A viable cloaking system (proposal)

and have some useful purpose for the military star bases

from GalCiv3 Forums

There have been a lot of talk on the forum and in the dev feeds about cloaking (and its absence in GalCiv3) therefor herewith my proposal for a workable cloaking system within the game.

Premises.

  • Every ship has a cloaking factor (default zero);
  • A fleet has the cloaking factor of the lowest cloaking factor of the ships in it (corrected by any fleet cloaking components that are installed on the ships in the fleet);
  • Every planet and star base has a base sensor strength (greater than zero);
  • If the sensor strength at the location where the ship/fleet resides is stronger or equal than the cloaking factor then the ship/fleet is visible, else it is completely invisible.

Of course the player should be able to influence the sensor strength of planet and star bases and the cloaking factor of ships. This can be accomplished by introducing:

  • planetary improvement that strengthen the sensor strength;
  • military star base modules that grant sensor strength to the star base itself;
  • military star base modules that amplify the sensor strength of bases and planets within it sphere of influence;
  • ship components that increase the cloaking factor for the ship itself;
  • ship components that increase the cloaking factor for the entire fleet.

Reasoning.

The game already includes the functional infrastructure for a distance bell curve projection (as used by the influence system), so the actual calculation is done by feeding sensor strength instead of influence strength into said function.

Pros.

Cloaking is implementable (Yeah \o/ ) and military star bases now have an actual useful purpose. This will open the game up to a lot of additional strategic depth.

Cons.

The calculation for the sensor strength at a given tile will take (possibly significant) cpu power and increased memory requirements. 8O

 

Let the cloaking (tech) wars begin. :ninja:

Any comments are welcome.

11,257 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

My idea would be to tie the cloaking ship module to a strategic resource. You could have two versions, one that affects only the ship it's on and another that cloaks the fleet. You would also need a counter, I'm thinking a special sensor, it would also need a strategic resource to produce, plus a starbase module that could only be built on military starbases.

The devs' concerns with cloaking was that the AI wouldn't be able to handle it and that they would need to make that effect when the ship is invisible. For the second I say you don't need any special effect, the ship is invisible no matter how much you look at it, obliviously you would need something to tell where yours are, otherwise it could get weird. "Now where did I park my invisible spaceship again?" As for the AI I have no solution.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Rhonin_the_wizard, reply 1

The devs' concerns with cloaking was that the AI wouldn't be able to handle it and that they would need to make that effect when the ship is invisible
End of Rhonin_the_wizard's quote

The problem was that if cloaking made the ships shimmer to indicate cloaking that would give problems to both the AI and the player. In my solution a ship is either visible or not. And because the default cloaking of zero, the ships without cloaking tech will be handled the same as ships are handled in the current game. And because every base / planet has a default (non-zero) sensor strength a cloaded enemy ship will become visible if it get close enough to your bases / planets.

Quoting Rhonin_the_wizard, reply 1

obliviously you would need something to tell where yours are, otherwise it could get weird. "Now where did I park my invisible spaceship again?"
End of Rhonin_the_wizard's quote

Your own ships are always visible to you, the same for the AI: his ships are always visible to him.

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The interesting thing is that if you look through the XML there is a reference to cloaking in one of the ship related ones, ship components I think.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Thecw, reply 2



Your own ships are always visible to you, the same for the AI: his ships are always visible to him.
End of Thecw's quote

 

 

 

Indeed, they could simulate cloaking by simply making your own ships appear faded where you could see through them when cloaking is on.