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Cloak Detection in Space
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
A common problem in KvK is that everyone is cloaked and it takes forever to find the other team. As a result, KvK queues are often relatively empty compared to the FvK and FvF queues.
There is reasonable belief that the Romulans might be the next faction to be added to the game. Of course, they will also have cloak, so cloak vs cloak scenarioes will become no less common. In addition, the Federation side now has limited cloaking abilties with the Galaxy X ship, and this might become more common at Rear Admiral Level if it is actually available on C-Store soon.
I think this all more reason to analyze how one can actually detect cloaked ships. What tools does the game provide?
I just lnow the basics:
- High AUX improves your chance to detect cloaked ships.
- Sensor Scan improves your chance to detect cloaked ships.
- Charged Particle Burst, Tractor Beam and I believe Eject Warp Plasma all can negate cloak.
- Full Impulse + Cloak can lead to a very ineffectice cloak, particularly if you get too close to an enemy.
But beyond that - what specific builds should be used to improve your cloak detection chances?
- What Captain skills should be trained?
- What energy levels do work best?
- Are Science Ships and Officers a must?
- What Bridge Officer abilties are useful?
And beyond that - What specific team tactics exists, how do they work?
There is reasonable belief that the Romulans might be the next faction to be added to the game. Of course, they will also have cloak, so cloak vs cloak scenarioes will become no less common. In addition, the Federation side now has limited cloaking abilties with the Galaxy X ship, and this might become more common at Rear Admiral Level if it is actually available on C-Store soon.
I think this all more reason to analyze how one can actually detect cloaked ships. What tools does the game provide?
I just lnow the basics:
- High AUX improves your chance to detect cloaked ships.
- Sensor Scan improves your chance to detect cloaked ships.
- Charged Particle Burst, Tractor Beam and I believe Eject Warp Plasma all can negate cloak.
- Full Impulse + Cloak can lead to a very ineffectice cloak, particularly if you get too close to an enemy.
But beyond that - what specific builds should be used to improve your cloak detection chances?
- What Captain skills should be trained?
- What energy levels do work best?
- Are Science Ships and Officers a must?
- What Bridge Officer abilties are useful?
And beyond that - What specific team tactics exists, how do they work?
Post edited by Unknown User on
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At any rate, I continue to support better cloak detection abilities on the conditions that:
* They must not be passive in anyway, requiring a fair amount of coordination on behalf of the team deploying them
* If there were a solo option it should have significantly lower success than team based detection abilities
* They must not be 100% effective 100% of the time - everything should be at least temporarily counter-able (even possibly returning false positives would be interesting)
* They should probably be Aux dependent so that there are understood trade offs based on the defensive and potentially offensive nature of the abilities
* I might add more later, there are plenty of ways this could be taken too far.
In short, people should have to work to earn a shot at a shieldless opponent because anything effective enough to reliably neutralize the something as sensitive as cloak really is potentially game breaking.
I think one "problem" with cloak currently is that it's binary. There is no state where you can detect a ships presence but not attack it. I think that would be a valuable addition to the game, and solve the issues with KvK, too. But... That's not the main topic here. Question is - how do you "optimize" for detection? How "good" is your detection when you're using it? At what distance can you detect cloaked vessels typically? How do you coordinate to make this useful? What do to do in the time between active sensor scans?
When we get a little cocky and impulse in with 5 power in aux it shouldn't be hard to see us.
I think the carrier has the same sensor boost the science ship does, but since it can't cloak it isn't entirely relevant. It will be targeted first as its the only bait around.
With a science ship you can generally expect around 5-6km detection with high aux and maxed skills. With other ships, maybe 1km. My science ship has maxed out sensor skills and grandfathered consoles, and if I sensor scan, MAYBE I can see beyond 10km. My eng/escort also has maxed sensor skills for target subsystems goodness, but I never detect cloaked ships unless they run past me as they battle cloak, because the sensor range is tiny. Its too short to capitalize on in anything but a science ship, for sure.
