On 2011-05-27 08:10, Gejaheline wrote:

Why yes, I am a fan of being able to lock onto targets, because trying to fight whilst manually targeting requires approximately three hands and godlike aiming skills, as anyone whom has attempted to shoot at an ECM scout will attest to.

On 2011-05-27 08:10, Gejaheline wrote:
Beacons don't explicitly find cloaked ships.

A cloaked ship getting hit by a beacon will feel no immediate ill effects; they will not be decloaked, no will the beacon reveal their position.

That's because when K'luth ships are cloaked it's difficult to focus enough gunfire on them to kill them, whereas targets that are currently active and attacking are a) higher threats and b) actually hittable.

Killing a K'luth ship is also difficult because they can heal themselves at a surprising rate, will typically be a dreadnaught, and because a ship that can kill a K'luth ship quickly will not be able to detect them and vice versa, meaning that to kill a K'luth ship you typically need two ships; a detector and a fighter. Inevitably, the detector will be a light ship that K'luth excel at killing due to their main weapons never missing and their ability to only engage when in an optimal position.

Why yes, I am a fan of being able to lock onto targets, because trying to fight whilst manually targeting requires approximately three hands and godlike aiming skills, as anyone whom has attempted to shoot at an ECM scout will attest to. Add to this the fact that, due to cloak, the target's position, heading and speed is unknown and you're basically reduced to randomly firing in all directions.

Pinging when coupled with blind-firing may ostensibly be deadly (if you have a whole bunch of ships that can target accurately in the split-second the target's position is known), but pinging WITHOUT blind-firing is utterly useless.

"Fantastic, A K'luth ship is sneaking up behind me and is getting ready to kill me. My options are:
a) Turn around so that I can get shot in the side instead of the back, although odds are that the K'luth ship will just decline to decloak and reposition instead;
b) Jump away!"

Option a) merely delays the inevitable, option b) completely removes you from the fight. In fact, the entire fleet might as well just jump away since they can't do anything about the cloaked ship.

The first option there basically turns cloaking from invisibility to actual invincibility, and the second makes cloaking perfect and the first indication that a K'luth ship is present will typically be death or extreme damage.

Counterpoint: "Why should my highly sophisticated EM cloaking system that perfectly bends all radiation around me with no distortion allow me to see the outside world? Any light that would hit my sensors is going around me."

Beacons are the near-equivalent of a very powerful ECCM which can affect only 1 target. When they hit a cloaked ship, they immediately raise its signature by 20, which takes around 5-10 seconds to be countered by the cloak. Because it can raise the signature, and therefore automatically enable targeting, it explicitly finds ships for a short time, not to mention increasing the cloak time and reducing our first strike advantage.

When you engage a K'Luth one of the two happens - you get hulled, and die or flee; or you hull the K'Luth and he cloaks or flees.
If he cloaks, you should continue pursuing him because he is weak at the given time, but will continuously regain health. Logically, if your enemies can heal, you should prioritise killing the weak ones over defending allies from the strong ones, because you cannot heal as fast as them. But once you kill some of them, their effective total regeneration reduces, thereby weakening their advantage.

Blindfire, which is possible on all cannon and beam ships, frigate and onwards. This is one reason why I oppose blindfire - it lets the fighter be able to indefinitely and frequently detect what he should not have been able to detect, and also ends in the fighter not valuing the role of detectors.

Also, most new dreads have a basic level of EW capabilities, which lets them ping periodically to detect K'Luth.

The K'Luth cloaked, and the other possible K'Luth are engaged by other possible ally ships. Who are you being coerced to fight? You are trying to reap some decisive benefit off the cloakee's non-combat condition. Yaw controls are also helpful if you want to have some rotation while manually firing on the cloakee.

Anyone who has tried to attack an ECM scout cannot make a valid attestment, because K'Luth do not have visible rings emanating from them, but are usually big (read : will typically be a dreadnaught) and cannot turn quickly. Both blindfire and pinging are effective against K'Luth, so that you can have an idea of their position. A scout is hard to hit even without ECM, and it can choose to jump away if you jump it, whereas a cloaked ship can't jump without decloaking, and will be subject to heavy damage and be typically forced to flee.

