I love the idea and lore of the TIE Phantom. A hard hitting and slippery experimental fighter that was a glass cannon if you could catch it uncloaked. It was a great concept and a fun nod to the older EU and games for fans. However, I think it was implemented poorly as it the cloak action didn't feel thematically right and as implemented said "Play the aces with VI or not at all". And even then it had to be hit with an errata bat that basically stripped it out of high level play. So I got to thinking about both the lore and the mechanics of what the Cloaking action should do. I do want to hear your guys thoughts, however I ask if you dislike it give please a reason why. Doesn't have to be elaborate but if you say "It'll mess with game balance" or something to the effect, walk through how you think it would wreck the game balance.

Cloak Action
A ship that is cloaked adds two agility when defending. A ship that is Cloaked loses all Red Target Locks and cannot be Target Locked while Cloaked. A ship may fire while cloaked but immediately De-cloak and must take an Ion token or Weapon Disabled token at the end of the turn.

Whisper: No change needed

Echo Pilot Ability: After defending you may perform a free barrel roll action even if you are stressed.

My reasoning is that the only movie reference we have to cloaking tech is when Captain Needa remarks "No ship that small has a cloaking device" in response to being told the Millennium Falcon no longer appears on their scopes (see sensors/targeting systems). So it makes more sense to me for the ship to rather then have re-positioning shenanigans to be much more difficult to direct with weaponry that requires guidance. The change of being able to fire while cloaked is to give the generics a shot at seeing play by not making them simply sitting targets if they actually want to shoot something. At the same time it doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the named pilots either. The inclusion of the Ion or Weapon Disabled is to help balance the strength of shooting out of Cloak.

Just to clarify, because it's a little unclear to me based on the post:

What about the existing decloaking mechanics?

You don't make any reference to them, and from the closing paragraph it seems like you would remove them entirely.

If That's not the case, then no problem I believe.

But if you plan on shelving the existing decloak mechanics, then you need to add a way that a ship can manually decloak. (even if it is without the reposition) I would suggest simply keeping the optional decloak at the start of the activation phase and removing the repositioning portion of the ability.

Forcing the high ps pilots to fire out of their cloak and take the associated penalty nerds them too hard.

5 hours ago, Deimos said:

Cloak Action
A ship that is cloaked adds two agility when defending. A ship that is Cloaked loses all Red Target Locks and cannot be Target Locked while Cloaked. A ship may fire while cloaked but immediately De-cloak and must take an Ion token or Weapon Disabled token at the end of the turn.

Is this legit in the lore?

I know it is the wrong IP, but Birds of Prey must specifically decloak before bringing weapons to bear.

OTOH it makes a sort of logical sense. . .if you can't see in, I can't see out.

If you ask me, what was broken with cloaking was. . .nothing. What ruined it was the high PS of the aces. Phantom aces should be mid-level or not have an EPT.

51 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

If you ask me, what was broken with cloaking was. . .nothing. What ruined it was the high PS of the aces. Phantom aces should be mid-level or not have an EPT.

No EPT. I doubt the Empire would entrust an experimental fighter to pilots of middling ability.

I'm not sure I like the fire while cloaked idea. That will make Whisper incredibly hard to get in arc if he's moving last. If he's in arc, but could decloak to get out he cloaks, still gets to shoot, then decloak and get out. It's almost as bad as the original timing. Yes an ion could be bad, but it might be worth it.

I like how Phantoms currently work, but I feel they should be able take autothrusters or have some similar mechanic, they just melt against turrets.

52 minutes ago, Mrk1984 said:

I'm not sure I like the fire while cloaked idea. That will make Whisper incredibly hard to get in arc if he's moving last. If he's in arc, but could decloak to get out he cloaks, still gets to shoot, then decloak and get out. It's almost as bad as the original timing. Yes an ion could be bad, but it might be worth it.

I like how Phantoms currently work, but I feel they should be able take autothrusters or have some similar mechanic, they just melt against turrets.

Everything melts against turrets, that’s the game’s core problem.

Fix turrets to reign them into the fold and the Phantom is fine and fun.

1 hour ago, Stoneface said:

No EPT. I doubt the Empire would entrust an experimental fighter to pilots of middling ability.

If you work at the problem from fluff, you get thrown under the bus for gameplay.

If you work at the problem from gameplay, you get thrown under the bus for fluff.

*sigh*

4 hours ago, namdoolb said:

What about the existing decloaking mechanics?

You don't make any reference to them, and from the closing paragraph it seems like you would remove them entirely.

If That's not the case, then no problem I believe.