Once I saw someone full impulse trough the 10km mark while cloaked in my science ship with sensor scan running, in and out of sight, while other times I can see some ships beyond 10km, so I'm not entirely sure why its different, with full aux every time. It doesn't help that you don't even know how far you can see unless you actually see something. Are they there and they defeat your sensor skills, or is nothing there? You have no idea.
However, its still relatively pointless. You can get first strike, but the first strike of a science ship is laughable, and by the time your torpedoes get there, they are already decloaked, shielded, and returning fire, and the rest of your team is clueless unless you can close to within 5km and use a tractor beam or CPB.
And if they are within 10km in the first place, they are probably ready to decloak anyways, just twiddling their thumbs to see who does it first. Rarely you might find that lone wolf who got their first and no one else is in position, but usually it just starts the battle early.
The only real tactic I have bothered with for pre-battle detection is putting full power to aux, the rest to engines, and then hitting evasive and sensor scan, circling the area fast to see what I can see. If I'm lucky I can tractor a BOP and quickly get them focus fired by my team. If not, nothing is there and I have to wait for cooldowns to feel useful again.
Also I'm not entirely sure but sensor scan might stack, that is one sci/sci can sensor scan centered on themselves and get the boost, then another sci could scan centered on the sci/sci and increase the sensor range additively.
But definitely I support changing the cloak detection game. The binary nature of it makes it really only useful for trying to grab escaping BOPs. Pre-battle detection feels largely irrelevant because the Klingons usually react too quickly for Feds to capitalize on it.
Some things I suggest is removing the binary nature. Yes at some point you should be able to see, target, and decloak ships, but there should be gray areas before that.
Detection should give you a hint that something is there or nothing is there, have the chance that its accurate go up based on how many skill points you have invested in the sensor tree. So if I don't invest anything, I can do a generic sensor sweep, a new power that would be available to all ships, and find false positives or false negatives. But if I max it out, it should give me accurate information, saying yes there are cloaked ships near or nothing at all, even if I can't pinpoint them.
I'd suggest having arc overlays represent how accurate your detection is when it isn't pinpoint accurate. Think of the firing arcs, a sensor sweep could reveal information that way, showing you an arc where cloaked ships might be, and they could be narrower arcs the closer you would come to a full on detection, and color coded for a general range indicator. If you heavily invested in sensors, you could trust it, especially in a science ship. If not, who knows what its detecting?
I'd also suggest Klingons and other cloaking ships/factions would be able to have a BO power or maybe a device that could create false positive decoys so the sensor sweep can be fooled.
It could allow a scanning vessel to know (if a successful scan is achieved) the general direction of a cloaked vessel beyond the 10km mark. Maybe even have such detected vessel(s) show up on the minimap as a temporary blip.
Certain skills improve cloak (I believe the aux management/efficiency skills), so the klingon's spec is also a variable. Generally ships that rely on aux are gonna be harder to see, even when they're auxiliary power's low.
You still can't see it
You still can't target it.
You don't know what direction it's heading
You might have a vauge notice of it's direction relative to you (at least which shield facing is directed at it)
It would be cool if they could replicate the "distortion" effect you saw in ST: III. So you have the sense it's there but you still can't fire at it. Although the spacescapes in STO are cluttered enough that it wouldn't work as well as empty space.
Exactly. Passive scanning.
You would know a cloaked enemy is close but have no specific notion of where they are other than a blip on the minimap.
Only if we can get Bops that can fire whilst cloaked!
Like putting prunes on a line & hook?:p
Cloak detection should be improved the chances of detecting a cloak ship to the point where cloaking becomes more of a risk and less of an advantage...As satisfying as it should be for a klingon to decloak and destroy a fed ship...it should be equally satisfying for a fed ship to detect and annihilate a cloaked klink ship.