A whole bunch of ships will be likely to have almost a whole bunch of EW. If you're lucky, you'll have a utility ship in that bunch of ships which will be armed with more than 1 EW device (read : carrier dread, command carrier, command dread, and currently missile dread). Even if theres a whole bunch of K'Luth surrounding you, you can rather easily have someone perform a ping every 3 to 5 seconds and take the cloakees out, one by one (read again : EW devices take more power and have shorter cooldown than v1.5). If your 'fleet' comprises of only flagships, you deserve to be buried into an asteroid by the undetectable and scary K'Luth.

ECCM has a range of 700 on dreads, and smaller ships will be faster than the pursuer. You can easily ping every 36 seconds on a dread (during which a K'Luth dread will close in >only< a max of 540 gu but also spend time setting up attack vector, attack plans and whatnot). If you see the dread close by, and be lucky that he decides to change his vector because you turned, you will have a pleasant time blindfiring at it with your side weapons (which aren't bad on human ships) and either force him to decloak for attack while he was trying to reposition himself, or make him retreat. And in a mere 20 seconds, you will have another clue on where to fire.

Clarification - Nerf blindfire, as in "ok you are absolutely sure or atleast have a clue about where i am so go ahead and damage me, but if you don't know then you shouldn't be able to cluelessly fire, and receive a clue about my presence and position". I don't mind receiving extra damage while cloaked if it means that my position will not be compromised unless they have a device which can occasionally find me.

The first option means that you can't use blindfire to continuously determine my position after you used ping, and thus undermine ECCM's role after using it just once. The second is an option which my K'Luth teammates might like (I'm mostly fine with ping).

Counter-Counterpoint - How can I be damaged by lasers if my highly sophisticated EM cloaking system can perfectly bend radiation around me with no distortion? Obviously, they are either shooting me with cannons and using beams as a cover for the projectiles, or my highly sophisticated EM cloaking system does not work in the way that was suggested.

Maybe the system receives the radiation from one side, and emits it from the other side of my ship using energy-converting substances, methods and whatnot. Because it absorbs the radiation, I can request the absorbers to send signals to the bridge screen based on position of impact and nature of the radiation received, and translate it into hi-definition graphics.
But since my organic absorb-emit system has some organic absorption limits, can a high-power military laser not pierce through the system's absorption field and hit my hull?

Bacons are slow and short ranged,.....

On 2011-05-29 19:01, NoBoDx wrote:
--------------------------
so my request:
-either improve cloak, so i can do something, after i decloak (eg flee, when my disguise is broken) without waiting for ages
- or add a fixed decloak-time

On 2011-05-29 20:55, Kenny_Naboo[+R] wrote:

Quote:

On 2011-05-29 19:01, NoBoDx wrote: -------------------------- so my request: -either improve cloak, so i can do something, after i decloak (eg flee, when my disguise is broken) without waiting for ages - or add a fixed decloak-time

I remember having a chat with either Jack or Shig some time back. He told me that you're supposed to be able to fire almost immediately after decloak, regardless of the ECCM activity in the area.

ECCM is supposed to artifically raise your sig so that cloaking takes time. So something may still be broken.

Logically speaking, once your ship is decloaked, you should be able to fire. Doesn't make sense to have the ship reach some sort of default sig level before it can fire.

On 2011-05-29 19:01, NoBoDx wrote:
with beam-sweaping, it'll take 2 beams to cover the close area around yourself, half-circle to the left, and one to the right and then you have an idea, where the luth are around you
and since almost all luth fly slow dreads, you can be sure, that he'll be there for the next few seconds, so you can blindfire an alpha or two at em

no need for eccms at all, if you know there is one luth

i already said some time ago, that beam-sweaping should be considered "a bug"




NoBo