Cloaker feature/nerf/adjustment thread

[whykt]

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.

That cloaker in question was a level 5 in high damage, so definitely worth killing. When else is there a time to kill active experienced cloakers?

Fleet to fleet fights where the cloaker soaks to red shields and cloaks? As you just did in Ajaxus. Why waste 2 turns in a random sector killing one. Your much better finding a vacant hw as the points there are guaranteed for pretty much everyone vs "Oh I hope I get an attack pickup, please please please gimmie an attack pickup *draws a HMR on full HP*"

Valdano got very unlucky and we got very lucky, something like that isn't likely to happen again in a normal battle. Who was the random sector person - leafblower? Definitely not a waste when he's a high combat, highly active cloaker. Infact, when there is a good chance to kill a cloaker, it should always be taken because there won't be another chance until the player makes another mistake.

[Demolition]

you have nothing to do but sit and wait for death

If you know they are there, and you do not move the blob, you ask for that death and the loss of your chance at winning the round. An all cloaker legion at present can not go into an enemy HW and bomb, that is the tradeoff they made with their choice. You could move you blob rather then sit there and die. You could a) go home or b) go to their hw and bomb forcing them to decloak and defend properly or c) be helpless food.

Got it, so your almighty strategy is to run away every time the cloakers come. As we all know, there's always stragglers. So you're saying, every time you detect the cloaker squad, you should run and let them freely kill 1-2 ships.

Wow, that's by far the best strategy I've heard in a long time and a great argument that it's not overpowered.

If you have 1-2 stragglers with ap... you lost the round. I didn't say the first pickup that shows the cloaked legion means you must drop everything and hyper right away. That would be committing suicide. I'm sorry if I didn't realize I had to lay the entire specifics of your escape down for you to grasp it. Now that I know I must lay down your strategy for you tick by tick my future responses will be much better.

Btw... I have kept my legion almost constantly moving never sitting idly in a sector for too long thus making the cloaker legion fairly ineffective at targetting me. Although I assume they haven't really tried so far. Just keeping your legion on the move helps greatly to negate the strategy

[Fwiffo]

I likely won't be playing again for a long while, but...I really don't get the complaints here. The entire point of the cloaker has been that it's a fairly safe ship that won't die if you're active enough, yet is less effective in fleet battles and takes absolutely forever to get up to a cruiser. If you want to easily kill a cloaked ship, then the game might as well not have cloaked ships. You're already getting plenty of free points by having an inactive cloaked ship sitting with your fleet, I don't see why you need to be able to kill it in one turn as well.

Also, if you're interested in some statistics, I did over 1500 pickups in the previous frantic to get some solid rates for them. And you're currently getting almost exactly 1 attack per 3 moves on a cloaked ship (with free attacks being 1 and triples being 3). Meaning that if it would normally take your fleet 1 turn to kill a ship in your sector, it would take 3 turns to kill it if it's cloaked. Doesn't make them particularly impossible to kill in my opinion, especially since they take a lot more damage than a fighter.

And the argument about a cloaker fleet being able to fire EoT and cloak again is ridiculous. First of all, as I said you get a 34% attack rate on them just by doing pickups at any point during the turn, while the 100% cloaker legion gets a massive 40% attack rate on your ships by all being online in the final seconds of the turn (4 attacks, 1 de-cloak, 5 cloak). And more importantly, if your legion has the same activity they do (an equal scenario) than at best they're going to be getting 1 turn of that surprise attack and then all of your ships are going to be around to shoot them in the final seconds for subsequent attempts. Oh, and don't forget to factor in the extra damage the legion's fighters get to do to the cloakers, closing the gap even further on the already tiny advantage gained in this impossible to execute scenario. Oh, and don't forget about the 45 bonus points you'll be averaging per move while doing these pickups or the Invulnerabilites and Half Maxes you'll be getting.