~D
That also means winning and losing has to mean something...so it boils down to objective based, non-queued, territory capture PvP. We need areas of open PvP so that cloaking and anti-cloak mini-games switch from just short-lived battle in a bottle tactical skirmishes...and moves toward long-term strategic and tactical dynamics.
The Cloak is fine...its the poorly thought out, half baked PvP scenerios that we are presented which is the problem. The devs neglected to recognize the strategic significance and use of the cloak in their severly limited tactical scenerios.
I usally run a protection grid pattern based pvp xp what I ussaly see klingons do in pvp, 75% of the time its effective to find one or more klingons before they can attack. CPB is nasty and BOP are most vulnarable becaue they get there sheild dropped and disable cloak.
I would like a better range of detection becsuse with a BOP coming in with 100+ aux is ussally unable to see till 5km and a science capt I think I should be at a greater range.
I like to suggest a weapon slot could be used to have sensor pods that can circle your ship and help you detection lvl that would be a great help to klingon and future romulans
Last thing a science capt should get a better +cloak to there cloak becuse they are science capt after all
Personally I would like to see this as something that pulsates maybe once every 5 to 10 seconds while active, with the first pulse starting at that 5-10 second mark.
The reason for this is when in PvP, a player would be grouped with 4 others, thereby making these pulses more like 1-5 seconds if all players in the party were actively scanning.
In the end, you don't want to make cloaking useless, but at the same time make it a bit more feasible to detect.
Another totally different approach would be to introduce a Ensign Level ability for Beam Weapons to do a 0 Elevation Sweep, like in Star Trek Nemesis when they tried to locate the Scimitar.
Basically your Tactical Officer would fire your beam arrays for their entire arc of fire, trying to make an impact on a cloaked enemy vessel.
This would of course only be effective on all ships except the Bird of Prey, which has a battle cloak and would not have its cloak affected by weapons fire.
There was a bug in PVP a while back where you could see a cloaked ship on your radar but couldn't target it or actually see it. Lots of QQ happened and this bug was very promptly fixed. I would see many FED on my teams running from cloaked ships or Klings. taking a long time to maneuver into a 6 o'clock attack position. It lost a lot of fun playing cat and mouse with a cloaked ship that you knew was there but couldn't shoot. I am all for a mine laying device for rear weapon slot that drops cloak detecting mines. I think it would help make the mines skill on the tree worth something finally. Or even make a separate skill just for these types of mines that extended the detection radius.
Have 1 person act as bait, then the rest cloaked about 8km away, when the other team uncloaks on his 6, the rest of YOUR team with be on The 6 of a group of people uncloaking, and prolly take down at LEAST 2 or 3 for the 1 death, the kicker is not to stick around if everybody else is cloaking back up on the other team
I agree, though, that a completely vanilla TDM scenario does not lend itself to a necessary resolution of combat - indefinite cloaking being the largest abuse, but long periods of waiting are possible regardless.
Cloaked alpha LOL-pop situations are especially common and frustrating to the average player who does not have a group with an organized anti-cloak strategy (but sometimes even those that do). Reducing that frustration in a way that average players find manageable and interesting would likely do some good for FvK in general by producing more involved matches.
This scenario would provide three key benefits over the current pure deathmatch:
1) Cloaking ships would still get their attack advantage, but would not be able to spend an excessive amount of time in cloak as they would be losing out on capture points.
2) It moves the fight around the entire map and creates regrouping opportunities naturally.
3) A team that is behind in kills could not simply avoid combat and grief their opponent, as points are still being awarded from captures.
-snix
Kind of reminds me of the Team Fortress 2 arena mode. Even if the hill doesn't grant you points that fast, it negates the incentive to hide forever, since that doesn't totally protect your team from being beaten.
I also like the idea of moving the battle around the different set pieces on the map. The docks and comets and starbases are cool, but they're often ignored in deathmatches since they don't do anything.
I've heard an idea that some environment objects should grant stealth bonuses, like some asteroids and nebulae in missions. This would change the dynamic as the hill moves around, as some sections would be more open to ambushes, even by Fed characters. Maybe being in a comet tail would make it so you couldn't capture the hill, just like cloak, but you could wait to attack your enemies instead.