Sorry, decloaking would still be done the same (minus the movement) and the advantage would be not being weapon disabled or ioned to after firing. The higher PS pilots would benefit more but that makes sense as well. They have the experience to better balance the power needs of the systems over the less veteran pilots.

2 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

If you work at the problem from fluff, you get thrown under the bus for gameplay.

If you work at the problem from gameplay, you get thrown under the bus for fluff.

*sigh*

True, but a high PS pilot would be more effective than a middling PS pilot with an EPT. Unless that EPT was friggin awesome. But then your still caught in front of the bus. Really beginning to hate busses.

Star Wars cloaking is actually kinda wrong how it works. You should be able to see out, not in. Its like one way glass. It allows light in, but doesn't allow it out. Which means an invisible object should still be able to see other visible objects. Its how light and vision works. Now any sensors which rely on sending out a pulse or frequency wave and then listening for the echo wouldn't work as the signal couldn't leave the cloak bubble.

Cloaking should be ''A ship with a cloak token immediately discards all red target lock tokens. While defending, a cloaked ship adds 2 evade results to their roll."

4 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

OTOH it makes a sort of logical sense. . .if you can't see in, I can't see out.

Are you saying that the invisible man is blind while invisible?

But nope, of course the gunner/pilot in the TIE Phantom (and the Bird of Prey) can see their enemies. The whatever-science-stuff that makes their ship invisible only prevents the others to see them, not them so see outside (or it would be useless).

2 hours ago, clanofwolves said:

Everything melts against turrets, that’s the game’s core problem.

Fix turrets to reign them into the fold and the Phantom is fine and fun.

So I think this would fix the game:

All turrets: when attacking a target outside your firing arc, add 1 defense dice to the defender.

Why not get rid of the firing while cloaked part with the ion/weapon disabled token and just add the loss of red TL tokens?

As another possibility, if you're fired on while being cloaked, why not roll a dice to allow a decloak to occur on a Focus result before modification of attacking dice? Make it so that the attacking ship was actually attacking a sensor ghost instead of having the cloaking action just be free evade dice.

It's just stupid that the enemy knows exactly where your ship is at when your ship is supposed to be undetectable. It would be nice to be able to replace the Phantom with 3 tokens which could move independently of each other and which one could be flipped to reveal it too be the true position of the cloaked ship when attacked, but it would get too convoluted especially with multiple Phantoms.

I could see a modification that discards target locks after actions such as cloak or evade. Sort of like a better Expert Handling.

2 hours ago, flyboymb said:

Why not get rid of the firing while cloaked part with the ion/weapon disabled token and just add the loss of red TL tokens?

As another possibility, if you're fired on while being cloaked, why not roll a dice to allow a decloak to occur on a Focus result before modification of attacking dice? Make it so that the attacking ship was actually attacking a sensor ghost instead of having the cloaking action just be free evade dice.

It's just stupid that the enemy knows exactly where your ship is at when your ship is supposed to be undetectable. It would be nice to be able to replace the Phantom with 3 tokens which could move independently of each other and which one could be flipped to reveal it too be the true position of the cloaked ship when attacked, but it would get too convoluted especially with multiple Phantoms.

Could be solved with a unique upgrade

3 hours ago, Odanan said:

Are you saying that the invisible man is blind while invisible?

But nope, of course the gunner/pilot in the TIE Phantom (and the Bird of Prey) can see their enemies. The whatever-science-stuff that makes their ship invisible only prevents the others to see them, not them so see outside (or it would be useless).

Technically, the invisible man should be blind. What's to stop light from every direction getting in (unfocused) and overloading his eyes?

Of course, active cloaking works a bit different, but I'm not sure that there would really be any way to implement it without at least severely diminishing sensor/sight functionality.

You don’t mecho with echo.

I love that pilot ability. Super fun.

I always felt like ACD was the biggest issue, but I also don’t know how you would make Phantoms good without it. Just give them higher PS so they can arc dodge, maybe. Get a ship that’s super defensive OR offensive, just not at the same time.

Make a Title: Prototype Cloaked Fighter

That way you can still get the benefit of ACD or SPA and the new cloaking mechanism of the title.

8 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Technically, the invisible man should be blind. What's to stop light from every direction getting in (unfocused) and overloading his eyes?

Of course, active cloaking works a bit different, but I'm not sure that there would really be any way to implement it without at least severely diminishing sensor/sight functionality.

Yeah, but the Invisible man thing is totally different from how a hypothetical invisibility cloaking field would work. He was invisible because there was no pigment in his body. Which still actually wasn't internally consistent because in that case he still would have been visible because the water in his cells would still refract light. So he would have been "Jello-man" not the "invisible man".

