Cloak bug

[Knjaz]

Well, I'm not sure why this came up just now, since =2te= (those pesky Rheinland cloaking turtles - yes, it's mainly =2te=) knew it from the very beginning (we made good number of tests on our first cloaks, back then), but we never considered it an exploit or something like that.

I'm just thinking - after reading how much whining there is going on here - that what if it wasn't a bug, but is a design feature?

After all, your DIRECT fire weapons still become useless, so that means that the guy cloaking can't be shot. But indirect fire weapons - missiles - hey, how do you know that this wasn't planned in the first place? And congratulations, you've now found the inherent weakness of cloaks, that missiles can track.

I think that'd be about the perfect definition of irony, considering how people try to always one-up and overpower things ...

Totally not true. We've been killing cloaked ships in their cloaked mode. Just because CDs show you where he is and the vector of his movement, and if it's at least Cruiser sized, he'll die. Or get out of cloak and die (but the former happened more often. For example, I once killed a cloaked rans with a thannie, and Rans had about 35% hull left when cloak activated. I just kept shooting him, and even running past me didn't help him, at all)

At same time, I've been caught by this as well. There's no counter to that thing if you're 1x1 - CDs will show your vector, and they will always track, even if he's not turned towards you (i.e. you're not on his screen). (but as long as it's in CD tracking angle)

Also, according to my experience, this doesn't work well in large scale fights. We didn't specifically test it yet, just LNS were never sucessfull enough to prevent our turtles from running, and we never had a chance to test it against Liberty dread that would try to run through our formation - (i.e. if CD will still track you, even if there're many other targets on screen, and at closer range) - then yes, it'd make cloak totally useless as an escape mechanism.

(Edit: but yeah, there was something that can be considered half-test. A dread against few our ships (4-5), + few Liberty ships on the field. Dread was pinned down until we finished off LAC, and when we turned our attention to it and engaged cruise to catch up with it and kill it in cloaked mode, it run out of fuel)

Unless you got alot of cargo space and they got little CDs, so you can both outlast their full ammo, and outtank the damage they'll be dealing to you while their CDs will be running out.