Technological arms races

[Suicide Junkie]

What is your opinion on taking cloaking & sensors, and giving them something like 12 levels?

The research costs go up rapidly, so its not worth researching all the way to the top, but you still have to keep one step ahead of your opponent

And before contact, you have to decide how far to go in each, and when to devote to battle techs.
"Is sensors VII enough? What if somebodys sneaking around here with Cloak VIII? Is it worth worrying about?"
With lots of levels, you can get the distinct atmosphere of paranoia .

Also, with sufficiently advanced sensors, you could detect low-tech mines, higher level mines would still be invisible, or have a super-cloak component you can add.

[Nitram Draw]

I like it. I'm all for putting as much strategy in as possible. I had toyed with the idea of mine and creating one type of mine that was visible to each type of sensor, one that was visible without any sensors and one that was always invisible but I got no time to test them. Plus I'm great at adding the extra blank line it seems and screwing it up

[Hydraa]

I was thinking about adding in individual cloaking items to cloak to higher levels on each individual cloaking type.

It would end up with a ship cloaked against all as long as they had one of each of the 5 components needed to cloak to that level.

so a cloaking unit for each of
active em, passive em, psychic em, gravitic , and temporal.

So if each cloaking unit is 40KT apiece that is going to take up 200KT of space and probably cost quite a bit and perhaps require a cloaking device already and these add to it.

If you don't use one perhaps that temporal race can see you but you might not care about them but you do about the psychics so they don't take your ships.

[dmm]

These are good ideas. Can they be implemented as a mod, with current SEIV code? Or would MM need to change the code to allow someone to implement it?

[raynor]

Taking a look at components.txt for the Cloaking Device, you see that it has five abilities--one each to prevent EM active, EM passive, Psychic, Gravitic and Temporal Scans. So, it is easily possible to add this cool idea to the game.

[Aussie Gamer]

I have been doing the mine s with cloaking components for some time now. They seem to work OK!

You just design a component that is a small one of the the normal one, as for weapons.
I also have a scanner jammer available as well.

The whole idea of this game is a sacrifice available room to what you want it to do, Do I put another warhead in it and make it visible or hide it?

I like the idea of the very high tech levels of scanners Vs cloaking. This was one of my reasons to remove the normal cloaking ability from the mines and made them have a cloaking component.