Now thats promising...very promising in fact. Can one suggest that the playable areas on these maps be increased considerably from the current Cap & Hold or TDM maps?
Though this may not apply to the current statement on new map types, this is something to chw on when stratigizing models/mechanics for cloak. Cloaks are ambush systems...there is one major thing missing to allow Cloaks to operate as they should. There needs to be an opportunity for the prey to become complacent, lulled into a false sense of security...its the "gotcha" moments.
We need open, non-scripted, non-queued potential for PvP...expanses of RvR/Territory control areas. Considering the lack of KDF numbers...possibly a small percentage of areas where the full time use of shields would be frowned upon(diplomatic reasons comes to mine) due to other PvE/Faction concerns within the space.
A glaring flaw I cant help but to snicker over, is the existance of "Raiders" with nothing to raid...a ship design role, with no role in game to fill. A light/lightening assault vessel forced to operate routinly like a front line Cruiser in PvE and in PvP matches.
It doesn't sound like any kind of space combat scenario I've ever heard of. Why would a control objective move, or worse bounce all over the map?
But a variation on that theme might work.
I'm recalling the Fed episode where the player has to set up mines near a transwarp gate to prevent the Romulans from using it, but you have to defend the mines while they are activating. Something similar might make a good PvP scenario.
Let's say that there is a planet with some resource that both sides would like to control. So there are beacons scattered around the planet that represent heavy minefields that can be activated. The first ship to scan/activate the beacon activates a minefield for their side. The minefield can be 'flipped' to the opposing team by shooting your way thru the minefield and get near enough to scan/reprogram the beacon for your side. Of course the mines would also retain their normal destructive properties, so you wouldn't necessarily want to run into an enemy mine. Say you scored 1 point for each mine destroyed, 5 points for each minefield activated, and 10 points for capturing an active minefield for your side. First team to get to 100 points (or whatever) wins the scenario. You could also win on kills, and getting blown up by an enemy mine would count as a kill for the team that controls it.
That kind of a scenario would also help to force ships out of cloak, since you can't shoot mines or activate a beacon unless you decloak. Also, a cloaked ship is unshielded and contact with a live mine would be inadvisable under those conditions...
secure objectives in sequence, rather than simultaneously. a chain of bases projecting shields on eachother, for example.
follow/defend a moving objective, such as a ship that both sides are trying to secure via boarding, or maybe a space monster/critter that both sides are trying to tempt to their side.
or just rip Payload off from TF2... each side tries to 'push' their invulnerable Metaphasic Bomb into the enemy base ^_^
the only problem is that tehre's a sizable number of peopel who dont give a **** about objectives and only go for kills. i had about the most miserable pvp experience ive had in STO earlier, a 4v3 on shantytown where the 3 were getting spawn camped (3 enemies were engineers and they were spamming deployables on our side of the map). the four didnt even try to do any hacking. so you know, die over and over and over again and you can't even quit out of the stupid thing. but that's ground pvp for you (aggravating across the board.)
if for example you could win C&H with kills as well as captures there'd be tons of teams that would simply ignore captures, no matter how well they were doing. This was reasonably common with Assault, when people actually played Assault.
Snix?
Make it so :cool:
Or is it just that people remain cloaked for too long? What I've found, on the Klingon side, is you just need someone to lead into combat, become the initial target. With the cloaks, we have weaker shields/hulls, so few people want to take a Fed Alpha... well, I don't mind so much, but I got balls (and Evasive Maneuvers). Really, you just need someone to open up and get the fight started. Once it's going, it's all out war.
Basically, the Fedballs make the Klingons not want to initiate attacks, and the Klingon cloak makes the Feds want to stick together. However, I haven't found the current Capture and Hold map to be a problem.. although, as a BoP pilot, if the fights not started, I'll start it (and then quickly run away and hide).