Blue pings and advanced cloak

posted on April 21st, 2012, 7:23 pm

Little suggestion, currently blue pings get a 0% chance of detecting advanced cloaks, my suggestion is to give them a chance to detect, just not a good one. Maybe 10% *

Currently things with advanced cloak force green pings or other decloaks, having blue pings be at least partially useful would smooth out the transition, allowing a player to possibly delay (with huge effort) while they tech to something better.

as this would slightly weaken advanced cloak, it could be sensible to slightly decrease the costs of advanced cloaks.

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*figures for illustrative purposes only, offer not valid on mondays, thursdays, sundays, tuesdays or fridays.

posted on April 21st, 2012, 7:27 pm

A chance to detect it sounds good.

posted on April 21st, 2012, 8:39 pm

Nooo, it would ruin the game for the rommies since they rely on advance cloak scout to pick their battles!

posted on April 21st, 2012, 8:51 pm

Nooo, it would ruin the game for the rommies since they rely on advance cloak scout to pick their battles!

klinks scout without advanced cloak. also scouts are becoming quicker to build in next patch, so maybe there will be a different balance with them.

posted on April 21st, 2012, 9:15 pm

Little suggestion, currently blue pings get a 0% chance of detecting advanced cloaks, my suggestion is to give them a chance to detect, just not a good one. Maybe 10% *

Currently things with advanced cloak force green pings or other decloaks, having blue pings be at least partially useful would smooth out the transition, allowing a player to possibly delay (with huge effort) while they tech to something better.

as this would slightly weaken advanced cloak, it could be sensible to slightly decrease the costs of advanced cloaks.

Sounds reasonable. I never like full immunities and this sounds like a good compromise to rid ourselves of one of those.

posted on April 22nd, 2012, 12:12 am

I'm okay with the suggestion, but there's also the fact that Romulan scouts are getting a big comparable nerf with the introduction of grey mode to other scouts.  If the devs take this into account, it would work out.

I think that cloak detect options need to be generally more scaled with the timing of the game: weak cloak detect in the early game and powerful cloak detect in the late game.  Something that allows the races to upgrade their existing cloak detect instead of building new stuff:

Federation: Advanced Particle Tracing research upgrades the station ping to a green, and the scout special to a Myotron ping.

Borg: Nanites are fine, thanks.

Dominion: Advanced Scanning Arrays research removes the Di/Tri cost on Tachyon scan and makes it cost only supplies.. 

Klingon:  Combat Instinct research grants all ships a weak version of Manual Targeting that has only a 10% chance of triggering, still if your fleet is big this will guarantee the kill.  If this ability is laggy they could get something else related to Mass Seeking Missiles.

Romulan: Advanced Scouts allows the Talon to be refitted a second time which grants it a defensive value bonus, and a third time (getting pretty expensive) to regain a non-advanced cloak (the ping is disabled while cloaked)  Also Singularity generators can be refitted with a blue ping.

...just some ideas.

posted on April 22nd, 2012, 1:03 am

I can't find it now, but I thought that I read that the blue pings had a 1% chance already. Anyone else remember this, or am I imagining things again? Anyway, a small chance would be a good thing.

posted on April 22nd, 2012, 7:29 am

Sorry, but with the Romulan scout being so far ahead of the non-cloaking scouts, saying that it'll receive a "comparative nerf" with the introduction of Gray mode seems disingenuous.  Once good players have adjusted their thinking, I can't see Fed and Dominion scouts living much longer than they do at the moment.

[Tryptic]

posted on April 22nd, 2012, 9:52 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on April 22nd, 2012, 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Have you ever played vs generix mines or Dominion sensor relays in a small icefield?   As the players get better at hunting scouts, it's natural to assume that they'll also get better at hiding them.

Also gray mode guarantees perfect scouting of the enemy's starting build for the first 2 minutes of the game, since they are immune to starbase fire.  Only the Borg scout will have trouble seeing exactly what they're building and exactly where they're building it.

This is definitely a good direction for the game, as it will help players survive better against cheese and rush tactics.  But it's still a comparative nerf because klingons and romulans currently have this as an advantage over the other races.