We see things because light bounces off them and reflects into our eyes. An object can still be hit by light and not be seen if the light never returns to a viewers eyes(or other sensors).

What a cloaked ship would actually be like is that the bubble of the cloak effect would simply trap all light, and likely other forms of energy as well, which entered the field. Any light reflecting off the objects inside the field would get reflected back inside the bubble, eventually getting turned into heat and ceasing to be light anymore.

The result would be a completely invisible object, but one which would be able to see objects outside of the bubble. Because as mentioned light could enter the bubble and be detected by the crew's eyes and sensors on the ship. The ship would of course only be able to maintain the clock so long as you would eventually heat the ship up to dangerous levels and would need to decloak to vent excess heat.

A cloak like this would of course leave a "visible" area. The area of the cloak would appear completely black, no light would penetrate from one side to the other, so it might be "visible" against the backdrop of a planet or star, but that would only work if you were looking right at it when it was silhouetted against the backdrop, where it would appear as a black blob. This however could be solved by a more advanced field which would bend some of the light which hit the surface of the field around it and sending it out again from the opposite side of the field, exactly as if it never was bent at all. Even only a portion of light would be needed to really sell the effect, while still allowing the cloaked craft to see. It would see a slightly dimmer amount of light, but see it they still would.

You could also have an incredibly mimetic system that was incredibly sensitive to the types of energy impacting it from any side. Every photon hitting point A would result in an equally energetic photon being released at the opposite point B. Temperature exuded by the hull equals that of the surrounding environment. It could be overcome by trying to look at it through weird spectra (kinda like the tachyon sweeps in Trek), but it would have much less of an issue retaining heat as only the internal heat sources would be causing a buildup.

I think it can work. Thematically it makes more sense to me go shoot from cloak and that deckoaks you - basically like a Rogue backstab in D&D.

Cloak Action - unchanged.

Deckoak window - changed to reposition window. At the start of the activation phase, if you have a cloak token, reposition your ship (as per the current decloak rules)

While Cloaked - Roll 2 additional defence dice (or straight up just add an Evade). Weapons with the Attack TL header cannot he used against you and TLs may not be spent to modify dice against you. When you shoot discard your cloak token (no reposition at this stage).

Phantom - I would like to change the base stat line to 3/2/2/2 and have decloaking grant an additional red but let’s not change the cardboard. It does make Cloak more interesting for Scum though.

Stygium Particle Accerlartor - same though it will likely be the Card most used on the higher PS Phantoms.

Advanced Cloak - two options here. First would be to give a reposition after shooting. Second idea would be to turn all focus to hits when attacking from cloak.

The real thing I wanna see for Cloaking is to add 'you may discard your cloak token to make an attack, if you do, roll one fewer attack dice' - so low PS Phantoms could cloak and use SPA to get focus, then either remain cloaked if they get arc dodged, and decloak as normal, or drop cloak to shoot, meaning that they could cloak and still fire usefully at the cost of losing the reposition. Note that discarding the token is not decloaking, so it wouldn't get the movement.

And the Scum cloak would actually work.

Thematically, this is basically smash cutting power to the cloak to fire the guns - and firing the guns immediately pinpoints your position so the enemy knows full well where you are.

As it is, CLoaking as a mechanic only works meaningfully in two cases - high PS with ACD, or in combination with Cikatro for permacloak nonsense.

I'd love it if low PS PHantoms actually worked.

13 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Technically, the invisible man should be blind. What's to stop light from every direction getting in (unfocused) and overloading his eyes?

Of course, active cloaking works a bit different, but I'm not sure that there would really be any way to implement it without at least severely diminishing sensor/sight functionality.

In the Heir To The Empire/Dark Forces Rising/Last Command series and Specter of the Past/Visions of the Future, that's exactly the case - a cloaked ship cannot see where it's going and has to work off preplanned moves and inertial navigation. That's why it needed devious plans by Thrawn using dirty tricks like cloaked asteroids and force-linked ships to make it actually workable on a capital ship.

Certainly in rebel assault, phantoms only fire whilst uncloaked.

1 hour ago, Magnus Grendel said:

In the Heir To The Empire/Dark Forces Rising/Last Command series and Specter of the Past/Visions of the Future, that's exactly the case - a cloaked ship cannot see where it's going and has to work off preplanned moves and inertial navigation. That's why it needed devious plans by Thrawn using dirty tricks like cloaked asteroids and force-linked ships to make it actually workable on a capital ship.

Certainly in rebel assault, phantoms only fire whilst uncloaked.

So thematically the current design is pretty spot on then.