As i posted in the petition:

I think IC will add cloaking with the 2nd expansion, which is focused on diplomacy and no combat stuff. In one of the suggestion threads a "spy-ship" was mentioned. I think this is the prefect introduction for cloaking.

have you looked at the solarcloaking ability that is applied on ships by stars?

if you combine this fx with something like this:

entityModifier
    buffEntityModifierType "ChanceToHitAsDamageTarget"
    value
        Level:0 -1.000000
        Level:1 0.000000
        Level:2 0.000000

perhaps it is a functional workaround.

The asteriod belts use a similar ability to decrease the hit chance for all ships "ChanceToHitAsDamageDealer" with a value of -0.2 which means the chance to hit is reduced by 20%.

I made my own don't worry! creating abilities is SOOO EASY!

It's the ship effects that remian....we still see the ship (even if he is phased out)

Mines were previously cloaked,  becuase of the obvious problem in cloaking in a game of this type it was removed and they were just given the "phased-out ability,  they are visable,  but cannot be targeted unless a scout disrupts the field

i personally like the fact that they removed cloaked mines.. it would become a battle on who had the most mines, scouts and scout killers.. and ofcourse.. everyone would pick vasari

i cant seem to think of another use of cloaking either...  invisable ships seem like a .. err ..  BAAD idea.. so where would you like the cloaking ability for?

Since (afaik) you can change the mesh on the fly in Entrenchment, why wouldn't you just replace the mesh with a blank one for the duration of the cloaking ability?

Yes during the beta of entrenchment cloaked mines where a real pain in the a###. The scouts get killed by mines before it could detect them. But also the mine spaming was a problem. Now mines are limited and cost resources for all factions. This works much better.

I see your problem. Lets hope the 2nd expansion or a patch will change this.

Well, I imigine, that you can't cloak during phase jumps, and that weapons are disable, what about giving the ability to detect cloak but with 25% accuracy?

I am only trying to prod the discussion in ways of balancing while allowing the potential of cloaking and in startrek the ships could move at low impulse/thrusters & maintain cloak

harpo

bump for cloak

I'd like to see cloaking, but there are some serious issues that you can tell IC has been avoiding. I think the main issue is the idea of an 'invulnerable fleet'. Having cloakable ships that you need a "detector" to be able to attack is a bad idea (especially if the detectors are the weakest ships in your fleet, scouts) because that fleet will just attack whatever makes it vulnerable to become invulnerable again. There are no abilities in the game that make ships invulnerable without some sort of drawback. Also, being able to move while cloaked also creates problems. I can't say I would enjoy it if an enemy fleet could just cloak its way to my homeworld, theres just too little anyone could do to stop that.

On the otherhand, there are ways cloaking could work and affect gameplay in a different way. I've wanted some sort of cloaking to disguise the contents of my fleet before an attack, or mask ships defending a planet. I propose a tactical structure that cloaks all stationary, not attacking ships within a certain radius. That way ships can be fired upon once engaged and the structure could be destroyed to reveal the enemy fleet, while at the same time it prevents cloaking from being mobile, makes your opponent think twice about jumping into a system with these structures in them, forces reconaissance to be more than just jumping in a single ship and jumping back out, allows for ambushes and sneak attacks and most importantly makes it a little harder for your opponent to figure out what you're doing. All without being to OP.

Couldn't you just do a phase ability that doesn't disable movement, and that is disabled by enemy Scouts?

Seems straightforward to me.

Justin, if you can make a ship invisible, with only the ship effects remaining?  Then let me know how you did it, please.

If it is the engine and weapon effects you are referring to as still "visible" then those particle effects which are used to show that in the entity file, can be removed, or blanked. The weapons fire will still happen, even if it isnt visible, and the ship will still move, even if the engine effect is not shown. This will effectively give you an invisible ship. With the phase out (with removing the boolmodifiers that disable engines, which will still then allow movement while phased out) making the enemy ships disregard the ship you will have an effectively invisible ship. 

-Teal