Islander wrote:Cloakers are not too powerful. you just think like that because we were in a frantic and luckily:
1. there was quite a lot of active cloakers
2. not too many active bombers
3. lots of careless people leaving their ships out in the open
In a real beta, there is Auto-Pilot, Sleep Tick, and 3 hour turns. These features are all biased against cloakers.
It's still going to be bombers who will be ruling the roost on a beta... trust me.
Cloakers only advantage is stealth -- the ability to sneak up on people without them knowing.
Without cloaked hypering this is not possible, especially with LC scans showing all movement, with or without decoys.
You expect Cloakers to go up one on one with a fighter or bomber? of course not, they'll be killed.
But if its an unsuspecting, outnumbered, damaged, and/or lower-level ship stuck for EOT and SOT? That's where they are most dangerous at.
They are too powerful. It has nothing to do with being stuck or outnumbered.
I was in roids as level 3 on 2500 HP. Got killed by a lvl5 cloaker. Never saw it coming. Very frustrating. It does not add to enjoyment of the game in any shape or form.
I like Avalen's idea: cloakers should either have the ability to hyper cloaked, OR attack while cloaked. Not both.
About fog of war: I too prefer it, *but* having no fog of war:
- decreases bunnying (because sometimes that is done to keep the enemy from having scans)
- decreases point whoring bombers, and even more so bombing runs by legions, because they can be seen coming. So it provides us with better fights in that respect (if bombing runs don't win you the game anymore, more fights will occur).
So i'm not if we should put in fog of war too quickly. It's definately not a priority, imho.
kandaar wrote:To be honest, what I think is overpowered is the scans for the brass.
Sure, you should be able to see into a sector where you have ships or decoys.
Sure, you should be able to see inbound and outbound ships.
What you should NOT be able to, is see where they're headed, unless you have ships in adjacent sectors (so you can see them inbound there).
After all, LC and VC scans are just a technical comm from ships in the field about the coming and going in the ships respective sectors, no?
Give us back a bit of fog-of-war, please.
I thought it was changed so that you couldn't scan sectors you don't have any friendlies in!? Are you saying you still get the arrows but not the scans?
You cant see who is jumping but you can see someone is jumping and where to (but you know number of folk jumping).
Was fairly powerful in the frantic as it is was lower numbers of players and it let you chase a damaged player but is less powerful on betas when its a blob and you dont know who has jumped where only that someone has gone to a certain sector.
Islander wrote:Cloakers are not too powerful. you just think like that because we were in a frantic and luckily:
1. there was quite a lot of active cloakers
2. not too many active bombers
3. lots of careless people leaving their ships out in the open
In a real beta, there is Auto-Pilot, Sleep Tick, and 3 hour turns. These features are all biased against cloakers.
It's still going to be bombers who will be ruling the roost on a beta... trust me.
Cloakers only advantage is stealth -- the ability to sneak up on people without them knowing.
Without cloaked hypering this is not possible, especially with LC scans showing all movement, with or without decoys.
You expect Cloakers to go up one on one with a fighter or bomber? of course not, they'll be killed.
But if its an unsuspecting, outnumbered, damaged, and/or lower-level ship stuck for EOT and SOT? That's where they are most dangerous at.
They are too powerful. It has nothing to do with being stuck or outnumbered.
I was in roids as level 3 on 2500 HP. Got killed by a lvl5 cloaker. Never saw it coming. Very frustrating. It does not add to enjoyment of the game in any shape or form.
I like Avalen's idea: cloakers should either have the ability to hyper cloaked, OR attack while cloaked. Not both.
You realize that the cloaker could have just decloaked and killed you with 9 shots anyway right? Attacking with pickups is almost always less effective than simply decloaking and shooting. So you would have died whether the pickup attack while cloaked ability was in the game or not.
It sounds like you're more upset with the damage output of a level 5 on a level 3, which is pretty big. A better proposal might be to lower the point gain range from -2 levels to -1 level.
Fwiffo wrote:
You realize that the cloaker could have just decloaked and killed you with 9 shots anyway right? Attacking with pickups is almost always less effective than simply decloaking and shooting. So you would have died whether the pickup attack while cloaked ability was in the game or not.
It sounds like you're more upset with the damage output of a level 5 on a level 3, which is pretty big. A better proposal might be to lower the point gain range from -2 levels to -1 level.
You know that is not true. If it had decloaked mid-tick i could have jumped out. If it had decloaked end of tick i could have done 7-10 self reps or pickups. So i would have had a chance either way, instead of not seeing it coming at all.
Fwiffo wrote:
You realize that the cloaker could have just decloaked and killed you with 9 shots anyway right? Attacking with pickups is almost always less effective than simply decloaking and shooting. So you would have died whether the pickup attack while cloaked ability was in the game or not.
It sounds like you're more upset with the damage output of a level 5 on a level 3, which is pretty big. A better proposal might be to lower the point gain range from -2 levels to -1 level.
You know that is not true. If it had decloaked mid-tick i could have jumped out. If it had decloaked end of tick i could have done 7-10 self reps or pickups. So i would have had a chance either way, instead of not seeing it coming at all.
No, you would have died in the 2 seconds after the person decloaked during the first minute instead, and still never see it coming.
Fwiffo wrote:
You realize that the cloaker could have just decloaked and killed you with 9 shots anyway right? Attacking with pickups is almost always less effective than simply decloaking and shooting. So you would have died whether the pickup attack while cloaked ability was in the game or not.
It sounds like you're more upset with the damage output of a level 5 on a level 3, which is pretty big. A better proposal might be to lower the point gain range from -2 levels to -1 level.
You know that is not true. If it had decloaked mid-tick i could have jumped out. If it had decloaked end of tick i could have done 7-10 self reps or pickups. So i would have had a chance either way, instead of not seeing it coming at all.
No, you would have died in the 2 seconds after the person decloaked during the first minute instead, and still never see it coming.
Then it would be 4 shots, not 9
The point is: if I am 100% active i must always stand a chance (unless i was stupid enough to use all my moves already).
I didn't understand your scenario. I thought someone did pickups EoT/SoT against you, which is why I went with 9 shots. It doesn't matter either way.
And no, you won't stand a chance. When one person can decloak at any time during the no hyper window and fire shots in fractions of a second, they're always going to kill them before the other pilot can react. If you want reaction time you would need to remove cloakers entirely.
Now, if your problem is that the person got more damage in through pickups than they would with regular shooting, then that's just bad luck. Solution there would be to change the pickup rate.
