer it to a set tick up to 8 ticks in advance. In that tick your first pickup as the attack you defered (free attacks still take up a turn, so you can't stack on them, and this also puts a limit of maximum 5 attacks defered.)

[Demolition]

I think there is a lot easier answer to be honest with you. Force cloakers to decloak to do pickups or attack. This way they cant sit in a sector with an enemy fleet and just do pickups to get points. If they want points they need to be with their fleet. The cloaking feature should be for scouting purposes and as an extra escape mechanism and later on when we start advertising as a legion setup with cloakers + reppers being your main legion.

[Jhyphi]

I disagree. The problem is not points gained, for which it is fine or maybe not good enough according to LoB.

The problem is that a cloaked ship is nearly unkillable. We had the entire tib fleet doing pickups for 1.5 turns and couldn't kill a single offline cloaked ship. And the time before that required 2 full turns of pickups to kill 1 cloaked ship.

[Demolition]

To be honest I am not sure why you would waste that much time for 1 cloaker, there are far better point options in the game to have your legion work on.

[Jhyphi]

The point is that not being able to kill a single cloaker with an entire fleet is a problem.

Cloaking should be a perk for being active in a fight or for quick scouting (quick in/out at 5 min hyper window). It shouldn't be an easy way to avoid being killed while inactive by yourself in enemy fleets.

[Jhyphi]

That actually made me think of another alternative.

****If there are no enemies in sector, the very first free/triple shot decloaks the ship.****

Think of it as, if enemy fleet is not in a ship battle, then everyone will immediately focus their attention on a detected cloaker = not hidden.

[idontknow]

To be honest I am not sure why you would waste that much time for 1 cloaker, there are far better point options in the game to have your legion work on.

Because in the current situation a cloaker fleet is basically able to dominate any beta if it's active and organised. If you cannot realistically kill a single cloaked ship, but have a large enough amount of them in one place, a EoT/SoT de-cloaking, shoot, cloaking pattern would be a very lame but very successful way to get rid of (damaged) enemy ships with marginal risk involved.