Posted by: 3_14159
« on: January 08, 2012, 04:55:22 PM »
While thinking about some tactics, I came to the idea of providing a bit more of a cat-and-mouse-game, specifically by giving players the possibility of using decoys. Seeing as it hasn't been suggested yet (at least, as far as searching told me) I came up with two different ideas of different origin and - presumably - different difficulties to implement.
1. The hardware or reflector approach.
Like stealth is used at the moment, you could mount reflectors or something like that on your ships. As a game mechanic, this would mean you mount a component increasing the TCS by a factor. As that's basically the functionality of cloaking devices in reverse, it probably shouldn't need too much work to implement.
Looking at the cloaking technology and inverting their efficiency, one could make a progression line like 4x - 5x - 6. 6x - 10x - 15x - 20x - 33x - 50x - 100x - 200x.
The basic effect would be that you'd create a specific ship class which appears larger than it is. Of course, this will only work once per enemy, as after one battle they will know that that big blob called "Yamato" is just a 1000 ton ship. This would of course make players produce only few of them, preferably of fighter size once they have that technology (or not at all).
Technology progress could be in the areas of effect (multiplier for size), minimum size and efficiency (like cloaking devices).
That's why the second one is proposed, the
2. The software or electronic warfare approach
Here you can tell a ship with a certain EW module size (depending on your technology) to mimicry the emissions of one of your other classes (within the limit dictated by technology and EW module size). This would fool active sensors, but only up to a certain percentage of their range (again, depending on your technology). Therefore, you could basically duplicate your entire fleet using one class, as long as it stays away from the enemy. In theory, even missiles with this could be possible, but probably only very big ones, and only very late game.
The main problem would be that this is probably very difficult to implement, as changing classes and uncertainty in TacInt isn't yet, well, implemented.
Technology progress could be in the areas of effect (multiplier for size), minimum size, efficiency and burn-through-resistance (range fraction at which enemy active sensors can look through it).
. When I do, the above is the type of thing I will be including.