[Spec-Wep idea] Bestowing cloak

Post ideas and suggestions on new features or improvements here.
posted on October 8th, 2014, 2:11 pm
I had a thought recently for a special ability that I liked and thought might suit a Romulan ship (maybe a Tal-shiar one?). Wanted to see what people thought of it and if liked hear ideas for balancing and restrictions.

The ability would enable the carrying ship to cloak another allied ship nearby, even if the other ship doesn't have a cloaking device of it's own (maybe through a drone carrying cloak attaching to the allied ship?). The ship can behave like any normally cloaked vessel and can deactivate the cloak anytime it wishes (or loose the cloak through the normal methods like nebulas, entering repair yards etc); but once the cloak lowers the ship has no way of regaining it. To do so would require the ability to be used on the ship again.

My big inspiration for it was capture operations so you could capture a ship and then cloak it while it repairs or sneaks back to your base, though can imagine others coming up with some scary tactics in co-ops (cloaked Dom dreadnought anyone?). They'd probably be one or two truly massive ships that could never be cloaked by it (cube etc), but the vast majority of ships would be valid targets.

Welcome any comments ideas on it, especially balancing suggestions if it is liked. Perhaps make it a high-rank or veteran ability? A rare or map-unit only ship? Or restrict how large a ship can be cloaked until the carrying ship ranks up?

Cheers everyone.
posted on October 8th, 2014, 8:02 pm
This sounds intriguing... :cloak:
posted on October 8th, 2014, 8:59 pm
From a programming point of view, it would be pretty easy to code the ability to add cloak to an ally. The tricky part is controlling how it goes away. The game allows you to specify how long an ability lasts in seconds, but I would have to study the code a bit to see if it allows extraweapons to be removed by abilities. I suppose the Borg refresh ability might hold the key...

From a balance point of view, I think it would have to drain energy from the ships that use it, or else have some other important drawback such as it taking 10 seconds to cast. A very interesting idea though.
posted on October 8th, 2014, 10:45 pm
Tryptic wrote:From a balance point of view, I think it would have to drain energy from the ships that use it, or else have some other important drawback such as it taking 10 seconds to cast. A very interesting idea though.


Proximity could be another possible drawback. If the Tal-shiar ship was just 'projecting' the cloak onto the allied ship, that would mean that the two ships would have to stay within sensor range of each other, which would lead to some interesting strategic scenarios (destroying the projecting ship would become a high priority in a battle to keep the ally from cloaking and escaping.)
posted on October 8th, 2014, 11:15 pm
It certainly would make an interesting game mechanic, but nearly impossible to program. The Romulan ship would give the cloak, but then you'd have to find a way to keep track of the positions of the ships in order to remove the cloak when they are no longer close to each other. The engine doesn't support auras, so in a few special cases the devs made invisible weapons that fire at everything in range every few seconds. I'm not sure if reapplying the cloak ability every second would allow the ship to remain cloaked or not, we'd have to test that.
posted on October 9th, 2014, 3:12 am
We had a similar ability in play with our v4 launcher - this won't work properly in v3 as far as I recall, but I could be mistaken.
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