[Islander]

Strange to hear all these complaints coming from Bomber players, when they should be the one that should be further nerfed. We didn't solve the bomber problem with the damage/experience adjustment, people merely got interested in the cloaker and picked that over the bomber. This was probably due to the last Frantic, since these cloaking features were there for a while already. Otherwise the bomber-repper combo would still be hopping between planets and boring us to death. I'd actually like to propose a % decrease in damage for bombers when shooting fighters (and maybe not against cloakers?) to even out the playing field. Theoretically, bombers should be escorted by fighters because they are vulnerable to ship to ship combat. But as it is they stand on their own quite well. Do the Tib cloakers really think their ships are too powerful? That they are the key to the Tibs winning at the moment? I'd really like to hear from them, especially ecvej.

[iceblink]

I've been thinking along similar lines... if you look at real life, cloakers can be seen as submarines. They can go unnoticed for most ships, but there should be one type of ship that can spot them. (But it should probably cost moves to do a full scan of the sector.) Bombers should be relatively vulnerable, like the WWII bombers, and have an escort of fighters to protect them from other fighters. Even one enemy fighter should be able to do bad damage to a blob of multiple enemy bombers. Repair ships aren't really seen in real life i think... i can't think of an example. (Maybe we should patent the idea and sell it to the Army )

[whykt]

Now that the beta is finished, I would like to disagree with my teammates and say that cloakers shouldn't be nerfed

They add an interesting dimension to the game and fresh tactics. The kill against Collider was extremely impressive and the cloaked hypering makes a whole legion hard to track on scans. They are still vulnerable against a bigger legion, although I suppose a little overpowered against a smaller legion in battle? However, their main advantage of cloaking to save their ship means they can't shoot twice SOT or move early, so they can't get that many kills and can be killed if there's a player error. Once their legion or other legions get carriers, it effectively neutralises the battle cloaking advantage. Cloaking takes a whole tick, so it is a big time sacrifice for that strategy. I imagine it also excluded other non-cloaker players in the legion and decreased activity? Lack of reppers was definitely a big disadvantage in the long term.

Fighters aren't that useful unless they can get to cruiser points... whereas bombers are really still the main game winners.

Fwiffo, why won't you be playing for a long time?

[EyeContact]

In the current state of the game, with a low number of players, a cloaker legion isn't all that powerful.

In a game with big blobs, a cloaker squad would be much more useful, a dozen active cloakers can easily wander of from the main blob unnoticed to hit a fallback sector or something.

Indeed the Krills had activity problems with their non-cloakers.

[whykt]

Yes a cloaker squad away from a bigger blob would be a deadly and useful tactic, no one can get complacent. When Jax were in Tibrar and we were in PK/Boraxus, even the three or four Tib cloakers who split from the bombers/reppers almost managed to kill Iceblink (as level 4), so something on a bigger scale would be great in the future. And fallback sectors would be very sneaky and lethal, which is why I couldn't let Deimos jump to SS on his own in red health. Makes for terrible paranoia of the nervous LC types like myself, I had learned a big lesson with Collider!

[Clementus]

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the Kril Cloaker legion which despite not being amazingly effective in the long run made the most of what you guys had for a short time and made a nice mess of Collider. I loved playing as a cloaker in the beta before testing it out and it is fairly powerful but I truly don't think too powerful. It adds a nice extra dimension to the game and being able to hyper whilst cloaked is the only way of making them even remotely playable due to their stats deficits

IF we suddenly gained another 75 active pilots then a large squad of cloakers could be very powerful but probably no more powerful than a squad of fighters/bombers with repper support

[idontknow]

As far as I'm concerned, I believe I've mentioned in one of my first posts here that cloakers' offensive capabilities might not even be good enough. But that's not the original point being made here. It's about the inability to deal with a cloaker squad in a reasonable manner.

Maybe the key question after all is, what are cloakers supposed to be?
a) a ship for somewhat inactive players which would keep them from getting killed easily (then leave things how they are right now or maybe even nerf their attack capability a bit)
b) a strategic ship to assault individual enemy ships and bring a twist to the traditional tactics (then make them hit harder but make sure they can be destroyed more easily)

Both includes scouting capabilities.